Relational Coaching & Mentoring
in Social Work Supervision & Practice
The Relationship IS the Intervention.
Are you using it with intention?
A workshop for social workers, supervisors and emerging leaders
who are ready to turn coaching and mentoring from something they do,
into something they understand.
Rarely offered.
Two live online sessions.
Limited to keep it relational.
New dates available soon
Also available for group bookings
Online via Zoom
7 CPD Points (SACSSP)
You Already Know Relationships Matter.
So Why Does “Building Trust” Still Feel Like Guesswork?
Every social worker has heard it a hundred times: build the relationship, build the trust. It’s in our supervision notes, our case plans, our training manuals. And yet – how many of us were ever actually taught how?
We supervise. We mentor. We coach junior colleagues through their hardest days. But most of us are doing it on instinct, patched together from what was modelled for us – some of it excellent, some of it exhausting.
Meanwhile, the profession keeps losing good people. Burnout. Isolation. Supervisors stretched thin, trying to hold space for staff while nobody’s holding space for them. Emerging leaders with real potential, but no structured way to grow into it.
This workshop exists because the relationship – the thing we all agree matters most – deserves more than good intentions. It deserves a framework.
What If the Relationship Wasn’t the Context for Work – It Was the Work?
Social workers are trained to see the client through a person-in-environment lens. This workshop shifts that lens one step further: to a relationship-in-environment perspective – where the relationship itself is not just the setting for growth and change, but the central mechanism that produces it.
It’s a subtle shift with enormous practical consequences. Because once you see the relationship as the intervention, everything about how you coach, mentor and supervise starts to look different – more intentional, more teachable, more repeatable.
In this workshop, you’ll get hands-on with a model that finally makes that “how” visible – developed by South African clinical social worker and trainer Werner van der Westhuizen, in collaboration with Thom Garfat, one of the world’s foremost thinkers in Relational Child and Youth Care Practice.
This Workshop Is For You If…
- You’re a senior social worker or supervisor who coaches or mentors colleagues, and you want a structured, relational approach instead of winging it
- You’re an emerging leader – not yet in a formal supervisory role, but people already come to you for guidance, and you want to grow into that deliberately
- You’re a direct practitioner who wants to deepen your relational skills, whether or not “supervisor” is in your job title
- You’re feeling stuck or quietly burnt out, and you’re looking for something that reconnects you to why you became a social worker in the first place
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
What You’ll Actually Be Able to Do Differently
- Apply Relational Practice principles directly to your coaching or mentoring role
- Create genuine relational safety — the kind that lets people take real risks and grow
- Recognise and facilitate positive experiences as deliberate growth opportunities, not just happy accidents
- Model reflective practice and self-awareness in your own daily work — not just teach it to others
- Clearly differentiate coaching from mentoring, and know when each one belongs in the supervisory relationship
- Reflect honestly on your own strengths and blind spots as a coach or mentor
This isn’t theory for theory’s sake. Every principle is built to be used in your very next supervision session.
Learn From the Person Who Built the Model
Werner van der Westhuizen is a clinical social worker and trainer with years of experience across direct practice, supervision, management and training. He is the developer of the Relational Coaching and Mentoring model featured in this workshop – built in collaboration with Thom Garfat, extending Garfat’s foundational research into a structured, practitioner-focused approach.
The model was first published in CYC-Online (Issue 303, May 2024), and has since been used to train mentors and facilitators in Nigeria and South Africa. Werner brings both the theoretical depth and the practical, in-the-trenches groundedness this topic demands.
Logistics and Investment
Format: Online (Zoom)
Duration: 2 half-days (9h00 – 12h00)
Next Dates:
- New dates for individual registrations will be available soon
- Also available on demand for group bookings
Why so few sessions?
This workshop is intentionally kept small and rarely scheduled – because a workshop about relational depth shouldn’t be run like a webinar. Cameras on, real interaction, real reflection. If the dates don’t suit you, it may be a while before it’s offered again.
CPD Points: 7 CPD (SACSSP) for Social Workers
Workshop Includes: Workshop Notes, CPD Certificate
Investment: R650 for individual bookings; group tarrifs available on request
A Note on Attending Well:
You’ll get the most from this workshop if you attend from a quiet, dedicated space, on a laptop or PC (some shared screens include detail that’s hard to read on a phone), with headphones and your camera on for the full session. This is relational work – it asks for your full presence, not a split-screen version of you.
You Already Give This Profession Your Skill. Give Yourself The Framework.
You didn’t get into social work for easy. But you also don’t have to keep building relationships on instinct alone, hoping the trust shows up. This workshop hands you a model – tested, published, practitioner-built – for the part of the job that matters most.
Offered rarely. Kept small on purpose. Two mornings that could change how you show up for every supervisee, mentee, or colleague after this.
Workshop Terms & Conditions
Please take a moment to review the workshop terms and conditions: