On 24 February, supervisors from across the College of Business and Law (CBL) met for the first in a series of workshops titled Building the CBL Doctoral Supervisory Community. Facilitated by Professor Peter Case and Dr Pawel Capik, the College Director of Doctoral Research, the event marked the first step towards fostering a more connected and supportive supervisory community and strengthening supervisory practice within the College.
Why develop a supervisory community?
Doctoral supervision is central to sustaining a healthy and vibrant research culture. Yet many supervisors work in isolation, navigating evolving regulations and changing progression processes largely on their own. The workshop aimed to begin building a community of practice, one that encourages cross-disciplinary exchange, supports both PhD and DBA supervision and promotes consistency and confidence across supervisory teams.
The vision is to create a collegial space where supervisors can share experiences, discuss challenges and collectively enhance the doctoral journey for candidates and staff alike.
The emotional dimension of supervision
The workshop opened with reflections on the often invisible labour of supervision. As Dr Capik noted, while doctoral candidates’ success is celebrated, the contributions of supervisory teams and internal reviewers tend to remain in the background. In his words, “they are the unsung heroes”.
Supervisors undertake multiple roles, ranging from academic guide, gatekeeper, quality controller, motivator to pastoral supporter. All are responsibilities shaped by organisational changes within and beyond the University.
Next, with Professor Case facilitating the workshop, participants took part in a Triad Listening exercise. In groups of three, each person shared a supervisory challenge while colleagues alternated between reporting factual details and identifying the emotional content of the stories being told.
Initially, summarising a complex challenge in three minutes felt daunting. However, the activity quickly revealed valuable insights, particularly the difficulty of separating facts from emotions and the role emotional labour plays in supervision.
Colleagues highlighted issues including managing supervisory team dynamics, supporting students returning from suspension and responding to the emerging use of generative AI in doctoral work. Many participants found the exercise eye-opening. Supervisors often overlook the emotional side of their work, even though it has a significant impact on them, their colleagues and their students.
Shared challenges across disciplines
The second part of the workshop invited participants to discuss which supervisory issues were shaped by disciplinary norms and which were common across CBL. Some discipline-specific elements emerged, including defining “rigour”, setting methodological expectations and selecting appropriate external examiners.
However, most of the identified challenges were shared across disciplines. These included:
- Supervising colleagues and navigating role clarity and power dynamics
- Balancing support and independence, particularly avoiding undue influence over a student’s theoretical or methodological choices
- Clarifying the role of the independent reviewer, especially the balance between quality assurance and academic feedback
- Managing boundaries, including the extent of pastoral care and how far supervisors should push students who do not act on feedback
- Handling supervisory workloads, especially with multiple candidates at different stages
- Impostor syndrome, particularly among junior supervisors or those from practitioner backgrounds
Participants also discussed systemic challenges such as accommodating non-linear research pathways (for example fieldwork or illness) and distinguishing between the expectations of PhD and DBA programmes.
These cross-disciplinary conversations demonstrated that despite differences in methods and norms, supervisory teams share many common pressures, questions and aspirations.
Participants also emphasised the importance of recognising and celebrating what supervisors do well. While the workshop focused largely on challenges, colleagues agreed that future discussions should incorporate elements of “Appreciative Inquiry” to highlight effective practices and successful supervisory relationships.
Moving forward: building the community
The session concluded with proposed next steps for establishing a sustainable supervisory community. Suggestions included:
- Storytelling events for sharing supervisory experiences
- Developing guidance and resources on good supervisory practice, particularly in relation to supervising colleagues
- Discussions on recruitment, supervisory workload and team structures
- Exploring what makes the UWE doctoral experience distinctive
- Convening a stakeholder workshop to promote dialogue between the CBL supervisory community and representatives of the Doctoral Academy and College research executives
A strong foundation for future collaboration
The workshop was a great success, bringing colleagues together in a friendly and collaborative environment. It allowed participants to share challenges and reflect on the emotional aspects of supervision.
One of the key takeaways was the importance of creating regular opportunities for open dialogue. Most importantly, the workshop set the stage for developing a lasting supervisory community that will empower supervisors, enrich candidates’ journeys and invigorate the research culture of the College of Business and Law.