The Singer not the song!... “There are educated people that are not intelligent and intelligent people that are not educated”

Ever known a great coach? A great teacher? A great mentor? A great friend? Why are these people all these things, and have had a lasting effect on your memory? On the flip side, can you remember your worst ever teacher or coach or someone you just plainly said “was clueless?”

Does gaining a qualification mean you are going to be effective at your job? Have a think about that? How many coaches/teachers do you know who have an A licence, B Licence or teaching degree? What separates one being more effective than the other? Have you ever thought some are more effective than others? Where and how do YOU compare to these people? At work we have often talked about 4 categories of people:

• Consciously competent people
• Consciously incompetent people
• Unconsciously competent people

and finally

• Unconsciously incompetent people

Where do you fit into the above categories? Now the title of this article is called “the singer not the song”.  So what I am trying to get at is…. a qualification (A licence, B licence, teaching degree, badge of honour as I call it) is only as good as the person that uses it to SUPPORT their career and the people they serve not RELY on it! Now I could explain the 4 categories to you but surely you can work this out yourself, but what I will say is the bottom category is very very dangerous. Basically these people are clueless about being clueless. These people are tough to deal with and I have witnessed some of these unconsciously incompetent people cause havoc in the work place, especially schools.

To make things worse, on many occasions they themselves had 1st class degrees from the top universities in the land…that apparently said, had proved and defined they were suitable for that job for which they now have. Let me tell you, I have worked with some teaching assistants (regarded as bottom of the pecking order) who are more skilled at working with young people and achieve greater outcomes than people with lots of qualifications. “Hence the singer not the song” So before you pre-judge, think about the skills of people that you can’t see on a piece of paper and how they can fit into your institution somehow. However the “money shot” is if you employ people that do have both the qualifications and the skills required to do the job well and also improve to better themselves along the way.