The Apprentice Analysed

The best selection processes would consist of a series of relevant business simulations giving the assessor a rounded view of the candidate’s capability and the candidate a good idea of the job.

To prove my point, I have devised a little game I like to call “Bad Practice Bingo”. The rules are simple. The ‘bingo card’ below illustrates examples of what experience and research tells us shouldn’t happen in an interview.

Your task is to check off each example of bad practice as it occurs in the episode. If previous years are anything to go by, I reckon I’ll be hearing calls of “House!” in under 15 minutes.

Pens at the ready. And they’re off…

Retail manager Howard Ebison's participation in the Apprentice ended last night after the team he was managing was narrowly defeated in a TV shopping channel task.

His performance on the task was not too bad, but Howard's fate was sealed when Sir Alan said, on coming into the boardroom,  that there were "lots of things to take into consideration, not just this task."

In our Apprentice League Table, Howard has been languishing near the Chop Zone for several weeks and last night he was finally put out of his misery. As with many candidates his strength, relatively speaking, was on knuckling down and getting the job done.

Despite his softly spoken manner his people skills were only average and he rarely had any great ideas. His biggest weakness consistently though is that he wasn't good at closing out projects and in a sales environment that is never good.

Throughout the series it has been a close competition between Yasmina Siadatan and Kate Walsh. Now though, due to Kate's lapses in concentration and Yasmina's consistency, there is daylight between the two of them.

Project manager Yasmina, knows how to create a focused, determined unit. She last night again established a framework for her team to work within, and all of them knew what the expectations were.  She has led the table most often and is my tip to win.

Her opponent in the final will be Kate, but her lapses of concentration will see her taking the runners-up spot.

One final point: the top five in our league table almost since the start, are all through to the semi final, which needless to say we are delighted about.

Next week though is the lottery of the interviews conducted by an assortment of puffed up business men, so who knows what could happen.

Professor Binna Kandola OBE
Senior Partner, Pearn Kandola

Finally this week’s episode has found something that Ben is an expert in: the art of self-love.  I can only assume that from an early age, Ben has worked hard to master mirror mantras, looking deep into his own eyes and repeating “I love and accept myself completely”.  Surely this is the only explanation for his ridiculously positive and bloated self-regard?

Don’t get me wrong; a positive self-view is good.  But you can take these things too far – and Ben really has.  His performance in this week’s task was final proof that he lost any sense of self-doubt or balancing perspective a long time ago, and now he is the biggest (perhaps only?) believer of his own hype. 

The problem with hype, of course, is that it is all talk and no substance – much like Ben’s responses in the Boardroom.  He claims to have shown Sir Alan that he has “raw business talent” and “raw acumen”.  I have no idea what he means by these vacuous phrases, but I do agree that consuming too much of Ben’s “raw” talent does indeed leave you with that queasy feeling you get when you’ve consumed something undercooked. 

James and Kate both put in improved performances this week.  Kate played her diplomatic hand again, and continues to smooth over previously troubled waters by supporting Lorraine’s input and ideas.  It remains to be seen how genuine this is, but there is no doubting that Kate is very savvy.  Her self-insight and ability to monitor her impact on others will see her go a long way. 

A bit more monitoring wouldn’t go amiss for James, as he spends time in this task telling Ben about the impact of the tense negotiation on his nether-regions, rather than thinking about how they can support Debra.  However, James connected surprisingly well with mothers-to-be, demonstrating a decent, down-to-earth style whilst talking about the stretch they will experience between their coccyx and their pelvic bones, something that many, including mother-of-two Lorraine, would shy away from. 

The remainder of tonight’s episode provided a nice example of how past behaviour is often the best predictor of future behaviour.  Previous tasks have surely taught the teams the importance of understanding their products (the antiques task was only back in week 6) and understanding their potential market (how about the cyclists rejecting the bike pods in week 7??).

Yet we saw the same mistakes again tonight with Team Ignite neglecting to practise how to collapse the buggy and Team Empire completely failing to understand that even those who are prone to extravagant impulse buys such as rocking horses need a good incentive.

Of course the most persistent refusal to learn from past mistakes comes from Debra, who again demonstrated a worryingly single-minded focus that allows her to bulldoze her opinions through.  The remaining six candidates, Debra included, are going to have to demonstrate they are genuinely learning something in this interview from hell if they are to stand a hope of hanging in until the final.

