Mentoring - building rapport

What is whakawhanaungatanga?

• Whaka – to cause something to happen
• Whānau – family
• Whanaungatanga – relationships, shared experiences, sense of family connection that holds people together

Whakawhanaungatanga is a process of forming strong, positive, collaborative relationships. It helps us get to know each other and to explore what is important in our relationships. It is how we gather together to support each other, putting ‘our’ needs ahead of ‘my’ needs.

Building relationships and rapport based in whakawhanaungatanga is how young people can be supported to set and achieve goals. It may take time and a few interactions for them to trust that there is a genuine desire to support and help; to see through experience that they are cared about, and that it’s worth the effort to establish a good relationship.¹

Task: Brainstorm

Write the word whakawhanaungatanga in the centre of a piece of paper. Brainstorm what this concept means for you and your work with young people. How do you already implement it into your practice?

Explore further

The Ara Taiohi website² explores whakawhanaungatanga through a youth work lens, explaining it as being created through shared experiences and a sense of belonging. In this way of working, relational connections are a higher priority than tasks.

He Pikorua³ integrates whakawhanaungatanga while working with children, in partnership with the Ministry of Education and other learning support services. While this example is not directly related to youth work, it is a good example of how whakawhanaungtanga can function to build relationships at an organisational level.

What is youth mentoring?

Youth mentoring usually matches a young person with an adult who can provide them with a safe, caring, responsible adult–youth relationship to help guide them through their transition into adulthood. The mentor may act as a role model and/or provide support which may include material, social or academic guidance though a mentoring relationship. Mentors may be paid, un-paid, professional, or simply someone who is older and has been though situations a young person may face. Mentors are usually not related to the young person but are connected to them through school, church, social services, community, or sporting groups.

Watch the video below (2:08) produced by Dream a Dream⁴, a youth mentoring network in India, for a quick overview of the role and purpose of mentoring.

A youth mentoring relationship is a particular type of relationship. As with a professional or career mentor, you are there to provide advice and guidance as well as a listening ear. A mentor is normally further along in their life’s journey than the mentored person. A mentor’s role is not about judging a young person’s attitude or behaviour or educating them about what is right or wrong. Rather, youth mentoring means sitting alongside a young person and helping them to determine their own pathway through a situation. This is achieved through conversation or other forms of facilitation.

Mentoring can range from an older youth who meets up with a younger person each week to chat about life in a safe place like a café or youth centre, through to a person with specific educational, sporting, or artistic skills who mentors a young person as they develop and achieve success in this particular area. Mentors offer support with communication, relationship building, developing a positive attitude and sense of identity – cultural or otherwise – and reaching goals.

It is very important to understand that mentoring is not about rescuing or saving a young person. It is not about fixing families or telling young people and their families how to behave and live their lives. A mentor is not a peer. While it may feel a lot like friendship, it is not, because there is a very clear power imbalance. When an adult is in a mentoring role it becomes essential to be aware of boundaries. A mentor does not replace a parent, teacher, or counsellor. Young people should be encouraged to get advice, support, and help from those people in their lives when it is needed.

Task: NZ Youth Mentoring Network – online resources

Please read about the mentoring role at the NZ Youth Mentoring Network website.⁵ At the bottom of the page you will also find links to ‘More Reading’. Please read the information in each of these links, especially the page on the Four Stages of Mentoring. Each page is very short, so this task will not take you long.

What is rapport?

Rapport is a friendly, harmonious relationship characterised by agreement, mutual understanding, and empathy that makes communication possible. Having good rapport with the young people you work with helps facilitate the best outcomes for you and the young person.

Youth work is based on strong, healthy, often long-lasting relationships that take time, effort, trust, and respect to build. The quality of rapport you have with a young person starts with the first meeting. Over time, as the bond and connection develop, the young person learns they can be open and honest with you. How you interact with them at the first meeting is important for starting out in the right way.

