Claudia, my wife, and I just returned from a California trip. We saw lots of friends and enjoyed several memorable restaurants. Back home now, we heard about the best pizza in town and last night gave it a try with our family. That said, I guess I’ll be filtering my writing today about Seven Challenges implementation through a food and restaurant-oriented lens.
From a restaurant perspective, The Seven Challenges could be considered a fine dining program, definitely not fast food. Counselors don’t simply serve the same old meal to every client. Instead, they provide individualized counseling tailored to the needs, goals, and strengths of each unique client. Standardized educational curricula, psycho-educational groups, and similar approaches certainly have their value. However, The Seven Challenges is built around something different: counseling to help each client work on what matters most to them.
Implementation Ingredients
Just as great restaurants depend on more than a good menu, successful implementation of The Seven Challenges depends on more than quality training. Two ingredients are especially important: clinical supervision, and support and learning groups.
Clinical Supervision
Every successful restaurant has an experienced chef who is responsible for maintaining quality and helping others improve their craft. In much the same way, counseling organizations rely on experienced counselors serving as clinical directors who provide supervision. They bring expertise, oversee the quality of counseling, and, in many ways, serve as the restaurant’s executive chef. They are in charge and ultimately responsible for the counseling services.
Good supervisors support counselors and help them develop skills, including some that are unique to The Seven Challenges. Because The Seven Challenges is a holistic program, clients can present with almost any possible issue. We want them to get help that is specifically aimed at the issue that concerns them most. No one knows everything, so clinical supervision and continual professional development are core pieces of effective implementation. It’s about counselors gaining knowledge and expertise so they can provide high-quality services. Now, that’s fine dining.
To support this work, The Seven Challenges provides leader training and ongoing quarterly Support Calls for clinical supervisors and other counselors who could benefit from them.
Support and Learning Groups
Even the best restaurants depend on more than talented chefs. Great ones continually learn, solve problems, and refine how they work together. Support and learning groups serve that same function in Seven Challenges implementation.
The Seven Challenges program has several core principles, provides a transtheoretical framework for counseling, and incorporates proven and innovative skills. But any evidence-based program is only as good as its implementation. We know that every organization is unique in terms of client demographics, organizational arrangement, environment of practice, and training level and experience of service providers.
Support and learning groups are collaborative team meetings that give counselors and staff an opportunity to tap everyone’s input and intelligence to take the broad structure that has been provided by The Seven Challenges, adapt it locally, and make it work optimally at an implementing organization’s site. At these meetings, team members share what’s working, discuss what isn’t, ask questions, make suggestions, solve implementation challenges, celebrate successes, and identify opportunities to improve.
This process allows organizations to take ownership of the program and make it their own rather than simply trying to replicate it exactly as taught (again, this is not a curriculum). The result is an implementation that follows the principles of The Seven Challenges, while fitting the unique needs of the organization and the clients it serves.
These meetings are empowering, creative, and often among the most energizing parts of the implementation process because everyone contributes to making the program stronger.
Seven Challenges leaders can facilitate support and learning groups or designate someone else to do it. Regardless, it’s vital that all team members’ views are heard and respected. Just like in a kitchen, the culture matters.
Bringing it All Together
Clinical supervision focuses primarily on developing counselors’ clinical knowledge and skills. Support and learning groups focus primarily on improving implementation across the organization. Together, these two components lead to excellence. Like farm-to-table dining: They take all the best ingredients (The Seven Challenges program and local talent) and creatively combine them in the best possible way for an outstanding implementation.