Watching my regular fix of “The Apprentice” did make me chuckle this week!! It just reinforced some of the crazy management beliefs that are out there, yet ironically demonstrated why the thinking behind them is so nuts!
The wannabe executives needed to make appointments with retailers in order to sell their wares. Unfortunately, they didn’t make as many appointments as project manager, Lorraine expected: “Only one appointment – I’ve lost my job for that before now!” she criticised.
Clearly Lorraine had in mind a target number of appointments which her team should achieve. As in all telesales environments, the members of Lorraine’s team wanted to do well. They wanted to make appointments - they weren’t bad or lazy. And Lorraine went on to give us a fine demonstration of how managers demoralise their teams when they don’t achieve their targets…
Originally, I wasn’t keen on James, but he did explain his side of things quite eloquently when he compared the responses to his calls to opening a funeral parlour and people stopping dying! James was smart enough to understand that the call outcomes weren’t entirely down to him: “I had a bit of bad luck in that no-one I rang was interested,” he lamented.
Then, as if the guys that had been doing the calling didn’t feel bad enough after their verbal bashing from Lorraine, “Suralan” swaggered in with “My people rang six people and got in!”
Yeah right!!! That’s a fair comparison, isn’t it? Let’s just look at these two opening lines from a telesales operative:
A - “Good morning, I’m calling on behalf of Sir Alan Sugar and we’re filming The Apprentice at the moment. May I make an appointment to come and see you tomorrow?”
B – “Good morning, I’m calling from a company you’ve never heard of. We’ve got some great products that are really different from those of the hundreds of people like me that ring you each day. May I make an appointment to come and see you tomorrow?”
I wonder which appointment you’d arrange?
What business owners need to learn from this week’s bout of public humiliation if that if people are set an unrealistic target, they may only be able to achieve it by “cheating” (e.g. booking bogus appointments, lying to or pressurising people into taking appointments and so on). Alternatively, workers will become increasingly demotivated as they believe their managers’ accusations it’s their fault.
Perhaps if Suralan used his programme to demonstrate how businesses should really operate, then things might improve in British industry. But then I guess that wouldn’t make good television…