The first meeting is part of the first stage of mentoring, initiation. You and the young person are checking each other out and starting to establish trust and connection. You are entering into the young person’s world by demonstrating care and respect.

Build rapport from the first meeting

Here are some things to keep in mind when you first meet and start to build rapport with a young person:

• Treat the person with respect – the same way you would want or expect others to treat you at a first meeting.
• Be honest and realistic about what you can and cannot do. Do not promise what you may not be able to deliver. Young people may have been lied to in the past and it will take time and consistency to build trust.
• See the individual as a person, not a number or case file. Remember the person’s name and how to pronounce it correctly. Also, make sure you remember a few key things about them and refer to these at the next meeting. This can signal that you paid attention and were genuine about getting to know them.
• Be yourself, or at least a professional version of yourself! Communicate clearly when you are being serious and when you are having fun. Be friendly and open but also clarify and maintain boundaries within the youth work relationship.
• Be aware of your body language. Young people can unconsciously pick up how you really feel about them. Your body language should reflect the relationship you want to build. Be aware of how you sit, how you place your arms and legs, your facial expressions, if you smile or not, eye contact, and personal space. Even something as simple as sitting beside them at their level can help to build rapport, instead of standing over them or sitting across from them behind a desk.
• Take a genuine interest in what the person is saying. Paraphrase it back to them to check that you have understood correctly. For example, you could say something like, “What I heard you tell me is … do I have that right?” “So, you are feeling … now. Or am I missing something?” Rapport may fall away if the person feels you are bored or disinterested, or that you are not trying to understand them.
• Listen and ask open-ended questions to learn more about where they are coming from, their background, interests, and feelings. Examples of open-ended questions include “What was that like for you?”, “What happened after that?” or “How did you come up with that idea?” these types of questions will encourage them to keep talking.
• Try not to set up communication roadblocks, especially at the first meeting. The fastest way to shut down future dialogue is to lecture, judge or preach. Later when the young person trusts you and knows that you care, they may be more willing to accept or listen to your opinion on their attitude or behaviour.

The key to building rapport from your first meeting is to focus on making a personal connection. View the meeting as the first step to building a quality relationship with this person. Start out open and positive but give the young person time and space to get to know you if they need it. Do not expect too much too quickly. Your goal is to start to get alongside them. It is also okay to ask them questions like, “How do you think we should do this?” “How would you like to start?” “What did you think of our conversation?” or “What should we do differently next time?” Some young people will not be comfortable sharing their thoughts, but others may surprise you. However, if they do give their input, make sure you acknowledge it at the next meeting. Directly address how you will structure or change a session based on their feedback or explain why you cannot incorporate their feedback or suggestions. At least let them know that they are being listened to.

Finally, do something fun. Nothing breaks the ice faster than getting someone to laugh or smile. The young person is likely to be somewhat nervous, anxious, or even a bit hostile or defensive, at the first meeting. Maybe you are too. It is part of human psychology, but when we start to genuinely smile, we start to relax, and we start to have more positive emotions about the person who made us smile.

Unconscious cultural bias

New Zealand is a diverse, multicultural country, so expect to work with people from a range of cultures and to be aware of cultural bias – prejudice against a person from a particular group (including cultural and ethnic groups), with assumptions based on preconceived, generalised ideas.

What is unconscious bias?

We’ve discussed the importance of critically examining your own worldview in earlier topics, and we’ve looked at some of the harms that can result from bias and prejudice. The video below⁶ gives a concise overview of unconscious bias, and how it can impact our judgement. Watch the video (2:59) to hear this brief explanation. As you watch the video, try to recall other examples of unconscious bias that you’ve heard about in the past.

