Struggling to trust supervisor’s judgement calls.
Hi all, I want to hear your thoughts and suggestions about my supervisor’s recent guidance, as I have started to distrust her judgement. It makes me not want to ask her things in supervision or ask for advice.
Example- I worked with a client who was expressing suicidal ideation and I was finding it difficult to contain our working relationship to my role focus. I had a moment where I had to respond to a suicidal ideation disclosure and I called my manager to ask for guidance. I ended up doing all the right things in the end and it was fine. I also learned from this moment and was able to implement the guidance from my manager within the next few days around boundary setting and being more clear about my role. There has not been a similar issue since.
I felt like this was all fine- except my manager had been pushing me to close with the client ASAP so I don’t “hold risk.” The client has other workers to turn to for her mental health, and we still had goals we were working on that were within my role.
There have been other similar situations faced by my coworkers. They tell her that they are feeling stressed/frustrated etc about a client’s behaviour, and then she blames the client and tells the worker to close. She makes assumptions about clients without knowing their full stories, and doesn’t seem to attempt to think of their perspective or reasons behind behaviours. I believe that as social workers, we should be able to work with the complexities of clients and manage our own feelings whilst doing the best we can to serve the clients. We can’t close clients because we find them a little challenging?
My caseload is extremely overloaded, which I am continually working to get down to a manageable workload. When going through my cases during a supervision, my manager quite bluntly and harshly told me to close like 90% of my clients. Questioning why I had them open when I had them open for good reasons. It felt like she just didn’t want me to be stressed and overworked so was not even considering the clients at all when telling me to close them. Keep in mind also - my caseload has been crazy for at least a year, partly due to my poor time management, partly due to my supervisor not really ever looking at my workload or giving me proper advice on how to manage it all. I am meant to have a supervision every fortnight, but this year I have probably had about 5? We are fixing this now since I spoke to her about it, but still concerned about her total lack of empathy in regards to telling me to close so many of my clients.
It feels like our supervisor can’t sit with us as workers during supervision and help us reflect on our work with clients in a productive way. I believe if a client is challenging us we should sit with this and work through it, looking at different perspectives, putting ourselves in their shoes, trying different ways of working. It feels like the supervisor has a protective knee jerk reaction to just tell us to close, or dismiss the client’s situation with little empathy.
Our supervisor is old and very experienced, but also quite defensive around her own actions and decisions. I have occasionally done well with giving her feedback, but there have been several times where she got too defensive to even seem to try to understand what we are telling her.
There are also many other things that she does that are not great, but I don’t want to make the post too long so I’ll write them very shortly:
- shares employee reasons for calling in sick and their diagnoses with other employees
- talks badly about employees to eachother
- not-so-subtly hinted to our team at a meeting about how one of our coworkers was being performance managed while they were not present
- talked loudly about a placement student behind their back to employees when they could have heard
- constantly seems to dismiss clients’ situations with little empathy, as if clients are too demanding of their workers when asking for small basic things. seems to automatically assume that clients are too lazy? or attention seeking?
- told a client off harshly in front of several people, client made informal complaint, supervisor was not self reflective on her actions at all and instead framed them as being good because the client advocated for themselves in making a complaint and has been engaging well with services now
From what I know, nobody else in the organisation is aware of these things. I have only spoken to my close coworker about this, and hoping to somehow also hear from other coworkers in the team but I don’t see them very often to be able to have a private chat.
I am thinking of sharing my concerns with someone, but fearful that she will turn on me, especially while my workload is not fully up to scratch. I get along pretty well with her, and am generally not super good at confrontation. I know she tries to be supportive and actually is a lot of the time, and is really chill about stuff like taking sick days and annual leave, but this stuff is worrying.
Would you do something about all of this??