Coaching Supervision Models: A Practitioner's Guide

You’ve probably encountered the Seven-Eyed Model in a training program or credentialing workshop. Maybe Proctor’s Three Functions. You know the names. You could probably sketch the frameworks on a whiteboard if someone asked.

But here’s the question worth sitting with: have you ever felt what these models actually do when a skilled supervisor applies them to your coaching – not as an intellectual exercise, but as a way of seeing something about your work that you couldn’t access on your own?

Because there’s a significant gap between knowing a supervision model and experiencing one. And that gap is where most of the value of supervision actually lives.

Why Models Matter Less (and More) Than You Think

Coaches who encounter supervision models in training tend to file them away as academic – interesting to study, unlikely to use. Then they experience a supervisor applying the Seven-Eyed Model to a session they thought they understood completely, and the distance between knowing the model and feeling what it does becomes immediately clear.

That shift is worth understanding, because it changes how you think about what coaching supervision involves and what it can actually do for your practice.

Supervision models are tools, not procedures. No experienced supervisor follows a model step-by-step in a live session the way it reads in a textbook. The value isn’t in the framework itself but in what it makes visible – each model directs attention to different aspects of the coaching relationship, and a skilled supervisor knows which lens serves the moment.

What I find most coaches don’t expect: supervisors move between models within a single session, often without naming them. The coach experiences insight. The model is the infrastructure underneath – present, shaping the conversation, but not the point of it.

Here’s what changes when you understand that: you stop evaluating supervision models as if you need to pick the right one, and you start seeing them as lenses a practitioner selects based on what emerges. That distinction matters for how you approach supervision, and for how you evaluate a potential supervisor’s skill.

The Seven-Eyed Model in Practice

In a supervision session, I might ask a coach to walk me through a client interaction – not just what happened, but what they noticed about themselves while it was happening, what they think the client was experiencing, and what was going on in the relationship between them that neither person named. Then I might shift to what I’m noticing as the coach tells the story – the energy that changes, the detail they skip over, the moment their voice drops. That’s five or six different perspectives on the same coaching conversation. Most coaches arrive having examined it from one.

That’s essentially what Peter Hawkins calls the Seven-Eyed Model – though in practice, it feels less like a model and more like turning up the resolution on a conversation you thought you’d already understood. The framework examines seven distinct perspectives: the client’s experience, the coach’s interventions, the relationship between them, the coach’s internal process, what the supervisor notices in the telling, the wider systemic context, and the dynamic between supervisor and coach in the room.

Most coaches, even experienced ones, default to the first three perspectives when examining their coaching – the content-level elements. The systemic and relational perspectives – what’s happening in the coach’s own process, what the supervisor observes about the coach’s telling, the broader organizational dynamics – consistently reveal what coaches miss. This isn’t a skill gap. It’s a structural limitation of being inside the coaching relationship while trying to observe it.

A situation I see regularly: a coach brings a session they assessed as successful. The client was engaged, the goals were addressed, the conversation felt productive. Through shifting to the fifth perspective – what I notice about how the coach is telling the story – something surfaces. The coach’s energy changes when they describe a particular exchange. There’s a hesitation they don’t seem aware of. When we slow down and examine that moment, what often emerges is that the coach was managing the client’s emotional state rather than coaching through it. The “successful” session had a layer neither person examined because the outcome felt good enough.

The Seven-Eyed Model sounds academic until you use it. Then it becomes the difference between looking at your coaching from one angle and looking at it from seven – and realizing how much you were missing from the angle you thought was enough.

That kind of discovery doesn’t happen quickly or comfortably. The first reaction is often defensiveness or confusion, not gratitude. It can take multiple sessions to unpack what a single model application reveals – which is part of why supervision is an ongoing relationship, not a one-off event.

The topics coaches most commonly bring to supervision look different through these seven perspectives. What starts as “I need help with a stuck client” becomes a more complex picture of what’s happening relationally – and that complexity is where the useful material lives.

Proctor’s Three Functions: The Supervision Backbone

When I sit down with a coach, one of the first things I pay attention to is what they actually need in that moment – not what they say they need, which is almost always about technique, but what’s showing up underneath. Are they carrying something from a difficult session that they haven’t processed? Are they uncertain about a boundary they managed? Do they want to sharpen how they’re working with a specific client dynamic?

Those three different needs correspond to what Brigid Proctor described as the three core functions of supervision: restorative (support and wellbeing), normative (standards and ethics), and formative (development and learning). The labels sound clinical. The experience isn’t.

The restorative function is the one coaches most underestimate and most need. Coaching is absorptive work. You spend hours attending closely to other people’s experiences, holding their complexity, managing your own reactions – and most coaches do this without anyone attending to them in the same way. The restorative dimension of supervision is where someone asks how you’re actually doing with your work, and means it professionally.

The normative function – the standards and ethics dimension – is the one coaches most resist. The word “normative” doesn’t help. It sounds evaluative, and most coaches have spent their careers moving away from evaluation toward collaboration. When we reframe it as “the part of supervision that helps you stay aligned with your own professional values,” the resistance usually shifts. This is where ethical reasoning in supervision becomes tangible – not as abstract principle, but as a real conversation about a real situation you’re navigating.

The formative function is what most coaches expect supervision to be entirely about: skill development, technique refinement, case conceptualization. It matters. It’s also only one-third of the picture.

What I observe consistently: when supervision feels stuck or unsatisfying, it’s often because one function is dominating at the expense of the others. Coaches who only want the formative function – “just help me be a better coach” – sometimes resist the normative and restorative dimensions precisely because those require a different kind of openness. Good supervision moves between all three functions fluidly, and part of the supervisor’s skill is recognizing which function the moment calls for, even when the coach is asking for something else.

