4.50 GREATEST HITS - How to have a great relationship with your supervisor

In this episode I discuss five ways that you can improve your relationship with your PhD supervisor. This relationship is one of the most important aspects of your research experience yet we so often leave it to chance. The good news is that you can improve things so much without expecting them to change at all - find out how in this episode! 

***NOTE - this is NOT talking about abusive, problematic and/or unacceptable supervision. I talk about this more in episode 19 of season 1 - What to do (and think) if you have a toxic relationship with your supervisor. The strategies in this episode are mainly focused on enhancing supervisory relationships that just don't feel as good as they could right now.  

If you liked this episode, you might also like this episode on How to manage your supervisor or boss.

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I'm Dr Vikki Wright, ex-Professor and certified life coach and I help everyone from PhD students to full Professors to get a bit less overwhelmed and thrive in academia. Please make sure you subscribe, and I would love it if you could find time to rate, review and tell your friends! You can send them this universal link that will work whatever the podcast app they use. http://pod.link/1650551306?i=1000695434464

I also host a free online community for academics at every level. You can sign up on my website, The PhD Life Coach. com - you'll receive regular emails with helpful tips and access to free online group coaching every single month! Come join and get the support you need.

Transcript

Hello, and welcome to the PhD Life Coach podcast greatest hits, and this week we are focused on academic relationships. Now, this is such an important topic because I believe that academic relationships are what can make or break your PhD experience. The biggest challenges I ever see with my clients come from some sort of breakdown in that supervisory relationship, some difference in priorities or expectations or acceptable behaviors and so on.

When I came to decide which episodes to include in this week, I actually found it quite difficult to pick, 'cause I've done quite a few on this topic because it's such an important topic. And what I selected in the end were two that I think cover off a quite general introduction to having effective academic relationships, and then one that addresses a more specific challenge.

So today's episode focuses on how to have a good relationship with your supervisor. Now, some of you might think, "I've already got a good relationship." Listen anyway. There is lots in here that will make it more effective, more collegiate, that will improve what is already good.

Others of you might think, "There's nothing you can do to improve my relationship. We just don't get on." And I wanna remind you that relationships can change a lot, even if only one person changes. Even if you only change the way you're thinking about it, you don't even behave any differently, or if you change your behavior and they don't change theirs, it can make a massive difference.

If you listen and you think, "Oh yeah, this is good. This is helping me understand, but I feel like I've got a long way to go on this," please do check out the PhD Life Coach membership. We open today. So this comes out, if you're listening to this live, it comes out on the 27th of July, 2026, and the membership is now open for a week.

We close on Friday. You can join for quarter three, where our focus is going to be academic relationships. Now, if your academic relationships are not too bad, but your problem is motivation or procrastination or organization or any of these things, don't worry. We totally still coach on all that stuff.

You totally get support on all that stuff. But the talk component this quarter will focus on feedback and networking and improving your supervisory relationship. So today's episode is going to be a brilliant introduction to that.

I want you all the way through to be thinking about a specific relationship, and then by the end, identify one thing that you're gonna try and do differently to see what impact it has on that relationship. If you have any questions, then do get in touch with me.

The second episode I chose, I'll tell you more about when I actually introduce it, but it is essentially about preparing for difficult meetings. So it's a very specific, very pragmatic, episode that will really get you ready for a meeting that you've been dreading or perhaps a progress review or promotions discussion or any of those sorts of things. So keep an eye out for that one. I really hope you enjoy both episodes, and please tell everyone you know about the membership, and I hope to see lots of you in there soon

Hello and welcome to episode 18 of the PhD Life Coach, and today we are gonna be talking about how to have a great relationship with your supervisor. I find this a fascinating subject because I've really seen it from all sides. So obviously I've been a PhD student myself with my own supervisors. I had two supervisors. I've seen it as a supervisor. I've. Seen eight ish, something like that, PhD students through to successful completion, but I've also seen it as a coach.

When I hear PhD students talk about their supervisors, I've seen it as a co-supervisor when I've had students talk to me about the other co-supervisor as it were. And I've also seen it talking to my peers and colleagues about their experiences with their students and how they're managing those and how it affects them. 

So what I've really seen from this kind of multiple perspectives is that no supervisor supervisee relationship is the same. There's no such thing as a kind of objectively great relationship. Different people want different things from relationships. What could be super helpful from one person is claustrophobic to somebody else.

What's kind of hands off and freedom giving for one student is neglectful for another student. Everybody in these relationships is a human being and every relationship is different.

That said, I think there are some really basic things that we can ask ourselves and consider that really will help improve whatever relationship it is you are in with your supervisor or indeed your supervisee, if you're listening to this as an academic.

