Chapter 8

Developing professional competence: relevant counselling skills

Key points:

Three key aspects to consider in developing professional competence: relevant counseling skills:

• promoting wellbeing:

Every human being has intrinsic value. All persons have a right to wellbeing to self fulfilment and to
as much control over their lives as is consistent with the needs of others.

(BASW 2004)

• building ethical working relationships:

Maintaining constructive relationships that don’t exploit and promote development.

(BASW 2004)

• combating disadvantage by challenging what may be:

not in the best interests of service users unfairly discriminating oppressive, disempowering or
culturally inappropriate.

(BASW 2004)

This chapter now turns to some key areas where counselling skills contribute to the development of
professional competence. These are:

 Listening to services users;

 Taking a developmental, related approach;
 Using evidence from research; working in the team;
 Using supervision; self-care;
 Taking responsibility for self-development.

Listening to people who use services

Beresford (1994, 1995) describes the parents of disabled children as ‘active agents’ and not ‘passive
recipients’ in relation to services.

Service users report of meetings with practitioners who are ‘transmitting’ but not ‘receiving’
communication.
A developmental, related, approach

Key points:

 Anand and Sen (1994) emphasize social justice and the unacceptability of discrimination,
arguing that personal development depends on social circumstances and institutional support,
not just individual effort.
 They advocate for sustaining human life quality and developing human potential, aligning
with social work values and the Human Rights Act 1998.
 Effective practice requires understanding developmental needs, especially: For children: what
helps or hinders their growth. For adults: the sociological and psychological effects of life
events.
 Social workers must learn to: Stay emotionally attuned to others. Manage strong emotions in
difficult cases.
 The professional relationship is crucial in delivering services and must be ethical and
communicative.
 Human growth occurs through relationships and interactions, especially in times of crisis or
stress.
 Social workers often help vulnerable clients who may be: Hostile, disadvantaged, ill, or
oppressed. Undergoing transitions or turning points in life.
 Workers must understand concepts like attachment and resilience to support clients
effectively.
 Ethical, warm, and empathic relationships are vital, as confirmed by The Obligations of Care
(1996).
 The relationship-building skills are foundational for social workers. Without them, other skills
can’t be applied effectively.
 Criticism of social work and counselling includes: Over-focus on relationships at the cost of
client safety (e.g., children at risk). Becoming overly bureaucratic, ignoring the needs and
voices of users.
 Efficient administration is essential but shouldn’t override quality relational care.
 Social work must balance personal, relationship-based services with organizational
accountability.
 Dominelli (1996) and others stress that public confidence depends on recognizing this
balance.

In understanding the relationship between client, society and ourselves we discover what social work
is, how it should be taught and assessed. Social work’s Particular role focuses on:

• The promotion of people’s wellbeing, using a developmental understanding;

• Understanding and intervening in political and social contexts, combating disadvantage.

• Keeping the service user’s expressed wishes, views and feelings central.

 The profession serves as a bridge between individuals and the state, using interpersonal
processes to manage societal issues.
 If the relational and process aspects are neglected, the field risks marginalization.
  Emphasizing process and style in human interaction is key to revitalizing social care, as both
users and managers value the time and relational approach of the worker.

Using evidence from research

Key points:

• Social workers must keep up to date with research to make sure that practice remains competent
and informed by relevant evidence. Knowing how to assess the reliability and relevance of research
findings is also important (Gomm and Davies 2000; Shemmings and Shemmings 2003).

• One key factor when considering what weight to give to research findings is a steady build up of
evidence confirming previous and current findings. An example of this is Child Protection: Messages
from Research (Department of Health 1995) where an accumulation of evidence from several research
studies led to proposals for a refocusing of work with children and families towards family support.

The social worker provided counselling including:

• Listening and engaging a young man in constructing his own plan;

• Helping him to manage anxiety and stress regarding job applications and interviewing

• Helping him to reconstruct his negative views of his own performance;

• Helping him to build a realistic relationship with his parents.

A further area of research to consider is the relevance of the different approaches to counselling to
specific situations. Trevithick (2000) suggests that 146 Counselling skills in social work practice

Five particular ‘schools’ of counselling are influential within social work, mainly because they
‘promote personal freedom and are consistent with anti-discriminatory and anti-oppressive practice.’
These are:

• Client-centred counselling (sometimes called person-centred or humanistic counselling);

• Feminist counselling;

• Cognitive behavioural counselling;

• Psychodynamic counselling;

• Eclectic and integrative counselling (adhering to no single ‘school’ but instead combining different
approaches).

• The use of cognitive behavioural approaches in work with offenders and people who use
substances, feminist approaches for women who have experienced abuse, or the research findings on
effective interventions with sexually abused children and their families (Jones and Ramchandani
1999).
Taking responsibility for self development: becoming a reflective practitioner

Key points

Social work is a challenging profession and practitioners need to be engaged in emotional, reflective
and practical ways with service users. Continual professional development will be everybody’s
responsibility, agency, worker, team, managers and service users. It is important to learn to reflect
before, during and Developing professional competence: relevant counselling skills 153 after each
event in practice. This is so that practitioners can explain what they are doing when they meet with
service users, and also enable them to evaluate, review and learn. As Parker and Bradley (2003: xi)
write: Reflection is central to good social work practice but only if action results from that reflection.