Developmental Models: Where You Are Matters

A newly credentialed ACC and an experienced MCC don’t just need different answers – they need different kinds of supervision relationships. The frameworks built to explain this shift originated in counseling psychology with the work of Stoltenberg and Delworth, whose Integrated Developmental Model maps how practitioners at different career stages relate to supervision differently.

The core insight is straightforward: early-career coaches benefit from more structure and direct guidance. As they develop, the supervision relationship becomes more collaborative and consultative. The supervisor’s role shifts from providing direction to facilitating the coach’s own reflective capacity. What ICF and EMCC supervision guidelines describe as ongoing professional development reflects this reality – supervision isn’t something you graduate from.

What’s less obvious – and what I’ve learned from working with coaches across career stages – is that the progression isn’t always linear. Experienced coaches sometimes need more structure, not less. An MCC who takes on a new population (say, moving from executive coaching to team coaching) can temporarily benefit from the kind of directive supervision they haven’t needed in years. A coach going through a significant professional transition may need restorative-heavy supervision even though their skill level is high.

The counterintuitive observation worth naming: experienced coaches often have more sophisticated blind spots, not fewer. A newly certified coach’s gaps tend to be visible – they’ll tell you what they don’t know. An experienced coach’s patterns are subtler and more deeply embedded. They’ve developed workarounds for their limitations without realizing it. Their expertise creates assumptions so embedded they’ve become invisible. Developmental models account for this complexity when they’re applied well – but the practical reality is that the supervision conversation with a highly experienced coach often requires the most deliberate use of frameworks, not the least.

If you’re interested in the formal study of these models, there are pathways for coaching supervision training that go deeper into the theoretical foundations. For most coaches seeking supervision, what matters more is finding a supervisor who applies these frameworks with fluency rather than learning the models yourself.

Choosing the Right Lens

So if these models serve different purposes, how does a supervisor decide which lens to use – and when?

This is the question most coaches don’t think to ask, and it’s where the practitioner skill really lives. Models aren’t sequential or hierarchical. They’re lenses selected based on what the coach brings and what emerges once the conversation starts.

When I reach for the Seven-Eyed Model, it’s usually because a coach has brought a specific client situation that has more complexity than they’ve recognized. The multiple perspectives help both of us see angles that a straightforward “here’s what happened” retelling obscures. It’s particularly useful when a coach says, “I’m not sure why this session is bothering me” – because the answer is almost always in a perspective they haven’t examined yet.

When Proctor’s functions guide the session, it’s often because the supervision relationship itself needs attention, or because one function has been neglected. If a coach consistently brings technique questions and avoids discussing the emotional weight of their work, that tells me the restorative function needs space. If they’re navigating something ethically complicated, the normative function leads – not as evaluation, but as shared professional reasoning.

Developmental approaches come into play when a coach seems stuck at a stage or is in transition. Sometimes the most useful thing I can do is name the developmental shift I’m observing: “The questions you’re asking now are different from the questions you were asking six months ago. That’s not random – it means something about where your practice is heading.”

The fluid reality of a single session: I might start with Proctor – checking what the coach needs today, whether they’re carrying something that needs restorative attention before we can do anything else. Move to the Seven-Eyed Model for examining a specific case. End with a developmental observation about what this session reveals about the coach’s growth pattern. The models overlap. The skill is in knowing which lens serves the moment and being willing to shift when the conversation asks for it.

What Models Can’t Do

I’d undermine everything I’ve written here if I didn’t name this clearly: models can become crutches. A supervisor who applies frameworks mechanically – fitting every coaching situation into a model rather than letting the situation guide model selection – produces formulaic supervision that misses the human complexity underneath.

I’ve seen it happen, and I’ve caught myself doing it. There’s a temptation, particularly when a session feels unfocused, to reach for a framework because it provides structure. Sometimes that’s appropriate. Other times, the most useful thing is to sit with the unfocused quality and see what it reveals – and no model prescribes that.

The relationship between supervisor and coach matters more than any model. A technically proficient supervisor using frameworks flawlessly but without genuine relational presence will produce less insight than a relationally attuned supervisor who barely references models at all.

There’s also a timing reality that models don’t account for. Moving from knowing a framework intellectually to feeling what it reveals in practice takes multiple supervision sessions. The first time a coach experiences the Seven-Eyed Model applied to their work, the experience can be disorienting – they may not know what to do with what they’ve seen. That’s normal. The insight needs time to integrate, and the integration doesn’t follow a model.

One more honest limitation: if a coach is in acute burnout or crisis, model-based exploration isn’t the right starting point. The restorative function needs to lead. You can’t examine your coaching from seven perspectives if you don’t have the cognitive and emotional bandwidth to engage with what those perspectives reveal. Part of a supervisor’s judgment is knowing when to put the models down and attend to the person sitting across from you.

After years of working with these frameworks – teaching them, learning them, applying them in hundreds of supervision sessions – I’ll share what I actually believe about supervision models.

They matter. And they’re not the point.

The point is what happens when someone who knows how to use these lenses turns them on your coaching and helps you see something you couldn’t see alone. The models make that possible. The relationship makes it real.

If you’ve read this far, you’re probably someone who cares about the depth behind what you do. That’s exactly the kind of coach who gets the most from supervision – not because you need fixing, but because you’ve decided that understanding your coaching at this level is worth the investment.

See these models in action – explore supervision with Tandem