I'm gonna start with a big, fat caveat. I, in this podcast, I am gonna be talking, as usual about the thoughts that we have, how they create our emotions and the actions that we take, and to some extent our results. And I'm gonna be thinking about reframing some of these thought. Nothing I say in this episode in any way would encourage you to reframe supervision that is unacceptable. So if your feeling is that your supervision is actually wholly inadequate, or is inappropriate or is threatening in any way, is discriminator in any way, I am absolutely not saying that what you need to do is work on your mindset and reframe those things. And in next week's episode, we're gonna talk in more detail about how you might recognize some of those issues and how you can seek support and minimize the impact on yourself and on your studies. The focus of today is thinking about supervisory relationships that don't fall into actually fully unacceptable, but perhaps don't feel like what you came for or feel like they could be better or that you wanna feel better about it. 

That said, even if you are in one of these really toxic relationships, I would still listen today cuz I think there'll be nuggets that you'll get that will help you look after yourself while you are navigating the rest of the complications that come from having to untangle a potentially really difficult relationship.

So I'm gonna give you five tips in this episode to help you have a great relationship with your supervisor.

Tip one, explore what you mean by a great relationship. Like I said at the start, this can vary hugely from person to person. What are you expecting from your supervisor? What do you want them to bring? What do you want them to do? How do you want them to act? How do you want them to make you feel? And I would actually take some time to grab a piece of paper and a pen and start to write down some answers to some of those questions. What do you want from your supervisor?

And I want you to get as many things out of your head as possible, because actually we talk about wanting a great relationship, and we don't always necessarily define what that means to us. So just getting some clarity on that situation. Can really help to start to untangle some of these complicated feelings that we sometimes have about our supervisors and our supervisees.

Now, once you've listed these, I want you to have a look at your list, and I want you to ask yourself a bunch of questions. I want you to ask yourself, is this realistic? Can one person do all these things? One I see quite a lot from students that I coach is they want their supervisor to be an eminent expert who can connect them into the discipline and, you know, take them around the world and all of these kind of high flying things.

But at the same time, they want somebody to be comforting and supportive and attentive and get feedback regularly and to see them in person regularly and so on. And sometimes that can exist in the same person, but sometimes what we're doing is we're asking for quite contrasting things.

It's the same as in any relationship. You know, if you are looking for a personal relationship, you might want somebody who's got an amazing job and successful, but who's also super attentive and there when you need them, and never has to work in the evenings or the weekends, for example.

Sometimes these things are, if not in conflict, but difficult to find all in the same person. So is it realistic? Is it universal? If you showed people your list of what you think a great relationship would be, would everybody else agree? or are these things that you want in a great relationship but that somebody else might interpret differently or it might not be important to them.

Now, that's not to undermine your preferences. Your preferences are your preferences. That's that's absolutely great, and it's brilliant to figure those out, but accepting that those things. Are preferences and not necessarily a universal truth about what makes a great supervisor is a really important step towards figuring out how to either improve your relationship or to improve how you feel about your relationship.

I want you then to ask yourself, how are these in line with university regulations? Do you even know what university regulations are? Does your university specify how often you should meet your supervisor? I bet it does most do, at least in terms of formal recorded meetings. Does your university specify how long your supervisor should take to get drafts back to you if you've submitted drafts for feedback?

Most universities have guidance around that, if not full on rules, then guidance recommended durations. How does what you are expecting from your supervisor relate to those? Are you expecting or hoping for more contact than is specified by your university?

Again, it's not a problem. Many, many, many supervisors and supervisees meet far more often than the university specifies, but this is a really good way of trying to figure out, okay, am I being unrealistic in my expectations? Is my supervisor even meeting the basic requirements of the university? And if they're not, That's the point to listen to next week's episode and to really think about, okay, how can I move this to a situation where I'm at least meeting the basic requirements?

I also want you to ask yourself, is it true that you need all of those things? . So if you said, I want my supervisor to make me feel confident, isn't it true that that's your supervisor's job? Or is it something that you can work on in yourself so that whether you feel confident or not is not dependent?

What your supervisor has said to you, is it true that you need your supervisor to be an expert in your discipline and in your method and in science communication and in writing skills and in statistics and in everything else? Or actually does your supervisor just need to be the one who can pull that together and you can get stats training from somebody else, or ethics training from somebody else?

So I want you to go through and query, whether it's actually true that your supervisor needs to do all of these things, one thing you might like to try is prioritizing, which are the most important things that you really need and that really need to come from your supervisor, and then you can start prioritizing what you're really asking for here, what you are really looking for.

