Week 1 - the exasperation begins

Where to start?! Already such fodder for analysis - The Apprentice does it again and manages to give us at least 110% worth of material to cogitate and cast our business psychologist eyes over. Where to start when there's already such so much to say?!

Let's start with conflict. I loved the part with the girls in the grimy cafe. All talking over each other. What would Ken Thomas, author of the TKI Conflict Mode tool, say? I'd hazard a guess at a few too many 'competing' styles playing out over those builders brews. Our recent study found that the average employee spends 2.1 hours per week dealing with conflict – I wonder what the average would be if we surveyed the latest batch of hopefuls in their new flash pad? If you're thinking 'I'd do a better job' and not shout the house down in 'Competing' stylie, then try our mini conflict handling quiz http://www.opp.eu.com/conflict_quiz.aspx

I asked one of our resident occupational psychologists at OPP, Paul Deakin, what he thought: “I was struck by the complete absence of trust and communication. The contestants failed to value the different contributions made by each team member. Yes, Anita could have spotted that the £200 was not a ‘budget’ but the total allowance for the task. But remember, she was the only one with a clear task to perform – totting up the expenditure. What were the others doing at this time? It’s all too easy to be scapegoated when everyone is working to achieve different objectives and teamworking is always undermined by personal agendas. Without trust and communication it’s incredibly hard to move to collaborating in a team: instead you just see people competing and avoiding the issue."

Moving swiftly onto leadership I wish the candidates would actually display some inkling of knowing what this might mean. Those spurious things called 'leadership goals' - did Mona stop to consider what success might look like? At least Howard mentioned the word 'objective' (lip service at least) when taking on the responsibility of being in a leadership position. But to think that neither considered mentioning the words 'margin', 'profit', or 'costs' in this climate is scary - this is a time when our leaders need to get back to these basic fundamentals.

In the words of Gillian commentating in the after show, 'sell, do, or bean-count' is what companies need to focus on now - with their leaders getting the fundamentals right. You'd hope that 'Commercial Awareness' would make it onto every organisation's list of core leadership competencies, eh?

Self-awareness if this is a key to developing into an authentic leader (as we believe it is) the Apprentices seem to be brutally lacking - preferring instead to fit into what their perceived model of what Sir Alan is looking for. We found recently that a third of employees said that they acted a part at interview to fit in with the company. If we surveyed the Apprentices, I'd expect that stat to rocket. Let's hope next week the true selves start coming out - that's got to be more fascinating than the current mis-mash.

Eagerly awaiting next Wednesday,
OPP

P.S. I’ve just thought of a new scale for a psychometric (perhaps we'll add it to the next edition of the 16PF?) - the scale would measure someone's ‘diamondness’. At one end 'sparkling' at the other 'rough' - perhaps that's the scale that Sir Alan should recruit against?