2011

When the supervisor and supervisee each come from diverse cultural and ethnic backgrounds, they bring with them culturally conditioned beliefs about each other’s cultural group (Jordan, Brinson, & Peterson, 2002). These beliefs and attitudes can be positive, negative, and neutral. When these beliefs lead to misperception (Riley, 2004) and negativity (Jordan et al., 2002) in the supervisory relationship, they can shut down communication and growth within the supervision process and between the supervisee and client. Intentional clinical supervision models that promote the supervisee’s multicultural competence in appropriate ways are of recent interest (Ober, Granello, & Henfield, 2009). What happens when the rubber hits the road within the clinical supervision session? The purpose of this article is to illuminate the importance of applying multicultural competencies to cross-cultural supervision in order to increase multicultural understanding and awareness between supervisor and supervisee, which in turn impacts multicultural awareness between counselor and client.