Tip two follows on from this, and this is gonna sound like I'm doing this from the perspective of a supervisor, but trust me, I'm not, cuz it goes both ways and that is, don't expect the person to be anyone other than who they've shown themselves to be. An awful lot of pain comes from expecting somebody to behave differently than the way they always behave. that you are constantly trying to get more reassurance from somebody. You are constantly trying to get somebody to be tidier than they are. You are constantly trying to get somebody to micromanage you less, whatever it might be. And again, this is not about accepting unacceptable behavior. But instead, one of the best ways to have a great relationship with your supervisor is to really know them, know what they're really good at, know what they're less good at providing, and to accept that and to accept and revel in and make the most of all the things that they're really good at. And figure out ways to get the support you need for the other stuff outside of that supervisory relationship.

If your supervisor is super well connected and brilliant at helping you network and get to know different people and opening up opportunities for you, and making sure there's a huge amount of money in the laboratory so that you can carry out your research, Then perhaps you find some of the day-to-day support where you just need some reassurance.

You need people to sense check whether your paragraphs are clear and those sorts of things. Maybe you try and find that support somewhere else. 

It's about knowing that your supervisor gives amazing feedback, but it sometimes takes them a while to do it. So ensuring that during that time you've given yourself other things that you can be getting on with so you don't feel like you're being held back by the fact that they've been slow to give feedback.

It is about knowing your supervisor and expecting them to be who they have always been, and as long as that's within the realms of acceptable, then we accept it. They're human beings.

If you're a supervisor, exactly the same goes the other way. I've seen a lot of supervisors have constant frustration that their PhD students aren't a particular way when that student has never been like that. They've never been someone who's fast at writing or they've never been somebody who speaks up in seminars, but they have a whole ton of other qualities which make them an amazing PhD student for you.

We get to accept and nurture all of those sides while helping them develop some of the things they find difficult, but not expecting them to be different than the way they are.

My third tip is be really careful what you make things mean. I coach a lot of PhD students. If you're interested in that, you can sign up on my website. During that coaching, one of the things I see a lot is the stories that students generate about the behavior of their supervisors.

So if a supervisor doesn't reply to an email, I see students make that mean that they are a low priority to the supervisor, or they make it mean that they must not be very good at their PhD because otherwise the supervisor would take more time and attention. Or they make it mean they must have written something stupid in their email and the person just doesn't even wanna respond rather than taking it at the face value that they haven't replied to your email.

There's a whole lot of reasons that have got nothing to do with you and nothing to do with the relationship as to why they might not have replied to that email.

I see the same thing with supervisors who take ages to get their comments back, and we all know they exist. I've been that supervisor sometime, I've seen those supervisors. I've had students talk to me about waiting several weeks, several months for comments on their drafts, for example, and making that mean, oh, the supervisor must just be too busy. You know, they'll get to me when they can get to me. They're just too busy at the moment, or making it mean I'm not a priority or I'm not important.

And even the one that sounds kind, the sort of understanding, oh, they're just super busy at the moment. They'll get to it when they can. Even that is a big assumption. You are trying to kind of second guess why you're creating meaning from the fact they haven't got back to you when it's possible that the reason they haven't got back to you is cuz they have forgotten entirely that they said they'd do it.

So it might not be that they're too busy and that they'll get to it when they can. It may not even be on their to-do list anymore because they have rubbish systems and they have no idea who they've committed what to. We've seen that. So just be really careful the meaning that you're putting on things

again, I feel like I'm putting caveats into every single one of these, but I think it's super important cuz this is a really, it's a really delicate issue, this relationship between supervisor and supervisee. And unfortunately there have been many occasions where the supervision hasn't been acceptable, the behavior hasn't been acceptable. 

So just to be clear, again, if somebody is saying inappropriate things or things that you find offensive or upsetting, this isn't about gaslighting yourself, about that, about saying, oh, I shouldn't interpret them like that, but it is thinking. What am I making those comments mean about me, for example, so if you are experiencing inappropriate comments from your supervisor, you might find that you find yourself thinking, and this means I can't finish my PhD and this means I don't belong in this department and this means that no one will support me, and those sorts of things.

So this is not about talking you out of interpretations that you are making of behavior because you're experiencing what you're experiencing. It's about thinking about what you're making that mean about you and your future. 

Tip four, focus on what you are bringing. So all of us spend probably too much time thinking about what other people should do better and not necessarily thinking about what we can do. And sometimes the belief that the other person in the relationship, so the supervisor in this case is not doing their side of the bargain, sometimes gets in the way of us doing our side of the bargain.

So one example where I see this a lot. PhD students is where they believe that the supervisor isn't interested in their research. So they have this belief, it feels very real to them. Maybe it's true, maybe it's not. Who knows? But the belief feels very real to them. And what that does is it starts to affect how they interact with the supervisor.

They start telling the supervisor less often what they're doing. They avoid talking to the supervisor. They don't send them a cool new graph or a cool new document that they found. Because they believe that the supervisor isn't interested in what they do. So focusing on what you're bringing. I think he's really important. What would you do? If you had a great relationship with your supervisor, and try and embody that as much as you can. So if you believed your supervisor really cared about your research, how would you behave?

