Relational Coaching & Mentoring
in Social Work Practice & Supervision
A Workshop for Social Workers, Supervisors & Leaders
About This Workshop
Coaching and mentoring provide valuable frameworks for enhancing social work practice through both supervision and peer relationships. In supervision, coaching and mentoring emphasize skill development, strengths-based practice, reflective thinking, and structured goal-setting, creating more supportive and purposeful supervisory relationships that build workers’ problem-solving abilities and self-awareness.
In peer mentoring, experienced social workers can share practical knowledge, provide emotional support outside the evaluative context of supervision, offer career guidance, and reduce professional isolation. Together, these approaches address common challenges in social work such as burnout and high turnover by creating collaborative, empowering environments that align with core social work values while ultimately benefiting both practitioners and the clients they serve.
Who Is It For?
- Senior Social Workers and Supervisors who want a structured, relational approach to coaching or mentoring colleagues and junior staff
- Emerging leaders who are not yet in a formal supervisory role but show potential – and want to grow into it deliberately
- Direct Practitioners who want to deepen their relational practice skills
- Practitioners who feel stuck or burnt out and are looking for new inspiration and a refreshed sense of purpose in their work
What is Relational Practice all About?
Social workers generally hold the person-in-environment perspective as a lens from which to understand our clients, as well as colleagues. Relational practice repositions the frame to a relationship-in-environment perspective; the relationship is not only the context for interactions and interventions – the relationship is the main intervention and is utilised as the central mechanism of growth and change. The “building of relationships” and “trust relationships” are terms frequently used in the social work practice and supervision, but how relationships are built and utilised often remains something of a mystery. In this workshop, the relationship is unpacked and a new model is presented to provide a framework that can applied in almost any situation where growth and change is desired.
What You Will Learn
- Apply Relational Practice principles to your role as a coach or mentor
- Create relational safety in your coaching or mentoring relationships
- Support supervisees in taking healthy risks for growth
- Recognise and facilitate positive experiences as growth opportunities
- Model reflective practice and self-awareness in your own daily work
- Differentiate between coaching and mentoring and situate both approaches as roles within the supervision relationship
- Reflect on your own professional characteristics as they apply to effective coaching and mentoring
Logistics and Investment
Format: Online (Zoom)
Duration: 2 half-days (9h00 – 12h00)
Next Dates:
- Monday, 27 July 2026: 9h00 – 12h00
- Tuesday, 28 July 2026: 9h00 – 12h00
CPD Points: 7 CPD (SACSSP) for Social Workers
Workshop Includes: Workshop Notes, CPD Certificate
Investment: R750
Technical Requirements:
The workshop is facilitated fully online via Zoom. Participants are required to remain on camera for the full duration of each session and should ensure that their equipment and internet connection is suitable for this kind of interaction. Attendance with a phone or tablet isnot recommended – it is recommended to use a PC or laptop since some of the screens that will be shared may include text or diagrams that would be too small to read on a cellphone screen. It is recommended that each participant should attend from a suitable physical space (for example, not while travelling or while sharing office space with others). The use of headphones is recommended – alternatively participants should be in a space not shared with others. It is not ideal for participants to share a device, since it will limit their interaction and participation.
Your Facilitator
Werner van der Westhuizen is a clinical social worker and trainer with many years of experience in direct practice, supervision, management and training. He is the developer of a model for Relational Coaching and Mentoring, having collaborated with Thom Garfat – one of the world’s foremost thinkers in Relational CYC Practice – to extend Garfat’s foundational research into a structured, practitioner-focused coaching and mentoring approach.
The model was first published in CYC-Online (Issue 303, May 2024) and was successfully launched through the training of mentors and facilitators in Nigeria, and later South Africa. Werner brings both theoretical depth and practical groundedness to this training work.
Workshop Terms & Conditions
Please take a moment to review the workshop terms and conditions: