Badass Therapists Building Practices That Thrive
Welcome to Badass Therapists Building Practices That Thrive, the ultimate resource for mental health professionals ready to step into their power, grow their practices, and create a career they love. I'm Dr. Kate Walker, a Texas LPC/LMFT Supervisor, author, and business strategist who's here to show you the path to success.
Formerly Texas Counselors Creating Badass Businesses, we’ve rebranded because, well, we’re way too big for Texas now! This community of badass therapists is growing nationwide, and we’re here to help you create a career and practice you love, no matter where you are.
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Badass Therapists Building Practices That Thrive
155 Preventing a Toxic Climate With Supervisees: Why Every Supervisor Needs a Contract
Toxic supervision relationships damage our profession, but preventing them requires simpler solutions than many realize. Drawing from recent surveys and proposed rule changes, this episode dives deep into what makes supervision relationships thrive or fail.
At the heart of preventing problematic supervision sits the humble supervision contract - a document not currently required by licensing boards but essential to establishing clear expectations. When supervisors charge fees that exceed what supervisees earn hourly without providing commensurate value through amenities like office space, administrative support, or specialized expertise, resentment inevitably follows. Transparency about financial arrangements, scheduling expectations, and evaluation procedures creates the foundation for healthy supervision.
The most troubling revelation comes when examining supervisor termination protocols - or lack thereof. Currently, supervisors have no formal mechanism to end relationships with problematic supervisees, remaining responsible until the supervisee secures another supervisor or upgrades their license. This regulatory gap creates professional vulnerability that puts supervisors in precarious positions when ethical concerns arise. While proposed rule changes aim to address these issues, the path forward requires both regulatory updates and individual commitment to professional best practices.
Whether you supervise clinicians or are under supervision yourself, understanding these dynamics transforms how you approach these crucial relationships. Join the conversation about creating supervision environments that foster growth rather than toxicity, and help shape the future of our profession by advocating for clearer guidelines around contracts, fees, and termination protocols.
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no-transcript. I've got my list open in case we have more folks that want to attend today. So last week I talked about toxic supervision, what that looks like, and then I said, okay, this week, today, I would hopefully be able to provide you with more specifics, and I can, because we've got some surveys that are coming out, and surveys are based on, you know, input. I mean, they're trying to gather data, but they have to start somewhere, so they're coming from data, trying to gather more data. Also, there is another not a petition going around, but there's some information going around about trying to change some rules, and so I've got, I have opinions. I'm sure you folks do too, I'm sure, and I hope you make your position known. But I want to go through that as well, because where I'm coming up with this, how can we make supervision not toxic? What are things we can actively do or change? It's simpler than you think, and if you've taken the Kate Walker training 40-hour training, whether you've taken it, taken it this year or you took it 15 years ago, we've been teaching the same framework. You know, laws change, rules change, lots of things change, but the, the framework stays the same and it's the relationship right. We want to preserve the relationship, right, we want to preserve the relationship and so I'm going to start with the LMFT survey that's going around, the LPC survey. As of the date of this recording, it's 9-23 today, so it will probably be out by the time. I'm able to put this into the Step it Up profile, so hopefully you'll be filling it out by then. But some of the questions that are being asked how many supervisors did you have? What was the highest amount you paid for supervision? And so what was this amount per hour, per week, per month? And this question was really interesting to me If you paid a set fee, was the fee higher than your hourly rate? So this is asking the supervisee is the supervision fee matching the hourly rate? Is it higher than the hourly rate? And then, how reasonable did you find the fee to be? And were there any amenities included in this set fee? What were those amenities? I'm on question 18. So we just had a whole batch of questions right there related to fees, and if I were to pull up the other petition, you would see we would notice cut it out, buddy. We would notice that fees are huge, and I'm going to tie this up in just a second. So, thinking about fees, what is your fee? Is it reasonable? And if it's high, you know your fee. Is it reasonable? And if it's high, you know high for your area, high for your demographic, high for your specialty. What else are you offering? That's what amenities are. So some examples of amenities office space, office furniture, administrative support, administrative support for billing, client referrals, etc. Etc. So that's going to be huge.
Speaker 1:Then the next set of questions speak to was your supervision in person or virtual. So this is LMFT and remember, lmft has always struggled with this idea of providing anything virtually, and you know they just got rid of the rules prohibiting telephone supervision, like this past rule change. So that's what I imagine a lot of that is about. So I'm interested to see we may see some data that comes back where folks are wanting more in-person supervision or maybe they're wanting more virtual. I don't know how many folks supervising we have out there who are like no, I just want to be in person, I like virtual. Continuing on group supervision how many people are in the group is one thing that they're asking, and I know there are a lot of supervisors out there who don't realize, you know, whether it's the law in your state or not, you know. 50 percent, that's all you should be providing in a group. That's going to be three or more in your supervision and some folks are still providing group supervision every single time. And then there's a lot of there are a lot of questions about skills and did supervision teach you those skills? And then it just gets to harm. Asking respondents, were they harmed in supervision and the extent? And so, using the so number one, and this is what I was going to circle back to, did you have a contract? So I'm not talking about the paperwork that we submit to the state, talking about the paperwork that we submit to the state as of this recording. No contract is required in the rules, but it's always been best practices. So providing a contract is number one.