Why we need to recognise unconscious bias

People rarely see themselves as being consciously prejudiced, but we still instinctively feel more comfortable relating to people we see as similar to us, and less comfortable interacting with those we see as different. This is part of human psychology. Keep in mind however, that we may perceive a range of different similarities between ourselves and new people that we meet. We may notice differences in language, accent, or ethnicity, for example, but also immediately notice similarities in age, hometown, clothing, interests, or sense of humour. We may find it easier to relate to people from our own age group (people of all backgrounds) than to people who are much older. Context and individual personalities and preferences all play a role.

We all have unconscious bias to come extent. If we all have it, why is it so important to recognise and try to understand it? In situations where we feel stressed or uncomfortable, our unconscious bias can become a shortcut for our thinking and actions. And when we are in a position of power over others, like an adult youth worker supporting a young person, we need to become consciously aware of any negative or hostile bias our unconscious minds may have that could influence our interactions.

Many of us may be in situations with time pressure, where the resources are insufficient for the tasks at hand. We may not have enough information to make fully informed decisions, but we still must act or respond anyway. If we are aware of how cultural bias my impact us in those moments, and how it may influence our thoughts, behaviours, and interactions, we are better equipped to step back and look more critically at a situation. Young people can sense and perceive when they are being treated unfairly, and will respond as we all do when faced with prejudice or unfair treatment. Unconscious bias can make it difficult to establish quality youth work relationships.

Over time, the decisions and actions of individual health care workers, social workers, and teachers all add up. A growing body of research in New Zealand has demonstrated that unconscious bias in our healthcare and education systems (leading to a disparity in treatment for some patients and students) has led to negative impacts on health and education outcomes for Māori, for Pacific peoples, and for people from other ethnic minority backgrounds.

To hear a personal account, watch Taika Waititi’s unteach racism story on the Unteach Racism website⁷. In this short video (3:01), Waititi shares some of the prejudice that he encountered as he was growing up. Waititi encourages everyone that works as an educator or mentor to look for opportunities to ‘unteach racism’ by offering encouragement and support to young people instead. 

Task: Cultural bias and cultural competence

Your next task is to read What is cultural competence?⁸ on the Health Navigator website, to learn more about how to become aware of cultural bias, and how it may impact your interactions. This article was written for professionals in the health sector, but the advice it gives for exploring cultural bias can apply to anyone in a social service professional role.

Think about these statements from the Royal Society video⁶ you watched earlier, and what they mean for you, when working with young people from a range of cultural backgrounds and ethnicities. What impact might these have on how you build rapport with the young people you work with?

• The unconscious mind processes information more quickly that the conscious mind.
• It takes less than a second for us to identify whether someone is part of our ‘in group’.
• People from many cultural backgrounds tend to pay more attention when a man is speaking, compared to when a woman is speaking.
• We all have unconscious bias.

Culturally appropriate rapport building

Here are a few things you can incorporate into your interactions with young people that may help to overcome some potential barriers to building rapport:

Task: Fact sheets from the NZ Youth Mentoring Network

Please explore and read through these fact sheets for mentors from the New Zealand Youth Mentoring Network.⁹ In particular:

• Fact sheet 1 – Building a positive relationship with your mentee
• Fact sheet 2 – Successfully planning and mapping your mentoring journey
• Fact sheet 3 – Actively listening to your mentee
• Fact sheet 15 – Mentoring young people from migrant or diverse backgrounds

However, you will find all nineteen fact sheets extremely useful at different points during your mentoring relationships. We recommend that at some point you read through them all.

Explore further

Here are some links to additional resources you may find useful when establishing and building mentoring relationships and rapport with young people. You may find some of these resources and ideas useful for designing and planning activities to do with young people:

• Youth Mentoring Resources - The University of Auckland¹⁰
• Conversations for Change – reThink:¹¹

Here are five easy, fun rapport building activities if working with a group:

• Let’s Build Rapport – 5 Fun Activities for Educators – Learn to Change¹²

Here’s a quick list of 10 simple activities that could be used one-on-one (or in groups) if you are looking for way to help focus young people and get them talk about difficult or uncomfortable things but without having to ask direct questions. Activities like these allow you to see a situation from a young person’s perspective but enables them to express only what they are comfortable saying (at the time):

• 10 Creative Teen Therapy Activities¹³

Here are some icebreaker activities to build group friendship, cooperation and participation:

• Breaking the ice – icebreakers¹⁴

Here are some more game ideas for youth groups:

• Resourced! Games¹⁵

Professional ethics in youth work relationships

All those who work with young people must be clear about their role and responsibilities. It is especially important for youth workers to establish and maintain professional boundaries.

