“Do as I say, not as I do.”

Culturally-speaking, that’s often seen as a statement of weakness – uttered by one who lacks the willpower to stick by their own rules. However, we tend to take that concept further than we should. And it has to do with our forgetting the difference between practitioners, teachers and coaches.

Practitioners get things done. They perform the actual tasks. They play the game from whistle to whistle, they run the track. And while practitioners can eventually become teachers or coaches, there’s no guarantee they have the skills to succeed.

Teachers exhibit a level of mastery, and their job is to bring their students to the bar. Whatever that bar of expectation is, the teacher must bring the student along. To do so, the teacher must demonstrate the same level of ability in performing the task. A math teacher can’t teach you the quadratic equation without showing you how it’s done on the board.

Coaches are a little different, because no one expects the coach to run every lap faster than the student. It’s the coach’s job to help practitioners figure out how they can improve, and set them on a path for that. Often, that requires a level of mastery in the theory of an activity, even if there is no longer the physical ability to carry it out.

Why do I highlight these distinctions? Because the failure to understand them is resulting in a lot of ill will in the communication arts.

When everyone is an expert.

I’m flabbergasted at the number of people who sell themselves as “Social Media Experts” or “Gurus” or whatever the title du jour is.

Being free to start and easy to learn, one of the selling points of these revolutionary tools is that “anyone can do it.” But how many can do it well?

• The ability to dribble a basketball doesn’t make you Michael Jordan.
• The ability to recite Dennis Hopper’s “run the ole Picket Fence at ‘em” speech from Hoosiers doesn’t make you a basketball coach.
• Neither does it make you Dennis Hopper.
• The ability to be a goalie in soccer won’t help you be a goalie in hockey, much less a forward.

We’ve got a lot of people who have proven they can do one thing, and they are hanging up a shingle to sell you on something else.

Choosing the right path.

Now, if you’re a business looking to get involved in a new endeavor, you have some options:

• Hire a big name and let them carry you to the top.
• Hire someone cheap, and hope for the best.
• Hire no one, and let best practices bubble up from your own people.
• Hire a coach who can bring the best out of your people.

Notice that I am not talking about Social Media here. This goes for anything, but let’s see how it applies.

Go hire that big name (like a Robert Scoble) and that person will bring you an instant audience and instant credibility. But when that person leaves, who owns the knowledge? Who owns the relationships? Who owns the accounts? Who is ready to step up and fill the shoes?

Go hire that affordable alternative. Why not? In the grand scheme of things, you can write it all off as a pilot project.

Don’t hire anyone. (Be prepared for very mixed results, and a very nervous legal team.)

Go get a coach, who has a proven ability to elevate your game. Build bench strength. Build for the future, by injecting the change comfortably into the culture. Granted, there are very few of these coaches around. Within Social Media, there are many people who are great at what they do, but it might have little to do with coaching ability and everything to do with their own knowledge of the industry they are augmenting.

Past performance is no proof of future success.

Here’s the dirty secret: there are several reasons why social media practitioners do well. Some are just born with the right attitude for personal and conversational communication. If they have that knack, you can take someone with a few years experience in your company and they might shine. But take them out of your company, and they will be hopelessly lost (like the guy who won every golf tournament, until he got on a real course and couldn’t find the Clown’s Mouth.)

That is the Practitioner - very skilled, but not necessarily versatile enough to change games.

Some have the ability to show you what they do and how they do it, and you are able to follow the steps and emulate their success. This can be a good thing, but it also deceives. The guy who shows you how to get 80,000 Twitter followers might not have a clue what to do with them. His strength is solely in acquisition, not in leveraging or in calls-to-action.

That is the Teacher - who can instruct you on how to do what they’ve already done.

How to spot those who can really help you:

• They have proven their skills in different kinds of businesses and business models.
• They don’t have immediate answers, but instead follow with more detailed and insightful questions.
• They create ideas, concepts and systems that no one has ever seen – because your challenge is unique.

That’s how you know you’ve found a Coach. The person who will push you to heights you couldn’t have reached alone, and will leave you better than she found you. The person who will draw indirectly from past experiences and directly from sound principles to craft solutions to your problems. The individual who can fade into the background after launch, confident those he trained are self-sustaining and know how to improve on their own.

You know when you’ve found a coach, when you hear his students calling their own shots.