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It is puzzling that we seek expert advice on improving our golf game but avoid professional advice on how we can deal with other people. We pay personal trainers remarkable fees one or more times a week to encourage us to exercise harder. We avoid, however, engaging an expert to help us learn more about ourselves and others - someone who could help us learn to deal with different types of difficult people. Somehow, we are supposed to be experts on dealing with other people and with our own emotions even though these issues were never formally addressed in our education and training.

Individual coaching is the death of the group. Working with a single person, you can't see how his behavior affects the whole system. And giving people evaluations rather than creating situations where they can learn to evaluate themselves doesn't really raise their awareness. Also, the coach is usually the instrument of hierarchy, a way of asserting behavioral control from the top.

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We talk a lot today about the importance of mentoring and coaching, and they can be vital in helping novices learn the rules of the game. But it is very important that men should not always be mentored by men and women by women. Mentoring based on interests, not gender, can help to change the culture because it can lead to greater understanding of the perspective of the “Other.” It can make a big difference when very able men mentor and guide young women, routinely and systematically, and vice versa. That said, it can sometimes be very helpful to have a mentor of the same gender; the important thing is to find the right fit rather than be doctrinaire about it.