15 ways to be a complete failure as a social worker.

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1. Don’t listen to your service users, ignore their opinions. They are failing so what have they to teach you? If you get really good at this you can avoid being corrupted by their untruths by not letting them get a word in edgeways. Make sure that you do all of the talking. Use your mouth instead of your eyes and ears.

2. Give clients instructions and make demands of them, this will help them to understand what they have to do and motivate them to make changes.

3. Avoid the following things: going to supervision – seeing your clients – looking after yourself – challenging authority.

4. Show clients and colleagues who is in charge by being late, cancel appointments, or better still don’t cancel them, just don’t turn up, that will really mess up their day and show them that you have all the power and so they should listen to you.

5. Avoid speaking to more experienced workers – what do they know? They are old, probably hippies, or maybe even anarchists, they are probably addled by drugs. The world has moved on a lot since they became social workers. You are young and energetic and vital. Smile indulgently at them and steal their yoghurt from the fridge so that they remember what the ‘real world’ is like.

6. Avoid speaking with younger or less experienced workers. They have nothing to offer you. They need to learn it the hard way because experience is the best way to learn. If you have skills, keep them to yourself, you worked hard to get them so why should somebody have them for nothing? People don’t value what they get for nothing.

7. Keep your cases to yourself, don’t discuss them with colleagues, they are private and confidential.

8. If you are overloaded with work, remember that friends will always let you down and your family are just hangers on. Your work is vital and those things that used to be important for you before you got involved in this vital work are worthless by comparison. Follow this simple yet failsafe two step plan: 1. get some more hours in to clear the backlog, this will impress everybody with your dedication. 2. when you get a chance, get obliterated on your substance of choice, that might be alcohol or drugs or exercise. Everything will then seem much better and you can carry on as normal.

9. Do not read research, or anything else, especially if it relates to your field of practice, academics don’t know anything, they just deal in figures and have a great time taking four months a year off and when they do go to work they sit in their warm cosy studies reading and drinking tea, that is when they are not having sex with students. The only thing that matters is what you learned on your own - through experience - that is real. There are other more important things to be getting on with. Once you have done your social work course you know everything you need to know, experience in the field will fill in any gaps. Books and journals will just tell you what you already know.

10. Take everything seriously – it really is personal – they are out to make your life miserable, your name is on a list – no really, it is!

11. Avoid workers from other disciplines, especially therapists, psychologists, counsellors or people with flaky weird interests like Motivational Interviewing or hippy counselling skills. They will only pollute you and damage your purity. They are irrelevant to the more important work that you have to do.

12. Never question your work, it could destroy you. There is no point in mulling things over, far better to just get on with the next task and get more done. Reflection is what gurning fools do in mirrors.

13. If you have to evaluate your work or your project, maybe because your stupid boss tells you to, or because some idiot in the local authority or government says that you have to so that they can hit their targets. Focus on how much work you have done, rather than the outcome of that work. Outcomes are transitory, impossible to measure, relate only to how clients feel, and they change over time and so are worthless. Output however is a fact and can be written easily on a time sheet or balance sheet and gives a good measure of your work.

14. Remember university? You spent a lot of time learning the profession and its language, use it! For instance tell clients that you are going to have to take ‘legal advice’, do not tell them what this means, they will respect you for it.

15. You are an expert. You are extensively trained, you have expert opinions, you know what people are like, your experience gives you the ability to predict what people will do next, what they like to eat and whether they read to their children or not. Lets face it people come in types. Your professional skill comes in identifying types. Once you have identified a type, everything else falls into place.

15 ways to be a complete failure as a social worker

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All material is Copyright Mark Hamer 2006.