Supervision Toolkit

There are many approaches to supervision and leadership. Take a look at these articles and ask yourself which approaches resonate with you. Consider speaking with coworkers and mentors to hear their thoughts about your style. It is helpful for you to share your style with your supervisee in an initial supervision meeting.

• The Muse’s What Kind of Leader Are You? Common Leadership Styles (and Their Pros and Cons)
• Indeed’s Common Leadership Styles

Strengths-based approaches in our work help us feel more engaged, productive, and happy at work. See below for strategies to identify your strengths. We encourage you to share this reflection with your supervisee. Consider also incorporating discussions and exploration of their strengths – supervision, especially for students, is a great place for strengths exploration.

Think about last week. What tasks and activities left you feeling energized? What tasks and activities left you feeling drained? Did you notice if time seemed to pass quickly without you realizing – this is often referred to as your flow state.

There are a wide variety of free or low-cost assessments available to help you in identifying or building on your strengths. While Career Success does not endorse any specific assessment, CliftonStrengths is a popular paid assessment and VIA Character strengths is a popular free assessment tool. Assessments like these are ideally designed to give you a common language to use with others as you reflect on your strengths and what you bring to a team and to your supervision approach.

Reflect on the following questions as you consider your goals for supervision:

• What were the qualities of your best supervisor?
• What were the qualities of your worst or least effective supervisor?
• How will you incorporate this learning into your approach?

There is no one right way to approach supervision – this reflection process is key to helping you understand your approach and how to effectively supervise your student with that approach. We encourage you to be open and share this information with your supervisee. 

We highly encourage you to create a learning agreement after hiring your new student.

A learning agreement prompts a discussion between the student and supervisor about their goals for their growth and development. This is a document you can revisit throughout the experience to discuss progress towards the learning goals and tweak the experience accordingly to ensure the learning goals are ultimately met by the end of the experience.

Your supervisory/leadership and communication styles will influence the way you approach supervision. We encourage you to reflect on how you plan to structure each supervision session. Below are questions to ask yourself as you plan your structure. We encourage you to create and share the initial structure while enabling students to have autonomy in the process.

• Who will lead the session? We recommend that you provide the early structure, and that as the student grows, they begin to lead with their questions/concerns.
• How should the student prepare? Be clear about how they should approach supervision. If you want them to bring questions, make sure this has been clearly communicated.
• How do you share the agenda? A Google Doc is a good way to share and crowdsource agendas on a weekly basis.

Supervision is a flexible period for you and the student to discuss project progress, their growth and development, and how you can support them in their role. Because this time can be used in a variety of ways, here are some typical topics discussed during supervision:

• Project progress check-ins
• Troubleshooting and support
• Review/update learning agreement
• Reflect on growth/development
• Discuss career goals
• Share additional professional development opportunities

Focusing on strengths is a great way to keep students engaged, productive, and happy. Often we begin discovering our strengths in our first experiential learning opportunities, so we encourage you to actively incorporate discussions and reflections about students’ strengths into your supervision.

While you can certainly use paid or unpaid strengths assessments (see “your strengths,” you can also build in times in supervision for students to do the following check-in:

• Thinking about the last week, what tasks or activities left you feeling energized? What tasks or activities left you feeling drained?
• Incorporate periodic check-ins about reflecting on their overall progress with their goals and the learning agreement, and consider revising these goals as they explore and discover their strengths.

Having these conversations on a regular basis can help to better tailor their experience, ensure students are making meaning of the experience, and also prioritizes their growth and development, a key goal of transformative experiential learning opportunities.

One of the most beneficial aspects of engaging in experiential learning is the chance to build meaningful relationships. Think about potential meetings or opportunities to introduce your student to others, especially individuals in areas of interest to the student. 

• Practice introductions and talk through any potential areas of anxiety the student may experience in approaching a networking event.
• Consider doing an informational interview with the student where you share about your own journey and career pathway as a way to introduce them to the process
• Discuss potential individuals at or outside of your organization who would be a great fit for an informational interview. You can help prepare the student for the informational interview utilizing our guides for students. We highly encourage you to allow students to conduct informational interviews as a part of their hours with you.

The Student Employment Excellence Course (SEEC) is an asynchronous opt-in program that complements the professional growth of undergraduate student employees. SEEC is a self-guided course that helps students reflect upon experiences and build them into career growth.