Nic Sale
Head of Diversity
Pearn Kandola 

Mona Lewis came under criticism last week for having difficulty getting to grips with a marketing campaign to rebrand Margate because it was targeted at gay people. Two things can be said in her defence: firstly she acknowledged that the theme of the project took her out of her comfort zone and that she struggled with it; secondly we all are all biased and whilst we may not be as open as her in showing them, they impact on decisions we make more often than we may care to admit.

It is not acceptable to make prejudiced comments today but their absence should not lead us to think we are becoming non-prejudiced. In fact what the research tells us is that we are far more careful at hiding our biases- even from ourselves. Unconscious bias, that is bias that we may not even be aware of, is part of everyone's makeup: it is part of being human. But these biases also impact on our behaviour as could be seen with Mona whenever she met someone who she thought may be gay. There are little things that we do, or indeed don't do, that can make someone who is different feel excluded (e.g. a quiet word of encouragement to someone that we favour but not to someone else)  can have a big impact on how people  feel at work. Mona displayed behaviour like this all too clearly but we should not think that we are not capable of doing this ourselves.

Mona had stereotypes about gay people and this task, including the feedback she got from her colleagues, helped her to understand her biases better and she had enough awareness to recognise that they were without foundation. Challenge, feedback coupled with awareness represent some of the ways that bias at work can be tackled. (This is the topic of my latest book "The Value of Difference')

Less commented upon, with the distraction of Mona's views, was the little matter of Debra Barr's lying. Sir Alan remarked upon this but I suspect only because members of the audience she was pitching to had felt strongly about it. Ethical issues like this have occurred in previous series and whilst the viewing audience gets worked up about it, Sir Alan always seems to take a more sanguine view. A clue as to why this should be could be in his biography where he admits to being prepared to stretch the truth to get a deal done. It is something that a part of him may even admire. 

It was a close thing between Mona and Debra in tonight’s show – their shoddy work in this week’s task could have seen either of them looking down the barrel that is Sir Alan’s firing finger. 

Unfortunately for Mona, however, this week’s task could have been designed with the sole purpose of showcasing her weak points. Her one idea at the start of the task was poorly presented.

Then the team’s gay theme gave her every opportunity to demonstrate her unenthusiastic follower profile identified in earlier blogs. And what is usually Mona’s strong point – her willingness to get stuck in – became a weakness as she tactlessly quizzed a pre-op transsexual and was clearly proud of the fact that she had actually spoken to a gay man. 

To be fair to Mona, the entire team struggled with the gay theme. It quickly became apparent that they had little understanding of the UK’s gay population and minimal appetite for finding out about it.

Instead they remained in their collective comfort zone as they instead talked to local people about how they would feel about having more gay holiday makers in Margate; they wanted to make sure they didn’t “isolate” the local community. 

The problem wasn’t with the Margate community; the problem was with them.  Their failure to explore what would attract gay holiday makers to Margate led to team members relying on their stereotypes of the gay community and snatches of information about the pink pound. 

Mona’s references to “those people” and her insistence that the gay market isn’t suitable for Kent (her home patch) betrayed her perception of gay men and lesbians as being outside her boundaries of normality.

James faired little better with his insistence that the male models not lick their ice creams too suggestively as they weren’t “doing a porno”. 

All in all, a great example of how people can still show their intolerance of anyone who is different to themselves, without reverting to explicit racist, sexist, or as in this case, homophobic, comments.

The report card for the whole team would surely read “Must do better”, and I think some homework around getting to know people who are different to themselves would do them the world of good.  

On a different note (for ‘note’, read ‘rant’) does anyone think Debra will ever get the message that she actually does need to listen to what other people have to say?

Still, I guess that would mean her listening to someone saying that to her. The irony of it. When Sir Alan tells her she’s fired (as he surely will), I can’t help but think she will tell him he’s wrong…    

Nic Sale
Head of Diversity
Pearn Kandola 

We'll see this evening how the BBC chooses to treat alleged homophobic remarks, widely reported in the press last month.

In tonight's task, Week 8, Sir Alan invites the two teams to rebrand the seaside town of Margate.

When Howard Ebison, who is gay, suggests the Kent resort should try competing with Brighton, fellow candidate Mona Lewis is reported to hate the idea, adding she wouldn't let her young son meet a homosexual man. Exactly how much of this exchange will be aired is unknown.

The Apprentice has tinkered with workplace discrimination issues before. In 2007, Sir Alan Sugar expressed doubts about a young female candidate saying she was "too young" for the role - despite the introduction of age discrimination the previous autumn.

