Supervision for Managers

Supervision for Managers is a unit based on a collaborative process between educators and learners, which encompasses functions such as monitoring, professional development and supporting managers in their role as organisational leaders. The key focus of the unit is the personal integration of theory and practice through critical reflection on management practice. The unit is constituted by different activities, jointly selected by teaching staff and students themselves, whose common presumption is the importance of experience-based learning and whose aim is to facilitate students' holistic analysis of real-world issues, problems, and dilemmas. The purpose of the analysis is to promote the on-going personal and professional development of managers and to facilitate the search for creative solutions to complex and interrelated organisational problems in a world characterised by rapid change and by the near-universal experience of both congruence and dissonance. This unit is closely related to the unit 'Managers and Strategic Work-Based Learning'.

Learning Outcomes

• Achieve advanced skills in establishing, maintaining and guiding the management process in the context of students’ own approach to management
• Enhance your awareness and critical understanding of the theoretical bases for students’ preferred approach to management
• Demonstrate sensitivity to working within different cultural, political and social contexts and with staff who may have different abilities, values and attitudes
• Develop advanced capacity for critical reflection and self-evaluation, particularly in relation to the complex relationship between theory and management practice
• Apply of an in-depth understanding of contemporary approaches to ethics, boundaries and responsibilities to management practice
• Demonstrate willingness and capacity to use negotiated learning contracts, participate in reflective supervision and apply feedback appropriately to management practice

Content Areas

• Approaches to Supervision
• Integrating Theory and Practice: Challenges and Issues
• The Manager as a Person and a Professional
• Managing Boundaries and Multiple Relationships
• Multicultural Perspectives and Diversity Issues
• Mid-Unit Review: Professional Practice Issues
• Issues Related to Specific Population Groups
• Managing Poor Performance: Managing Strengths and Success
• Downsizing and Terminations
• Justice and Fairness
• Community: Internal and External to the Organisation
• End of Unit Review

Unit Duration and Workload

This unit involves a total of 36 hours of face to face delivery or self-directed study including educator contact in flexible delivery modes, generating a further 120 hours of self-study per unit including research and related study activities, including assessment. This translates as 13 hours per week for the unit.