Our Over-Reliance on Supervision

5 Minutes

by Jeanne Bell and Dan Tucker, Co-Founders

AI-generated image, 100% author-created blog content

Blog No. 16 - May 2026

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Progressive organizations have rightfully directed considerable energy and knowledge development to articulating a liberatory approach to supervision. Offerings from Change Elemental, The Management Center, and CompassPoint, among others, help us unlearn and reimagine supervision’s historical ethos of power-over and control. These tools offer essential guidance to people as they step into supervision roles and sustain a conscious practice of supporting and developing others.

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From an organization design perspective, however, we also observe a pattern of over-reliance on supervision for results that it's not suited to deliver. In our organization design work, when we reflect back to leaders how much their current structures expect of supervision, a light bulb goes off: strategic alignment cannot be nurtured through supervision alone.

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Here we address three challenges of an organizational over-reliance on supervision:

Given the pace of change, supervisors are not always strategically clear themselves.
Supervisor-Supervisee relationships can reinforce siloed perspectives.
Supervision is an insufficient means of organizational sensemaking and adaptation–the two most essential ingredients for organizational coherence in a chaotic operating context.

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CHALLENGE: Supervisors’ Strategic Clarity

A core assumption of supervision is that the supervisor is relaying and translating important strategic information to the supervisee to influence their work in the direction of the organization's emergent strategic choices. But this depends, of course, on the strategic clarity of supervisors themselves.

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The chain of strategic insight is theoretically originating at a Leadership Team of some kind. This presents two problems:

Even in relatively small nonprofits, there is a tendency to place supervision layers between junior and senior staff in order to create title and compensation growth opportunities between them. This means that many people supervising others are not on the Leadership Team and thus without regular access to conversations of emergent strategy.
And second, many Leadership Teams are not actually strategy-focused bodies. With a single representative from each functional area (finance, HR, fundraising, communications, program), they often do not tackle thorny strategy and theory of change questions that are better suited to a different mix of expertises. In fact, they typically spend a majority of their time on internal business–people and money issues–rather than strategy.

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Given these realities, it’s an unsafe assumption that supervision is substantially addressing staff’s ongoing interpretation of the external context and development of strategic responses.

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CHALLENGE: Siloed Thinking & Accountability

Another challenge of our over-reliance on supervision is that staff generally interpret what’s happening in the organization through a single or primary lens. If you are in Development, you are hearing a Development-centric perspective; if you are in Policy, you are hearing a Policy-centric perspective. But adaptive strategy does not manifest through disaggregated functional execution, rather in how functions interact purposefully to influence social change in a specific operating context.

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Another expression of this silo reinforcement is staff members’ sense of accountability to an individual supervisor rather than to the organization's theory of change. The alliance between the two people can overshadow their orientation to the organization as a single, strategically interdependent system.

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Unfortunately, many of our clients see these silo’s intensifying in hybrid and virtual organizations where people may only have regular dialogue about the organization's work with people on their own teams.

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CHALLENGE: Insufficient Means of Sensemaking & Adaptation

Finally, many concurrent supervision relationships across an organization are insufficient as an organizational sensemaking and adaptation mechanism. As Cyndi Suarez argued in her Nonprofit Quarterly series on sensemaking organizations: “Ultimately, in structuring sensemaking organizations, the focus is on frameworks of understanding that drive action, rather than departments or programs.“

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If we agree that sensemaking and adaptation are essential in this operating context, then there have to be powerful, reliable mechanisms for people to make sense of what's happening in and outside of an organization and to make adaptive choices. One-on-one, department-based supervision is a source for this but, again, insufficient to drive organizational sensemaking and adaptation writ large.

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Discussion Questions for Leaders:

Supervision lines are an invaluable aspect of organization design. But there are other design elements such as cross-functional tables, community feedback loops, and joint board-staff sessions that need to be included in our organization designs to sustain strategic coherence and alignment. We offer below a set of discussion questions for your Leadership Team to inspire your thinking about necessary design shifts.

As a staff and board, do we share fidelity to an organizational theory of change–referencing it regularly and adapting it as context requires us to? If not, how do we move intentionally towards this unifying state?
Are we relying on supervisors to translate to their supervisees shifts in organizational context and requisite shifts in internal choices and execution? If so, is that working well? Can we better support supervisors to, in turn, support the strategic thinking of their direct reports?
What powerful, reliable structures do we have beyond supervision to engage our staff in strategic sensemaking and adaptation? Here you can think of well-designed, recurring cross-functional tables, community feedback loops, and/or joint board-staff sessions, for instance.

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