Reflection on activity can be embedded into the workplace and agencies which aim to be ‘learning
organizations’ will include space for reflective analysis of practice.

The skills needed to do this include:

• listening;

• responsiveness to feedback;

• awareness of the impact of self on others;

• the capacity to stand back and analyse (cognitive skills);

• the capacity to reflect on feelings and intuition.

Like all skills it will be helpful if we have a way of starting our efforts to improve. The framework we
use here for reflecting has been adapted from an unpublished paper by Abraham (1992): • reflecting
on what underlies our judgements;

• reflecting on theories which are implicit in a pattern of behaviour;

• reflecting on feelings, and what they imply for action;

• reflecting on the way the problem we are thinking about has been explained and what alternatives
there might be;

• reflecting on how we or others see our role in relation to the problem or issue we are thinking about.

WORKING IN TEAM AND GROUPS

Social workers usually work in teams and counselling and communication skills are directly
transferable to understanding groups and the way people relate in teams. It is also helpful to have an
understanding of some of the complex dynamics which can operate in teams and ways to build teams
(Belbin 1981, 1995; Ward 1993; Jay 1995; Syer and Connolly 1996; Payne 2000; Ward 2003).

Key Points :
 • Members of social work/care teams seldom choose one another, as usually they are selected
by the employer along with others with the aim of putting together the knowledge and skills
mix needed for the particular workplace. Often teams are multidisciplinary, so that they really
do have to talk to each other to understand the skills that each other brings, working styles
and preferred ways of operating.

SEDEN(2004) WROTE THAT A GOOD TEAM LEADER

• Communicates what you are expected to do, but chooses words that do not criticize or belittle,
especially when your practice is less than desirable;
• Is honest about your failings and offers a way to do better;
• Offers encouragement and recognition for what is going well;
• Leads by example you can watch and hear ways of doing and speaking that are good practice;
• Leaves space for the team members to build relationships with and support each other;
• Retains a sense of humour and proportion while still keeping to work tasks;
• Conveys respect, genuineness and empathy to staff within the boundaries of the work
relationship;
• Makes opportunities for team members to learn together and from each other.

Supervision

Key points:

• The experience of supervision and processes of induction and appraisal are central to any
worker’s professional development.
• Supervision in social work has similar antecedThe knowledge, skills and frameworks from
which to practice are well established (Sawdon and Sawdon 1995; Morrison 1988/1999) but
the extent to which there is good practice in agencies can be questioned. Pritchard (1995)
writes:
• The gap between knowledge and practice in this area seems wide, contrasting starkly with
counselling practice, where detailed and close supervision of practi-tioners on all levels is
considered essential and it would be exceptional for it to be accorded a low priority. Marsh
and Triseliotis write:
• Newly qualified staff have major problems establishing their practice. Induction courses are
poor and in-service courses are rarely tailored to their needs. 25% of new staff in social
services report that they have no supervision in their first year, and for many others it is
unplanned and erratic.(1996: 1)
• Neither practical tools nor extra training will lead to better decision making if social workers
are having to work with an infrastructure which is not sup-porting them. The overview
published by the Department of Health (1995a) of research programmes noted the variable
quality of the supervision received by social workers and the frequency with which
inexperienced staff had to deal with difficult situations alone. (1998: 40)
• In practice, few managers appear to receive special training in supervision skills despite the
models available to them. Ability to supervise relies heavily on role and ‘apprenticeship’,
which is just as likely to result in new supervisors passing on oppression and poor practice, as
empowerment and good practice. Where practice is competent no doubt it will be modelled
 and transmitted, but this seems a very crucial area of managerial activity to leave to such a hit
and miss approach.
• Another critical issue is the extent to which workers in multi-disciplinary teams and their
managers share a common approach to supervision. The literature described here belongs to
social work, and in nursing clinical supervision mayents to supervision in counsel-ling
practice. Both have a history that includes understandings of the process from a
psychodynamic perspective.

The roles and functions of supervision are well established (Morrison 1988/1999; Richards,
Payne and Shepperd 1990; Kadushin 1995; Hawkins and Shohet 2000) from which they can be
summarized as:

• Management: ensuring agency policies and practices are understood and adhered to;
prioritizing and allocating the work; managing the workload; setting object-ives and
evaluating the effectiveness of what is done;
• Education: helping staff to continue to learn and develop professionally, so that they are able
both to cope with societal and organizational demands and to initiate
• Fresh ways of approaching the work, according to changing needs, support: enabling staff to
cope with the many stresses of the work;
• Mediation: helping staff to find the relevant resources and means of carrying out their tasks.
• The knowledge, skills and frameworks from which to practice are well established (Sawdon
and Sawdon 1995; Morrison 1988/1999) but the extent to which there is good practice in
agencies can be questioned.