When Your Coaching Practice Begins to Expand
There may come a point when you notice that your practice feels different. This often becomes apparent during moments of reflection, when there is space to step back and consider not just what you are doing, but how your practice is expanding.
Clients are progressing. The work remains meaningful. And yet, something begins to deepen. The questions become more complex. The emotional and ethical dimensions of the work become more visible. You may also start to notice more clearly how your own thinking and assumptions are shaping what happens in the coaching space.
At this stage, development is less about learning new tools and more about strengthening judgment, awareness, and professional maturity.
You may find yourself considering supervision or even stepping into the role of supervisor yourself.
Signs You’re Ready to Become a Coaching Supervisor
The decision to become a coaching supervisor is rarely sudden. Instead, it tends to unfold gradually through experience and reflection.
Some common signals include:
- A growing curiosity about your own practice, not just your client’s progress.
- An increased awareness of ethical complexity.
- A desire to reflect more deeply on the impact of your work.
- Supporting or informally guiding other coaches.
- Recognizing patterns across clients and contexts.
- Wanting space to step back and think, not just to do.
These are not entirely new skills, but rather a deepening of how you are already working.
Professional growth at this stage becomes less about improving performance and more about understanding yourself within your practice.
What Coaching Supervision Actually Involves
As coaches begin to explore this next stage of development, supervision often comes into view, sometimes without a clear sense of what it involves.
As with coaching, there is no single definition. Most descriptions, however, emphasize reflection, ethics, and ongoing professional development. One widely used way of understanding supervision is through its three core functions, outlined by Hawkins and Smith (2013): developmental, resourcing, and qualitative.
- The developmental function supports the coach’s growth, for example, by exploring how they are making sense of their work and where they feel stretched.
- The resourcing function creates space to process the emotional impact of the work, helping coaches sustain their presence, capacity, and effectiveness.
- The qualitative function focuses on standards, ethics, and professional responsibility, particularly where situations feel complex or unclear.
Across these functions, supervision also brings attention to the wider systems shaping the work, including organizational dynamics, stakeholder relationships, and cultural influences. This supports coaches in working with greater awareness of both what is happening in the moment and what may be influencing it more broadly.
Taken together, supervision can be understood as a collaborative, developmental space where coaches step back from their client work to explore how they think, feel, and make decisions. In doing so, they strengthen both their effectiveness and their professional judgment. This focus on reflective work within a relational space sits at the core of supervision practice and is reflected in the International Coaching Federation Supervision Competencies published in 2024.
This broader focus on reflection and awareness also helps clarify how supervision relates to, and differs from, mentoring.
Mentor Coaching vs. Coaching Supervision: Key Differences
Many coaches are familiar with mentor coaching, and it plays a vital role in professional development. It is also related to supervision, which can sometimes create confusion.
In practice, it can be helpful to think of them as working alongside each other rather than one being more important than the other. Mentor coaching and coaching supervision simply serve different, but complementary purposes in a coach’s development.
Mentor coaching focuses on observable performance. It supports coaches in refining their skills, strengthening consistency, and aligning with professional standards. This often involves reviewing recorded sessions and providing structured, targeted feedback.
Coaching supervision looks beyond performance to the thinking and decision-making behind it. It explores beliefs, values, relational dynamics, context, and ethical challenges.
Within supervision, development becomes more integrative. Coaches begin to make more intentional choices, respond more flexibly, and work with greater awareness.
In this way, supervision develops both the practitioner and the practice itself.
Mentor Coaching and Supervision in Practice: An Example
One way to make this distinction clearer is to consider how each approach might show up in practice. Imagine a coach working with a client who is struggling to make progress toward a goal.
In a mentor coaching conversation, the focus may be on the coach’s observable skills. The mentor might review how the session was structured, the quality of the questions being asked, and how closely the approach aligned with coaching competencies, offering specific feedback on what could be strengthened.
