"I'm not here to be managed by people" If decisiveness in leadership were the major criterion for success in The Apprentice, then poor old Noorul would have been out on his ear within seconds. Sugar appeared deliberately to select the quietest wallflower of the series, to see if this Quiet Man was really a John Wayne in the waiting.
Alas, no...
The indecisive Noorul gave himself an uphill battle from the start when his team looked to him for direction and he delivered absolutely nothing. Yet rather than Philip's method of going shouty-crackers down the phone, team members could gently have "managed up" and supported him - something OPP has addressed in the white paper How to keep your leaders on track in tough times.
Contrast this with the decisive Paula - her clear steer in selecting the cosmetic products showed a firm hand on the tiller. The products were indeed impressive, and something we at OPP would have no problem giving our mothers in a presentation basket on Mother's Day. They were certainly 'head and shoulders' above the road accident-esque monstrosities produced by the beekeepers!
Cedarwood or sandalwood? Paula's delegation of the teams initially appeared thoughtful - the team leader herself, a restaurateur and a stockbroker working on the raw materials and their costs. Now, we know good leadership means playing to the strengths of individual team members, but there is no excuse whatsoever for total abrogation of responsibility when it came to a skill set she didn't feel comfortable with. We're talking business here. Of course, the leader doesn't need to know the intricate details of double-column ledger accounting. But the person in charge should know enough to read a profit-and-loss statement. Saying "I'm from HR, I don't do numbers and we all make mistakes" was the undoing of something that could have been a roaring success. This is exactly the kind of attitude that gives HR practitioners a bad name because EVERYONE has to be able to 'do numbers' in this new world of living within our means.
An epic fail and a well-deserved sacking, as one of our OPP psychologists pointed out: "numerical reasoning is about more than just being able to perform calculations; it's also about having a real understanding of numbers and what they actually mean in applied terms. Surely it should have set alarm bells ringing as soon as they calculated that the total cost of fragrance for a large batch of beauty products was only 'around five pounds'. They should have gone back and double-checked, especially as Sir Alan had been drumming into them the importance of tracking costs!!"
While the girls may have been unable to tell a sandal from a cedar (remind us never to ask them to build us a dog kennel, or kit us out for the beach), it is in Ben that we may have found the furriest, floppiest muppet of the entire series!
Ben 'Sandhurst' Clarke, while clearly not stupid, showed an unwillingness to get involved in the choice of scent and costing - and thus excluded himself from rescuing the team from the subsequent fiscal disaster - because "I'm a bloke and they're girls". It makes us think he wouldn't seem out of place doing a little song-and-dance number with Kermit. But it was his subsequent failed attempt to don a Teflon uniform - as Sugar says, in a harsh corporate environment, it often doesn't matter who made the decisions within the team, because the team bears collective responsibility - that makes him, in our opinion, skate straight into the arms of Miss Piggy to perform the Bolero - on very thin ice.
If he makes it through the next round and is appointed Team Leader, will he hack it? Not if he continually tries to dodge the blame for things that ultimately he is responsible for. While Paula made the error of blaming her inexperience, Ben claims superhero status, and must therefore deliver in spades.
OPP
P.S. We have little confidence that his leadership qualities will shine at the moment - though perhaps OPP's course in Advanced coaching and leadership development using the MBTI® would help. Then again, he might learn a few things with some officer training - did you know that he has a scholarship to Sandhurst!?!
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