The SEEC course is available in Canvas.

We encourage you to incorporate discussions of the students’ next steps and goals throughout your experience. Some sample activities you could incorporate include:

• Reviewing their resume, discussing their new bullets from the opportunity
• Reviewing their LinkedIn profile
• Practicing potential interview questions
• Discussing potential future opportunities
• Encouraging them to attend a graduate school info session or webinar
• Requiring them to meet with a career coach or utilize some of the new 24/7 resources as a part of their experience

While feedback should be provided on a routine basis, we highly recommend incorporating at least three formal times for evaluation and feedback:

1. An initial learning agreement conversation. This also ideally incorporates a pre-assessment of their NACE career readiness competencies.
2. A mid-experience evaluation, including a self-assessment and a supervisor assessment. We recommend providing ample time to discuss the results during a supervision session. While these templates are optional, we do highly recommend incorporating the NACE career readiness competencies into your evaluation process.
3. An end-of-experience evaluation, including a self-assessment, supervisor assessment, and a site/supervisor evaluation. We recommend providing ample time to discuss these results during a supervision session. While these templates are optional, we do highly recommend incorporating the NACE career readiness competencies into your evaluation process.

Communication guidelines are very helpful for any office, but are vital as you consider supervising a student in a remote or hybrid setting. Develop clear guidelines and expectations for both asynchronous and synchronous communication. 

• Remote/hybrid supervision requires some creativity and flexibility as compared to in-person supervision. It is very likely that you and your student may be completing asynchronous assignments, so developing a plan for how to provide feedback is vital.
• Set expectations around how communication should take place. Being clear and up-front about these expectations helps to prevent miscommunications or burnout from overworking or working outside of regularly scheduled hours.
  • For example, you could clarify that it is appropriate for the student to send emails/messages during their asynchronous hours and that there is no expectation that anyone checks or responds to these messages outside of their work hours.
  • Clarify if you would rather students send one email daily with all questions or if you want them to message you as each question arises. There is no right way to approach this, but be clear about your expectations and preferences.

There are many informal ways you might know when your student has downtime in in-person settings. It is harder to gauge with remote opportunities. 

1. Normalize that downtime is healthy and typical in most roles.
2. Discuss ways to take initiative and some examples of tasks or projects during downtime. Taking initiative can feel particularly intimidating in a remote setting, so providing examples is very meaningful to ensure the success of your student.

For completely remote roles, consider adapting supervision to best fit the needs of the student. For example, you might block 10-15 minutes each day they are in to discuss questions and tasks for the day, building in more frequent communication.

For hybrid roles, we recommend providing supervision in person if possible.

• Regardless of the hybrid or remote setting, ensure that you are still providing between 30 minutes to 1 hour of concentrated support for the student on a weekly basis.

When individuals are not directly in the office, we may forget to include them in relationship-building activities, events, and opportunities. Ensure that you create remote or hybrid options for students to build relationships with other staff and be flexible in your professional development support. 

• Record in-person professional development if students are unable to attend in-person to ensure they have equitable access to the content.
• If you host a number of students, consider scheduling monthly meet-ups to help them get to know one another alongside professional development workshops or trainings.

Set and share clear expectations and guidelines during first supervision session

• Provide a written copy and email or print out/share with the student
• Include norms of the office (like where/how people eat lunch, use of the office kitchen, etc.)

1. First, mention the concern and refer back to the expectation/guideline. Approach with curiosity and a goal for how to adjust behavior.
   • E.g. if a student shows up late, discuss what is happening and discuss the best way forward, always with the students’ health and wellness top of mind.
2. If the behavior continues after the verbal warning, discuss the behavior, review the plan that was developed and revise if necessary. Write up the resolution and share it with the student in writing, letting them know if the behavior continues that it will advance to a formal warning.
3. If the behavior continues after the written warning, Career Success can provide a mediated conversation to review the performance plan and discuss whether or not the student will continue in the opportunity.

We recommend using or adapting our performance improvement plan template.

Here are the tools mentioned throughout the supervision toolkit:

• Learning Agreement template
• Student self-assessment
• Supervisor assessment
• Site and supervisor feedback – contact ucscel@ucsc.edu if you would like us to duplicate the Qualtrics survey and share directly with you
• LinkedIn Learning