Texas Counselors Creating Badass Businesses

4. Essential Elements LPC Supervisors Must Have

October 19, 2022 Kate Walker Ph.D., LPC/LMFT Supervisor Season 1 Episode 5
Texas Counselors Creating Badass Businesses
4. Essential Elements LPC Supervisors Must Have
Show Notes Transcript

How do you create systems as a clinical supervisor who spends a lot of time counseling and supervising directly? That's what I'm talking about today - systems that will work even while you are busy doing the thing you love to do. Supervisors often feel like they can't breathe because they are overwhelmed by the task of supervision, managing struggling supervisees, and trying to have a life. We explore some things supervisors must do to mitigate liability and start achieving balance. Show notes and more at https://katewalkertraining.com/want-to-be-a-lpc-supervisor-a-good-40-hour-course-teaches-these-essential-systems/

Get your step by step guide to private practice. Because you are too important to lose to not knowing the rules, going broke, burning out, and giving up. #counselorsdontquit.

What I want to get into, the meat of today, is what you need when you’re comparing supervision courses, or if you’re a new supervisor and you didn’t take my training, here are the things I believe, the systems you must have in place to mitigate any liability as a supervisor.

                              Okay, so the first one, obviously, is the interview, and if you came to my webinar, How to Hire Right the First Time, I talked a lot about growing graduate students into LPC Associates who can then become fully licensed colleagues. So I’m not going to go over that too much, head over to your Number One: Start Here and go down to replays and you’ll see that webinar and a transcript. So if you’re like me, I read way faster than I listen, so I love transcripts. That’s why I always put transcripts in there. Go in there to Hire Right the First Time, the webinar I did last week, and you’ll see I talk a lot about how – you know, anybody can interview beautifully. They can look at you and say the right things. Now, I want you to add to that folks who are trained to lean forward, give you eye contact, nod – that’s who we’re interviewing, folks. We’re interviewing people who are trained interviewers. That’s what counselors do: we interview people, we talk to people, we make them feel comfortable. So it’s entirely possible that the post-grad student that you are interviewing to be your new associate interviews beautifully but then is a lousy LPC Associate for you.

                              So you also have in your Number One: Start Here some templates, some interview questions. There’s a whole supervisor toolkit in there that you can access that will help you design an interview process for your new – or wannabe – LPC Associate. Because if they’re brand new, they can’t get their associate license without your signature. So this isn’t even an associate yet. They’re coming to you, you’re interviewing them, once you all sign the paperwork, then they can send it to the board to become an associate with that associate license. That’s not quite the same, of course, if they’re transferring. If they’re transferring, then y’all are good to go. So check out that replay about hiring right the first time and how bringing on grad students is sometimes the best way to vet and assure that you’re getting someone that you can trust.

                              The next part then is the contract. Here’s one thing an excellent supervisor course should provide you with: a working contract. Not just a working contract, but a working contract that is up to the minute with the latest rules. In my 40-hour training we give some templates, and those templates are like 15, 20 years old. So folks who just turn in the template, they’ve got a lot of learning to do. They’ve got to go through, they’ve got to update things like instead of weekly supervision, change it to four hours a month, and I want to know what happens if your supervisee no-shows you. Are you going to charge them? What do you do? How do you break it to them that they didn’t get four hours in their month and now they’ve lost all of their direct hours for that month? Your contract is where the relationship starts.

                              If you have a lousy contract and then later on, you’re trying to break some bad news to your supervisee, that can really negatively impact that relationship, and that’s the most important thing when it comes to supervision. Because you don’t want a supervisee who is going to hide things from you and do all kinds of shady stuff because they are trying to get away with it, because they don’t trust you or because somehow along the way you were like oh, yeah, you know that contract I had you sign? It was super old, but what I should have told you is oh, you’ve lost all of your hours for the month, I’m so sorry. So what time are we meeting next week? And oh, by the way, you owe me $300. So the contract is where the relationship starts; it’s where the transparency starts.

                              So if you take a 40-hour training that doesn’t help you with a contract, that’s a problem. Or, if they just say, yeah, do a contract, and then they never give you feedback. Or you realize the contract is really old or it has some things in it that nobody really does anymore, red flag. Now, it’s too late if you’ve paid your money, but I would definitely ask the question as you’re shopping for courses: hey, what kind of a contract do I come out of this course with? It’s like our marketing lessons: what do I get when I take your course? Well, I know at Kate Walker Training, our 40-hour training, you will leave with a working contract that we have gone over with a fine-tooth comb and we’ll give you comments. And then we make you present it via technology – not with your face or anything, we just want you to talk us through the changes that you’ve made because that’s how important it is. That’s how important that contract is.

                              So we’ve got the common misconceptions, the hiring, number two is the contract. Number three, you’re going to think that I actually crammed in four things and called it three systems. But I think of this as one system, and it starts with the orientation. I love this. If you were ever a Sesame Street Kid – I was a Sesame Street kid and Electric Company and all of those – there was a song about the ending T-I-O-N and they would talk about pollution and all of the T-I-O-N words. That’s kind of what this is. Orientation, evaluation, remediation, termination. I call this one system because I truly believe if one piece of this is missing, it’s not a system anymore. So if you’re trying to evaluate but you’ve never done an orientation, that’s a problem. If you’re trying to remediate someone but you’ve never evaluated them, that’s a problem. If you fire someone without remediating them first, you’re actually breaking an LPC rule and that is liable – that is sanctionable. So I teach these four things as one system.