Speaker 1:Establishing expectations at the onset of supervision, tracking experience hours weekly. Was the supervisor available between supervision sessions? Did they provide one hour of supervision each week? Did they address issues in the relationship? So, in other words, you know I can see you're standoffish today. What's going on? Are you mad at me? Are you angry with your clients? I mean, are you a supervisor who's able to address conflict and approach it right, or do you just withdraw and pretend like it's not there? Did your supervisor behave unethically? Did your supervisor ask you for advice or ask you to educate them about areas in which I have training or expertise? And we see this a lot, especially in the multicultural arena? Well, you know I'm not this, so why don't you tell me about that? And that's wonderful, you know, if you've started the conversation. But for a supervisor to depend on the supervisee to teach them or handhold them through those things, rather than the supervisor becoming multiculturally competent themselves, yeah, that's not good.
Speaker 1:And then did this supervisor provide evaluative feedback? Now, if you've taken the Kate Walker training course, you know we talk about summative and formative evaluation, right? Formative is, like every day, good job. I really like the way you're processing Great conceptualization. Summative is paper and pencil. You know I'm going to put that in air quotes. You don't have to have paper and pencil, but it has to be something that's documented and that's what we teach in the course. We call it the OER triad orientation, evaluation, then remediation. So that's one of the things they're asking. On the survey, did you provide or did you I'm sorry this is to the supervisee did you receive evaluative feedback? Were you enabled to develop your own style. Were you treated with respect, was confidentiality maintained?
Speaker 1:And then it gets into exploitation, embarrassment, shame, public humiliation, use drugs with me. So it goes to an extreme. Y'all aren't doing that, I'm not going to go there. But when we start with, okay, what can we do? You got to have a contract. Now the contract does not have to be set in stone, and I think this is why maybe supervisors don't do it, because obviously things are going to change. Your fees may change, the days of the week you meet may change, your evaluation schedule may change, and you know what. That's okay, you can change all of those things. But, as I mentioned last time we talked about this, when you mess with someone's money or you mess with someone's time, there will be negative consequences. Someone's time, there will be negative consequences, and so having a contract is just an easy way to get that out in the open.
Speaker 1:Because the petition if I pull that up, you know one of the first things no, adobe, I don't want to try that or learn that, thank you. One of the first things that it mentions is the idea of no, I'm sorry, it's not the first thing, it's actually number five Compensation and supervision cost guidelines. This is the request Add a new subsection to 68193 requiring that supervision fees be reasonable, clearly disclosed and agreed upon in writing before supervision begins. Y'all that's contract right. I mean, if we have supervisors out there that are not disclosing fees or they're saying one thing when they sign the paperwork and then they're changing it when something else happens, right that's. I just don't see why we need my soapbox. I would hate to see a rule enacted that forces us to do something when best practices says this is what we should be doing anyway.
Speaker 1:So, making sure that you are being very transparent about the compensation. And then you know, the question, like I said, I've seen again and again and again is is your supervisor charging more than your hourly rate? So that's the supervisee's rate that they charge for clients or the rate that they're getting paid by their agency? And if so, it's always tied into this. What are you getting Right? I mean, if you are going to be an EMDR specialist and you're going to supervise someone and at the same time, make sure that they are EMDR certified, charge for that, all right, that's great, put it in your contract. But I think what they're seeing and they're calling it exploitation, is when supervisees are being charged double perhaps their hourly rate not our hourly rate, but the supervisee's hourly rate and they're really not getting anything for it.
Speaker 1:So I and other supervisors, you know, we are sort of standing on our soapboxes going buyer beware, buyer beware, come on, read the contract. And then it's like, oh, lots of supervisors aren't doing contracts. So I'm just like I've got a palm print right here where I just like, oh my gosh, you know, we need to put this stuff, we do it with our clients. Right, it's got to be in the service agreement. How much are we going to charge? You can't change anything in a service agreement or consent for treatment with your client unless it's in writing. That is in the rules.
Speaker 1:So let me circle back to number one. Number one is failure to meet monthly supervision minimum. This is if the supervisee does, it doesn't say explicitly in the rules that they lose all of their hours. So they want that clarified. Yeah, that's fair, I don't blame them. Number two they want to rule they. The petition says I don't want to rule they. The petition says I don't want to represent that. This represents all supervisees. The petition says uh, require supervision contracts. I don't have a problem with that. Um, I think it might burden staff if we're having to upload forms and upload contracts and updated contracts, and updated contracts. So I'm not sure how they would do that unless they, you know, simply say it must be in the file and then, if they pull records, they could see that Ethical.