You'd probably update them more regularly with more enthusiasm. You'd probably look forward to your meetings so that you can tell them all about it. You can create that. If you spend less time believing that your supervisor's not interested and more time believing that you are someone who has interesting research, then you can really create an environment where you feel much more interesting and feel like you're doing interesting research.

So focus on bringing your side of the supervisor supervisee relationship.

, Tip five is slightly different. Treat them like a sense check rather than like a boss. So there's a massive transition going from an undergraduate, a master's, into a PhD. You go from having really strict assessment criteria, clear assessment information, through to having much more control over the direction of your research, the progress, the timeline, and all of those things. And for a lot of people, understandably, that can be a real challenge and something that you really need to get used to.

And again, I've seen this from both sides. I've had students saying, I've really just wish my supervisor would just give me some more guidance. And the supervisor saying, oh, they just don't have direction. They come and expect me to tell them what to do, but really I want them, I want to see them telling me what they want to do.

And then sometimes the flip happens that the supervisor decides that the student perhaps lacks direction and needs more guidance, and so they start giving more guidance and then the student feels really controlled and as though the supervisor doesn't trust them. So I want you to really think about here is how can you treat them as a sense check.

One bit of advice I always give PhD students is ask yourself, what would I do if I didn't have a supervisor and go to your supervisor with that. So instead of saying, I've got too many things on at the moment. I don't know whether to focus on the paper or on the presentation. Go to your supervisor and say, I've got too many things on at the moment. I've got the paper, I've got the presentation. I think it's a priority to focus on the presentation because actually that's coming up more quickly and once that's out the way, I have a good few weeks to focus on the writing. Does that sound good to you, or is there something else I should take into account 

Similarly, when you're asking for feedback on writing saying, it's too long. Can you give me some ideas about how to shorten it? That's okay. At least you're giving some specific requests to your supervisor, but much better to say it's too long. I've marked in blue where I think I could shorten it, bits that I think I would remove. Can you have a look and see whether I'm omitting anything that could be really important or whether I'm leaving in things that actually could go. 

So when you start to switch it up, instead of saying, what should I do, you are saying, I think I should do this. What do you think? Is there anything I've missed? Massively changes the relationship and sometimes your supervisor will go, nah, sorry, think you're wrong. We need to do this instead. Other times your supervisor will go, yep, cool. Sounds good. Let's go. Either way, They've seen you take ownership over your project and suggest ways it could be improved or directions for the future, which means you are demonstrating to them that you have the potential to be an independent researcher.

It also gives you both information. It tells you, oh, actually hang on. We are not on the same page with this. Why are we not on the same page? How do we manage that? Whereas when we just go, I think it's too long, what should I shorten? The supervisor's got no idea what you would do if it wasn't for them. If you say, which should I prioritize? The supervisor's got no way of knowing which you would've chosen if it wasn't for them. So treat your supervisor like a sense check rather than a boss.

So the five tips. Explore what a great relationship means to you. What exactly are you looking for? Is it reasonable? Do you need to get all of it from your supervisor? And how can you nurture the bits that you really, really do need?

Tip two, don't expect them to be anyone except who they are not accepting unacceptable behavior. But know your supervisor, know their strengths and their weaknesses, and make sure you're asking them for the right things.

Number three, be careful what you make things mean. Be aware of the stories we build in our head and the interpretations that we bring to things. It's not saying you have to reject them, but be aware that they are a story in your head and be careful which ones you choose to focus on.

Number four, focus on bringing your side. How can you be the best student in this relationship and be the best version of yourself?

And number five is treat your supervisor like a sense check rather than like a boss. I really hope you found that useful today. I would love to hear more about how you're getting on with these things.

So that was how to have a better relationship with your supervisor. I hope you have had some insights, some realizations about why things are the way they are, And that you have identified that one change that you want to make, that you're gonna actually go and do differently having listened to this podcast.

If you're thinking, "Oh, okay, this was good, this was important, but I do still feel like I have a long way to go," come and join the membership. If you are listening live, we are open right now. I know there is a cost involved, but I want you to think about what the cost of not joining is.

All the time I get messages from people saying that they couldn't have got through to the end without me. Now, I don't believe that. I always tell them, "You would've made it, but it would've been a lot more painful potentially than it was with the support that you get in the community." If you want your PhD life to feel just that little bit easier, then do check out the membership and let me know if you have any questions.

If you're a member of staff or you are a PhD student who doesn't feel the need for this sort of support, happy days, no problem. Please do tell people around you though, so that they can get the support they need. Thank you so much for listening, and I will be back with how to prepare for a difficult meeting on Wednesday.