In Module 2, we explored boundaries and the Code of Ethics for Youth Workers in Aotearoa, which is your first point of reference for understanding boundaries within the youth work relationship. It is part of whanaungatanga (quality relationships).

When you engage with a young person as a youth worker you are creating a new relationship. The primary members in this relationship are the young person and you, but you are not the only considerations of the relationship.

Task: Review how to set boundaries and create safety

Take some time to review clauses related to youth work relationships and think about how it applies to setting boundaries and creating safety within the context of mentoring young people, and especially what it means for establishing and building rapport from your first meeting. The clauses are on pages 22 to 45 of the Code of Ethics for Youth Workers in Aotearoa¹⁶

In particular you should reread the following clauses:

• 1 Hononga Matua | Primary relationship
• 4 Ngākau Pono | Integrity
• 5 Whakaaetanga Matatika | Informed consent
• 13 Mata Huhua | Diversity
• 15 Matatapu | Confidentiality
• 16 Ngā Tauārai | Boundaries
• 18 Kia Aroā | Self-awareness
• 21 Whakamana | Empowerment

Behaviour and role models

Mentors often become role models for the young people they mentor, especially if there are aspects such as only a few years age difference, similar cultural background, or someone they admire who has gone before them and achieved success as a woman, an immigrant, a rugby player from their school, etc.

How you behave in the mentoring relationship, as a youth worker has an impact. It is not just about what you say or the guidance you provide, but also how you live your life. How you behave towards others and how you conduct yourself in general matters when young people you hope to influence are looking at you. Can they trust your integrity? How does your behaviour outside of your youth worker role reflect on you and your organisation?

How comfortable are you with the idea that you may become a role model? Do you live in a way that reflects the values and expectations you have for the young people you are mentoring? You do not have to be a perfect human. None of us are. But you do need to be aware that young people are not only learning from what you tell them.

Mentors and boundaries

Setting clear boundaries and being consistent is extremely important in a mentor relationship. You need to set limits on your time and availability. And if you tell young people you are available you do need to follow through.

Appropriate physical and emotional boundaries should be set as early in the youth work relationship as possible. It may be difficult for young people to understand boundaries at times. You are not a parent, you are not a peer or friend, and you are especially not a romantic or intimate partner. A sexual or intimate relationship, or even too close a friendship, between a mentor and a young person can do lasting damage. Under certain circumstances it may lead to disciplinary action or even criminal charges.

Depending on who you are and things like gender or age gap this may or may not become an issue. If you become uncomfortable with a relationship between yourself and a young person you mentor and are not sure what to do get advice immediately from a supervisor or more experienced colleague.

Sometimes boundary issues arise because the youth worker or mentor also has another role in the young person’s life. For example, they may be a neighbour, coach, teacher, family friend, or pastor. It is important that you clarify the nature of the different roles with the young person. Sometimes it is possible to be a mentor and a coach or teacher, but not always. If there is a conflict of interest or it is not possible to separate roles and boundaries it may be necessary to end the mentoring relationship. For example, a young person whose mentor is also the family’s pastor, or a good friend of their parents, may find it difficult to be open about their life for fear that something they say may become known within the community or to their parents too soon.

Think about how you might put together an activity to use the first time you meet a young person you are working with or mentoring. What do you need to include in the activity? What is the best way to start to build a connection?

You are now ready to complete Task 1 of Assessment 3.4.