It was a good example of the difference between being a dictator and being a delegator. Richard got his entire team on board and they all had their own task to achieve. Aisha alienated her entire team and seemed to override every other decision/suggestion. Consequently, she didn't get the best out of them and, when she lost, she struggled to find anyone who she could credibly pin the blame on. Poor from a leadership perspective, and poor from a tactical one too.

Maybe that's because she was prevented from contributing anything. Complaints are what you get when you say you are a team and yet you refuse to listen to individual teammembers. It's usually a sign of bad leadership and Aisha was appaling as a leader.

Haha, you got there before me Fully agreed!

It depends on any situation, as a sole trader in business, I have had to sometimes work for others, in the business in am in I find it difficult to take instructions , as most times the boss is a idiot , doesn't know what he is doing , and I am positive I can do the job better, put me in a business or situation in am not experienced in , I will fall back and be a good team player
Is that a male thing ?

Agreed that Aisha was a terrible leader. Even in the car on the way to the boardroom she was saying "everything to do with this product is down to me" - a line that changed rapidly once told she had lost as PM!

But Elle didn't do herself any favours by being so negative. Admittedly, she may have also made some positive comments at other times that weren't shown in the edit, but Claude also commented that she hadn't exactly been a fountain of positivity, so there was clearly something there. It's possible to be critical and honest without being offensive - for me, Elle crossed that line in her frustration.

Also, a panda onesie in the house? I know they're off-task then and it says nothing about her ability, but it doesn't exactly support the air she's trying to project of a serious, go-getting businesswoman, does it?

I personally think it's just down to what Grace Dent said on YF, that the women aren't really used to working largely with women, but men are. So it should be more natural to adapt yourself to work with the other males

At slouchingthehatch, I personally think the house is where you are able to be yourself like you're at home. A panda onesie isn't my choice of pajama, but that shouldn't be linked to who you are in the business world/tasks on the apprentice

Like I said, it's not a reflection on Elle's ability, and she can wear what she likes. But if you're trying to project an image of yourself as uber-professional when you're on TV, that isn't the casual outfit I would choose to wear. She's on TV. Image matters.

This, all male teams are dreadful too and on The Apprentice driven by machismo which in most cases results in a flop. Even this shampoo ad while they won it wasn't good either, they did however do far better on the packaging.

I was glad task one mixed up the teams but was rolling my eyes when it went back to men vs women. Almost all academic research suggests diversity in teams works better.

I thought Grace Dent was talking about an outdated stereotype when she said that. There are a lot of women in business these days, it's not so male dominated. Women do work together a lot and in some businesses it might be a majority of women in a team. By the same token it's less likely for men to be in all male project teams too. Some women will have been to single sex schools and will be very used to working in all female teams.

In other series it's been the all male team that's fallen apart early on. It's probably got a lot more to do with how good the PM is at leading and keeping the team together, not gender. So I don't think Grace Dent's theory that stands up. Basically Aisha was a crap leader and her team fell apart as a result.

It looks bad for the women because April and Aisha both led their teams in exactly the same way. Two weeks on the trot it's been the same style of leadership.
I wonder if the next female project manager will learn from this or whether she will think that's the normal way to lead in this show because the tone has already been set?

Aisha and to a lesser extent April turned into PMzillas the moment they were voted in as PM.

You could see the looks of dismay on the girls faces when Aisha started in on them almost immediately after they elected her - the realisation that they had done the wrong thing was all too clear. Dictatorship apart - Aisha's next major mistake was to sideline Charleine (the task expert). Most PMs make the losing PM candidate leader of the subteam to get them onside, almost a runner up prize. By doing that and marginalising her as much as the team did, they were on a hiding to nothing.

Whether it was just sheer bitchiness or an attempt to get Charleine thrown out, I don't know, but not making best use of the assets you have is a huge mistake on any team leaders part.

