Reflective Practice and Leadership

We can help your staff do better, and feel better about what they do.

Reflective Practice, Reflective Supervision, and Reflective Leadership are emerging approaches that are now considered best practice for organizations where stress, high staff turnover, and quality of service are significant issues. Especially in the health and social service fields, the demands of increased productivity, high caseloads and complex client dynamics can challenge your organization’s morale and quality of service.  Reflective Practice and Leadership assist organizations to develop supports and strategies for caregiver, counselor and supervisor staff. This improves the quality of services and helps reduce staff burnout and turnover.

Five Signs that Reflective Practice and Leadership training may help your organization.

1. Staff have trouble monitoring their reactions and behavior with customers, supervisors and peers
2. An increase in complaints from clients/customers
3. Staff have trouble keeping up with workload; paperwork falls “through the cracks”
4. Increased absenteeism and voluntary turnover
5. Interpersonal challenges in the workplace become more frequent

Creating a Learning Organization using Reflective practice and supervision

High performance organizations foster an environment where staff  learn from their experiences, have opportunities to gather new knowledge and tools from training and receive recognition and support to apply their learning on a daily basis in their practices. Without this type of reflection and support, staff can feel more like hamsters on a wheel than like professionals who can make a difference in the lives of their clients.  Reflective practice involves stepping back to understand what has recently occurred between ourselves and others in our immediate environment. Once staff have the tools and support they need to do this, they can reflect on their interactions and improve them as they occur.

One of the keys to reflective practice is it’s focus on the power of a relationship as an environment for learning. This technique supposes that the “most powerful environment for learning takes place in the context of relationships, and that the quality of those relationships are critical” (Marie-Claire Heffron). We can help your staff learn new  ways to enhance their supervisory relationships and those that they develop with their clients or customers. Read more here about why relationships and reflective leadership are key to staff retention.

How we can work with your organization:

We can provide  workshops using a train-the-trainer approach, which guide you to develop your own capacity to have a reflective supervisory model and to develop reflective leaders and staff. If it is appropriate, we can also provide a longer-term engagement where we offer regular reflective supervision from an experienced, trained practitioner.

In either situation, we will work closely with you to asess your staff needs, and to tailor a plan to improve supervision and create a vibrant, learning environment.