A supervisor's role changes over time
Supervisors have multiple roles: coach, facilitator, mentor, and sponsor. Although these roles co-exist, mentorship and sponsorship become more important over time, as supervisees ask for letters of recommendation and benefit from informal promotion during their job searches. Balancing the different roles and styles promote a mutually beneficial supervisory relationship.
The Supervisor's role involves:
Coaching: Helping supervisees develop their research expertise through instruction, suggestion, progress tracking, and feedback.
Facilitating: Establishing an infrastructure that supports and guides the student’s progress (e.g., helping students set goals, providing templates for grant-writing).
Mentoring: Providing advice, encouragement, and support. See Mentoring.
Sponsoring: Helping students secure funding or resources (e.g., helping student apply for funding, securing funding or resources through the supervisor’s own grants, grant-writing with supervisees, etc.)
Adopting a balanced approach
Imbalance: Selfless |
Balance |
Imbalance: Selfish |
|
|
Co-operation vs. leadership |
|
|
I disempower myself, withdraw, become more passive, rely too much on the other to take the initiative, or provide the impetus – “laissez faire.” |
I believe in empowering communication, which is appropriately assertive, not disempowering but actively empowering the other person. |
I disempower the other person: being overly directive, controlling or even coercive. |
|
|
Listening vs. talking |
|
|
I focus too much on the other person, and listen too much. |
I balance attention on myself and the other person. |
I am too preoccupied with my own agenda, and listen too little. |
|
|
Relationship vs. task |
|
|
I focus so much on feeling, needs and the relationship that I lose sight of the task. |
I balance between the focus on task and the focus on the relationship. |
I focus so much on the task that I lose sight of feelings, needs and the relationship. |
In order to position oneself in the center, that is, to achieve a balance, it is necessary to:
- not focus on ego-issues (i.e., taking something personally);
- have an open attitude to embrace alternative perspectives and new information; and
- maintain a collaborative, problem solving mindset.
Adapted from materials (the table and list) provided by Geoff Mortimore, CEDAM, Australian National University.
This work is licensed under a 