When I worked in training, we used to run a session where we got students to complete a questionnaire which identified their team role, and the results were often very interesting. We then did an icebreaker exercise where we split them into teams and gave them a task which involved effective delegation and teamwork and sat back and watched them. On one memorable course, we ended up with 3 people being identified as team leaders. Two of them were quite senior the third a very junior member of staff. We knew that putting him in a team led by either of the other two would end up with him deferring the others just because of rank, so we had him lead one team, and put the other two (coincidentally both women) in the other. The task was a 20 item treasure hunt to be completed in 30 minutes, and the only way it could be done was using the 7 team members as sub teams. No one was designated the leader, it was up to the teams to decide who was doing what.

We were amazed to see how well the young leader dealt with his team. He took instant charge, split his team up and gave them definite tasks and they were back with all the answers in 20 minutes. The other teams couldn't make a decision to save their lives and wasted so much time deciding who was going to do what, that they were only starting to collect their answers as the other team finished, and lack of time meant that they got less than half the answers, and at least a couple of them were wrong.

Moral of my story - the two senior women wasted time fighting as to who should lead, and in the end, another team member took the initiative to leave those two fighting it out while they started the task.... Showed everyone just how important teamwork was.

Oh and incidentally - the women's team was by chance made up of more senior staff too, they would normally have been the line managers of the other team.

It was an interesting exercise - if nothing else showed that the more senior you are, the more rank conscious you are and not willing to stand aside for a younger more junior person for the betterment of the team. In the young leaders team, the senior member was 3 grades higher than the leader, but had come up in the analysis as a team player so was quite happy to do what she was told, rather than stand on status!

All of the students found the results fascinating - with the exception of the senior woman in the losing team who just didn't understand why the other team had won, senior and clever she may have been - but she was not an effective team leader. The analogy here was that she was Just like Aisha, where the young lad was like Richard. He demonstrated good leadership skills and delegated well leading his team to victory. The Apprentice episode was like watching that session all over again!

Did you ever watch Beat the Boss? It was a CBBC business show presented by Saira Khan after she became known for the first series of The Apprentice. It was a competition to design a new kids' product (they'd have a genre given at the start) where a team of three kids competed against a team of three adults who worked in the industry. Obviously each team has an advantage - the adults have more experience, but the kids know better what they want. The kids normally won it - it wasn't rigged in their favour because the adults did win sometimes, but the kids did very well. People underestimate young people. I was really disappointed when Young Apprentice was axed - for a number of reasons, I enjoyed it more than the adult show.

If the girls can't work out for themselves that April and Aisha's autocratic style isn't the way forward and something needs to change, they deserve every defeat that results in the future.

I do think it gets a bit easier to be PM as the tasks progress. There are fewer dissenting voices to overcome and people have more of an idea who's good at what. Of course, there's also the downside that there has been time for people to start disliking each other and some will increasingly feel marginalised when they're not given big jobs every week, but such is life on The Apprentice.

Yes, that is exactly it.

Whether we like it or not, there are still less women 'at the top' (for various reasons) so very successful women are less used to dealing with them on an equal, high powered level. There is also, often a belief (well fear) that most companies are only prepared to have one or two women in high powered positions so any other woman is automatically perceived as a 'threat' - even more so than men.

Having been on 'team leaders' bonding courses myself, there are often problems because everybody in the team is used to being the boss and automatically being listened to and obeyed, even if they are wrong and don't like it when others are answering back because they are also used to being the boss and not questioned. Any, even justified questions or comments are just perceived to be 'mutiny' so react badly. Nos of course that is true of the men in the process too but they are more used to dealing with other 'alpha' males because that is kind of what is expected of men whereas often, these powerful, 'alpha' females will have just naturally have risen above other women in a 'survival of the fittest' way early on in their career.

Oh yes, that is true as well of course. As the numbers go down, there usually are a few women that are supportive and work well together as a team and they probably always had but weren't focused on. Just as there usually are a few of the men that are bitching about or to each other.

Few if any of the candidates are alphas, though they might think they are.

This is all about personality and leadership. If you are an alpha female unused to working with other women, why should that be a handicap? If you can't do it surely that's a sign you arn't as good as you think. If a woman can succeed in a mainly male team, why on earth should it be harder to do so in a mainly female team? Women and men don't behave any differently in competitive situations. The idea that they do is gender stereotyping at its worse.