Speaker 1:Number three is ethical oversight of supervisory business practices. I don't. I'm pretty sure in Texas the LPC board doesn't have that authority and statute to oversee ethical business. But again, that's why people join, step it Up. You guys are, so you're going to be ethical, we're going to make sure you're ethical. And then number four number four I need to do a whole webinar on. So here's the thing Supervision, supervisor, termination protocols.
Speaker 1:Did y'all know that supervisors have no mechanism to terminate their supervisee? Like, we talked about that a little bit last time, but I'm still getting this. What, what? Even you know, in the Texas Supervisor Coalition Facebook group had one of our attorneys, who's also a supervisor, say what you know. But it's true, you are the supervisor of record Right until that supervisee upgrades or gets another supervisor. I mean, they can backdate it. They meaning staff. Once they get the paperwork. They can backdate it to the day you say we are through. But in that meantime, that limbo, no man's land, you are the supervisor, and so that's one of the things you know.
Speaker 1:Even I've probably confused folks in my course, because if a supervisee does something egregious, I preach hey, that's the one time you don't need a remediation plan, get them off your roster, you know, file the complaint, et cetera, et cetera, etc, etc. And now, as I've learned more, I'm seeing wait, you're still the supervisor of record, and now you've got somebody who actually, you know, does a poor job. It's probably important that you do really extra oversight on this person. Until the complaint goes through, the supervision is backdated, terminated, right, all of these things. So I say all of that because number four asks that the supervisor not be able to terminate the supervisee relationship. I'm going to read it. I'm saying it wrong.
Speaker 1:Supervisor terminates a supervisory relationship. They must provide at least 30 days written notice to the LPC associate and the board. That's what they're requesting. The notice must include the effective date, the general reason for termination and confirmation that final logs will be submitted. Failure to provide timely notice or documentation may be grounds for disciplinary review.
Speaker 1:So the problem with that is there's already a rule. We must turn it in all paperwork within 30 days of terminating the supervisee relationship. But then we have the same problem. We can't really terminate it. We can say and my example in the Facebook group is like it's like telling your spouse I divorce you, right, I divorce you. Well, it's not official until the powers that be say it's official. We're kind of in the same predicament. So right now the supervisees hold all the power because if they want to fire us, they can go, have you know and form relationships with another supervisor, fill out the paperwork, turn in the paperwork they don't even have to tell us and then show up to supervision and say hey, by the way, instead of that completing that remediation plan, I'm firing you. So see, ya, right, and there's no rule that says that you get to communicate with that new supervisor.
Speaker 1:So this one I think well, there are a couple of them. I don't think that one has a whole lot of merit. So you know, back to the title of this training and I want to open it up to questions for you guys. But when you're preventing a toxic climate, it really does start with that contract defining how you will charge them, how often, what comes with it and when meetings happen. And that includes you not showing up for supervision, right? If you're not able to make supervision, are you making sure that that supervisee now gets their four hours of supervision? If you're in Texas, lpc weekly supervision, if you're an LMFT or other disciplines are you doing your due diligence? Or are you saying, hey, you know, I just don't have time to make it up, well, that's on you, and that not only will create a toxic climate, but that's actually reportable, right? Your supervisee can report you for not being available for supervision.
Speaker 1:So define the time, define the money and then define the what ifs. Well, what if your supervisee has a job change and they can't come Tuesday at 4 30 anymore, right? Or what if you can't? What if your situation changes and you can't do supervision at four o'clock on Wednesdays? So the late cancel no-show policy that's one of the things we really pound into folks' heads in the K-Walker training. We want you to have a late-cancel-no-show policy.
Speaker 1:And then the creme de la creme, the number one thing that I see folks complained about is when you slap somebody with a remediation plan or you do say I'm firing you after 12 and a half months of everything being peachy. Right, if your LPC associate is on track to finish at 18 months and at 16 and a half months you're saying you know what? I'm going to give you a remediation plan because you're being a little bit, you got a little bit of an attitude. Come on, if you took my course, you know. Level two behavior is that push and pull. They are developing their own style, they are trying to establish themselves in their counselor identity.
Speaker 1:So, again, how do you define? Well, they're just annoying. Well, you pull out your LAMB-E, ccsr, your evaluation instrument, you find the criteria that matches that you make sure, and I'm sorry, if you're at 16 and a half months and you have never given an evaluation, then before you fire that supervisee or slap them with a remediation plan out of the blue, I would give them an evaluation and start the conversation. So hopefully that addresses everything, but I want to answer your questions, so I'm going to open it up. I'll go ahead and hit record. No, I'll turn off record, okay.