ABSTRACT
Monitoring and assessing the effectiveness of coaching or mentoring is extremely important. As a coach develops in competence using the core skills, opportunities for the development of the more advanced skills will emerge. Performer awareness can be enhanced by observation, analysis or synthesis being conducted separately. Mentors, by comparison, do require technical expertise in the subject or performance area. Medical scientists now conduct experiments on a 'double blind' basis, that is, neither the experimenter nor the subject knows whether what is being given is real or a placebo. Coaching can turn training into self-development. It can turn the idea of empowerment into reality. It can change resented authoritarianism into revitalizing self-responsibility, coercion into co-operation, stifling dependency into staff dynamism. Assuming the achievability of non-directiveness is not only impossible, it is hypocritical: non-directive coaching is based on the expectation that the other party will be self-directed.
