The Apprentice - Here We Go Again

Get ready to cringe!

The Apprentice is starting and those of us addicted to the programme will be getting our score cards ready: who'll get fired first, who will we love to hate, who will get up our nose and everyone else's as well, who will we be cheering for, who will come up with some ingenious ideas, who will make a fool of him/herself?

Why is The Apprentice such compelling viewing? At ten years old it still hasn't lost its appeal, even if, as a long-time viewer, you wonder if each new crop of candidates has ever watched the show before because the same mistakes are repeated over and over. Or maybe that is why we watch!

We want to see Alan Sugar sneering at someone's absolutely foolish behaviour; we want to see someone becoming a turncoat and dumping their colleagues in the s**t; we want to hear someone say something utterly fatuous; and of course we want to hear those hard-hearted words, "You're fired."

Every one of us will cringe at some point because of someone's idiotic behaviour or abysmal communication. We'll shout at the telly, "Don't do it!" We'll talk to our friends about how we would have tackled each task, we'll unpick each episode like forensic scientists and best of all we'll take bets on who will win (so far I've picked the winner on Episode One five times).

My colleague David said that usually the best communicator is the one who wins. Although that isn't 100% true, it's certainly mostly true, so anyone watching tonight and over the next few weeks, pay attention to how well each candidate communicates and what makes them good communicators.

Pay attention to those one-to-one inter-team conversations that can make or break a task. Pay attention to what's left out, what's ignored; what's said that shouldn't have been.

We'll be tweeting our favourite worst communication moments!!

And get ready to cringe each time someone walks blindly ahead and falls into that deep pit of humiliation we hope never happens to us!

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By Jo Ellen Grzyb, Director, Impact Factory