In the same series, both Kristina and Katie were quizzed about relocating to London in the light of family commitments, raising allegations of sexual discrimination in some quarters.

Tonight it is not Sir Alan, the "employer", but a fellow candidate. Nevertheless it will be interesting to see how Nick or Margarat react, assuming they hear the alleged discrimination. Will they feed back to Sir Alan? 

If you're on Twitter, get out the laptop tonight, and live-tweet during the show along with NotSirAlanSugar,and thousands of others using the #apprentice hashtag.

And of course, post show, look out for Professor Binna Kandola latest analysis.

Rob Moss
Online editor

I thought it might be interesting to give a more detailed breakdown of the performance of  our candidates using the Leadership Radar model that was outlined in an earlier blog.

Yasmina is the leader because she is the highest scorer in three of the four categories: Thought, Task and Potential. She is the quickest thinker in the group and possesses a sharp business intellect. Admittedly she made the mistake in Week 5, the cosmetics task, where she mixed up the cost of the ingredients.

However I thought this to be a checking error rather than a business one. She is prepared to listen to feedback and to act on it. She expresses her views and is challenging, which she needs to watch, but she doesn’t allow the differences to impede her performance. Her abruptness sees her marked down on the People front.

Second placed Kate Walsh’s strength is clearly in the people category where she is much better than anyone else.

Until last week she had performed well on Task but showed that she can lose focus and become distracted. A question mark, nothing more than that at this time, is now raised over her ability to respond to a knockback.

Her development area is Thought but she overcomes this by her people skills and playing to the strengths ot others.

Despite appearances, the much maligned Lorraine is actually something of an all rounder but this also means that she could also develop in most areas.

She is analytical but not so good at thinking on her feet; task focused but could be better at getting people to understand their roles; empathetic but sometimes  gauche in her communication. It is unfortunate that in repose her face can be rather stern and this could be part of the reason she gets such a bum rap.

Debra Barr gets the job done. That’s it, pure and simple. She’ll do it her way and may take no prisoners but she can be relied upon. An individualist rather than a team player.

James McQuillan is suffering a bit from a heavily featured poor start. Over recent weeks his scores have improved and put him in contention for a semi final place. He has shown himself to be a much better team player than he appeared to be in the earlier programmes. This shows an ability and willingness to learn.

Mona Lewis is another doer. At her best when she is in charge, her standing improved considerably when she came forward and led a team for the second time. When she is in charge she is a capable leader but she comes across as an unenthusiastic follower who can easily become discouraged.

Ben Clarke has two areas of strength: Thought and Task. The other areas, People and Potential, both leave a lot to be desired. He has ideas, is reasonably analytical and works to achieve a result. However he is only interested in achieving his own goals, so he is only cooperative when he believes he has something to gain. His unwillingness to learn from feedback give him, with Mona, the lowest score on Potential.

Howard Ebison is trailing the rest by some distance. His performance in leading the winning team in Week 1 has not been built on. A reasonably good team player with some good people skills but generally he appears out of his depth contributing little to any of the tasks in recent weeks.

Overall this is group of goal oriented achievers who are relatively poorer at the more strategic thinking and people skills, which is a pattern that we see a lot in our leadership development and assessment work. It is often remarked upon that The Apprentice is not like real business, which may be true, but the competency profile here is much like real leaders.

Professor Binna Kandola OBE
Senior Partner, Pearn Kandola

In the 1949 movie 'White Heat', gangster and mummy's boy Cody Jarrett (James Cagney) proclaims, just before he gets killed,"Made it Ma! Top of the world".

One of the cops  provides Jarrett's epitaph: "He finally got to the top of the world and it blew up in his face." The same could be said of Philip 'King of the World' Taylor whose personality failings outweighed his abilities and ultimately led to him being exiled from the programme.

In the last blog,  the Apprentice Analysed said that the biggest problem that National Accounts Manager Lorraine Tighe faced was saboteurs within her team. Estate agent Taylor acted as though the term 'bitter and twisted' was coined just for him such was the venom that he showed to Project Manager Tighe. His inability to accept criticsm was something that has been commented upon before; what I hadn't realised was that he actually doesn't understand the feedback.

Taylor believed that by keeping his mouth shut, relatively speaking, he was responding to what he had been told by Sir Alan in previous programmes. Therefore he saw no need to change anything else in his behaviour. In this task, choosing products and then selling them to retailers, he lacked energy, lacked loyalty, lacked persistence, in fact he was totally lacklustre.