In a supervision conversation, the focus shifts. The discussion might explore how the coach is making sense of the client’s lack of progress, what assumptions may be shaping their approach, how the relational dynamics are unfolding, and whether there are broader contextual or ethical factors at play.
Both perspectives are valuable and support development in different ways. One sharpens performance, while the other deepens awareness and professional judgment.
The Skills a Coaching Supervisor Needs
Supervision therefore requires a more integrative skill set.
It draws on coaching competencies alongside:
- Reflective practice frameworks.
- Adult development theory.
- Psychological perspectives on behavior, emotion, and relationships.
- Systemic awareness.
What develops here is not just additional knowledge, but an expanded capacity to interpret what is happening within coaching conversations. This includes noticing patterns in thinking, understanding relational dynamics, and recognizing the wider context influencing the work. In many ways, this is about becoming more psychologically informed in how you think about coaching.
Psychological theory can support supervision work by offering language and structure for making sense of these layers. It helps deepen understanding without shifting the focus away from coaching practice. Importantly, this does not mean stepping into therapeutic territory. The emphasis remains on the coach’s professional practice, rather than on diagnosis or treatment.
If you are interested in exploring this distinction further, including how psychology and supervision can work together to enhance coaching practice, I explore it in more detail in my recently published ICF Coaching World article, “How Psychology and Supervision Evolve Coaching.”
How Coaches Develop Into Reflective Supervisors
The transition from coach to supervisor also involves more than acquiring new techniques. It reflects a development in how you think, reflect, and work as a practitioner.
This includes moving from:
- Applying models to working more fluidly with complexity.
- Focusing on the client to including an awareness of self and system.
- Solving problems to holding reflective space.
- ‘Doing’ to ‘being.’
Supervisors are not simply more experienced coaches. They are practitioners who can work with multiple layers of awareness at the same time.
This is where coaching begins to feel different again. Not because the fundamentals have changed, but because your relationship to the work has developed.
This echoes my own experience. As my coaching practice developed, I found myself reflecting more deeply on what was happening within the work, including my own role within the coaching relationship.
A Personal Reflection on Moving into Supervision
Over time, that reflection began to extend beyond my own sessions. I became increasingly interested in exploring these questions with other coaches, including what they were noticing, where they felt stretched, and how they were making sense of their work.
In many ways, that was the point where my practice was already beginning to extend toward supervision. Not as a defined decision, but as a natural continuation of how I was thinking and working.
What I began to notice was a shift in the quality of conversation. Things slowed down, in a helpful way. There was more space to think, to question, and to notice what might otherwise be overlooked.
And in my ongoing experience as a coaching supervisor, this tends to be where the work becomes particularly meaningful and rewarding. It creates a space where both the coach and the supervisor are learning and developing together.
Stepping Into the Role of Coaching Supervisor
For those who recognize this development in their own practice, the question becomes how to begin stepping into the role of coaching supervisor in a more intentional way.
Developing as a supervisor typically involves building on your existing coaching experience while extending your capacity to work with reflection, complexity, and professional practice at a deeper level.
In practical terms, this might include:
Structured training can help make this progression more explicit, particularly in understanding how to work with ethical, relational, and systemic dimensions of supervision. Training programs, such as those offered by the AoCP alongside other established supervision courses, provide one route for developing these capabilities within a coherent and professionally grounded framework.
There is no single pathway into supervision. What matters is how you continue to develop your ability to support reflection, work with complexity, and engage thoughtfully with the practice of others.
From there, the question becomes less about whether you should take the next step, and more about how you choose to develop into it.
Key Takeaways:
- A clearer understanding of how readiness for supervision emerges through reflection and experience.
- Insight into the shift from learning new tools to developing deeper judgment, awareness, and professional maturity.
- Greater awareness of the complexity in supervision, including ethics, relational dynamics, and use of self.
- A grounded perspective on developing into supervision as an evolution of thinking, not just a role change.