                              So the contract, done, signed, everybody is happy. LPC Associate gets their LPC Associate license, it is live on the BHEC website, everybody is happy. Now it’s time to train, orient, your supervisee, your new LPC associate, to your practice. I don’t care if you’re in an agency and they have to go through a three-day training for the agency. You put them through an orientation for how you supervisee. You’re going to teach them all of the things in the contract. Why? Because nobody reads the contract; they’re just trying to get a supervisor. Orientation is where you take that contract piece-by-piece and you explain, in a way that they hear you, this is what happens if you no-show me. This is how much I charge you. This is what happens if you don’t learn the skills and proceed developmentally through my evaluation process. This is what happens.

                              The orientation is about consequences. It’s also where, if you do own your own practice and you’ve hired your LPC Associate as a W2 – and if you want to know the difference in that, go back to the Hire Right episode where I talk about W2 and 1099. Then you’re going to also do an orientation where you introduce them to your policy and procedures. Administrative supervision, that’s things like where should I park? Do you want me to tuck in my shirt? Where’s the key so I can lock the door at the end of the day? Clinical orientation is what do I do if my client threatens me during a session? What do I do if I just can’t get this Rogerian theory down and I fail my second evaluation with you? Clinical skills, administrative skills, and never the two shall cross. In your orientation, that’s where you explain how you keep those separate.

                              Now, yes, of course there are times they cross over. In fact, one of my students in the 40-hour training, I just read an amazing role play yesterday where the clinical supervisor said, well, why did you break agency policy and talk to this potential client before the lead therapist did? And I was like uh oh, that’s administrative. And then the student worked it into a boundary situation. She explained in her role play how this supervisee how struggled with boundaries. So it wasn’t really about breaking policy and procedures, it was about this supervisee needed help with the countertransference that was leading to the boundary issue. So it was a wonderful role play. But your orientation is where you start that delineation of this is the administrative part, this is the clinical part, this is how I run my supervision practice. I like to put in my orientation books that I want my supervisee to read. Emergency procedures if someone has a heart attack, CPR. And I have a YouTube video on that. I need to redo it and update it a little bit, but you can go to my YouTube channel and see there are resources there, and I will add some to this as well. Or you can ask me questions. Resources, anything like that goes into your orientation.

                              Alright, evaluation. I truly believe – and I teach – that you should give, and I call them “paper and pencil” evaluations because I’m old school. But however you want to do that, just as long as there is an artifact. You want there to be something you can file away, documenting your supervisee’s progress. Now, if you are in my Texas Supervisor Training Facebook page, if you go to my monthly live consultation groups, we talk a lot about instruments to evaluate our supervisees. So orientation, this is where you teach the skill, and then evaluation where your supervisee has an idea of where they exceeded expectations, met expectations, or failed to meet expectations.

                              Then, when you get to the piece where oh my gosh, I taught you this three times, you’re still not getting it, inside I want to fire you, but I know LPC code says I must remediate. So here’s the thing, I’m going to design a remediation plan for you. And here are the things it will address. Go back to the evaluation. It’s right there in your evaluation, exactly the items – the specific, measurable, trackable things this supervisee failed to meet expectations for. So when you remediate, you can say, hey, I need you to read this book by this date. I need you to write a paper by this date. I need you to get three CEs in this skill by this date. IF they don’t get it done, then we go to the next thing, which is termination.

                              Now, if you terminate your supervisee, you have so much documentation – the orientation where you taught it, the evaluation where you measured it, the remediation plan where you retaught it, and finally, if you’re just at the point where, hey dude, I taught you this, now it’s making me liable, you liable, not to mention your clients are not in a good space, I’m worried about them, you’re going to have to go find another supervisor; I’m firing you. You have met every qualification or criteria that would potentially come against you. So, for example, if you fire a supervisee without remediating, they file a complaint against you, they are in the right; you should have remediated them. If you get rid of your supervisee and you did remediate them, now you have all of this documentation, so yes, it’s still time and money and stress, but when you show up for the complaint hearing, you’re like, here, this is what I did. They’re like, oh, okay, never mind. Next.

                              So this system, orientation, evaluation, remediation, and termination isn’t just for firing your supervisees, it’s for graduating them. When you sign off on those hours, if you have done this, you are going to feel so confident in their skillset there won’t be any question that you are just completely confident that they can do a great job as an LPC.

                              Alright, so let’s talk about what we talked about. This training was about helping you check the boxes. If you’re interested in becoming an LPC supervisor in Texas, common misconceptions, little nuts and bolts things like how long you have to be licensed, and then, of course, we went through the systems you must have: your interview, your contract, and then our T-I-O-Ns, orientation, evaluation, remediation, and termination. So again, if you are interested in that hiring piece, go back to your replays and take a look.

                              I am Dr. Kate Walker, I am so glad you joined me today. Have a great day.