His parting shot showed many of his failings: " I thought I had the potential to go further than this, unfortunately I crossed paths with Lorraine". He had no potential, as our ratings consistently showed, but worse I don't think he even knows what the word means. He deservedly got the chop with only freeloader Howard Ebbison scoring lower than him in our Apprentice League Table.

Last week Lorraine Tighe found she had an influential sponsor in the shape of Sir Alan's advisor Margaret Mountford who referred to her as a Cassandra. Tighe's response was to say that she has good business instincts. I was fascinated by this as it is something that Sir Alan believes in: it is referred to many times in his biography and in his book called 'The Apprentice' (I know, sad aren't I).

At first I thought that this could be coincidence but was watching to see if she called attention to this again, which she duly did. I believe that she has done her research and that the reference to 'instinct' was her dog whistle appeal designed to be heard by SIr Alan. Unfortunately her performance was not good enough to back up her claim. Having said that I don't believe she did as badly as others made out.

Psychology graduate Kate Walsh, who had not done much wrong in the past few weeks, showed an aspect that had not been in evidence since Week One, namely defensiveness and a tendency to be critical and negative when under pressure.

She took her lead in this task from flirtatious Philip and lost sight of what the task and programme are about. It may be that she was beginning to feel invulnerable and could afford to coast on this task and in doing so colluded with Taylor's overt obstructiveness. She can be distracted in other words which calls her conscientiousness into question.

Shaken out of her complacency in the boardroom she was forced by tigerish Tighe to take a more objective view of the boorish behaviour of King Phil, and in the end saw that it was better for her to sacrifice him. This is the first time she has been criticised and it clearly brought out some undesirable responses in her. How she handles this setback will determine whether she deserves the accolade of being the Apprentice.

Of the leading group, Yasmina Siadatan came out best in the programme and this saw her take advantage of Kate's lapses to clamber into the top spot.

What an awful selection process- not the Apprentice 'Interview from Hell'  but the Sandhurst officer selection boards. What on earth must it be like if they end up offering trainee stockbroker Ben Clarke a commission? His many failings have been enumerated several times in the Apprentice Analysed and last week his one success was to add to what was already a pretty lengthy list. As Project Manager he proved incapable of motivating a team, providing direction and remaining calm. Instead he prevaricated, procrastinated and finally panicked. It's not as if the competition was tough either: the self-proclaimed 'King of the World' (see Episode 1) Philip Taylor's performance was miserable in all senses of the word.

As anticipated in the blog of a couple of weeks ago, bully boy Ben was got at by a dual attack from motor mouth Debra Barr and, more surprisingly, from the mouse that finally roared, Noorul Choudhury. Despite his continued attempts to dominate them, the pair formed a spontaneous and effective alliance against their team leader which left the uber-alpha Clarke befuddled and confused. Science teacher Choudhury was always going to be dismissed but at least the manner of his departure (calm, focused, passionate) did him some credit.

In the blog following the first programme of the series, I said this of belligerent estate agent Philip Taylor: ' I expect him to be expedient in his decision making. Whlist he is blunt and judgemental when evaluating others he could be sensitive to criticism...I expect Philip to display energy, vigour and passion and at times he could inspire others. However, he is the one who could most undermine any team and himself by a rash decision.'

Well it eventually happenned. He performed badly for a number of reasons: not listening to his teammates; not learning from his mistakes; a preference for action over any analysis; and a complete and utter belief in his own judgement. In short he lacks any sort of leadership potential whatsoever.

At last someone has spoken up for the stigmatised Lorraine Tighe. Since the third programme this blog has been recording her improving and impressive performances when all she was getting from everywhere else, it seemed, was harsh and unfair criticism. Margaret Mountford, the former lawyer and Sir Alan's aide, referred to, a by this stage weary and self doubting, Tighe as a Cassandra i.e. someone who speaks with wisdom but who is constantly ignored ( no I didn't know what it was before she explained). What was important was not just what was said but who said it, as Lorraine now has a senior sponsor. The effect of this was immediate: the rest of the team recognised that her status had been elevated as a result of this one small observation and began according her more respect. The group on the surface will give her more credit but some, like Philip, will not be able to see what qualities she possesses that they do not. She now needs to step up to the mark as Project Manager and her biggest challenge will be dealing with potential saboteurs determined to change Mountford's opinion of her.

Professor Binna Kandola OBE.  Senior Partner, Pearn Kandola