With this blog post, Trump University welcomes Sean Yazbeck, winner of The Apprentice Season Five, as a new member of the Trump University faculty. Let’s hear Sean’s views on last night’s episode.

The leaders of both teams faced a deceptively simple task last night. What could be more straightforward than putting honey in bottles and selling it? Yet both Aaron and Aimee, leaders of the Arrow and Kinetic teams, proved too weak to lead their teams to achieve optimal results.

Here are the lessons that you and I can take away and apply in our own careers.

Great leaders exert firm control ... but flexibly

Aaron was just not strong or flexible enough to control the members of his team, each of whom needed something entirely different from him. Surya was overcomplicating things terribly. That’s Surya! That is just what he does, but Aaron was unable to rein him in and make him keep it simple. James, with his alpha-male sales personality, needed something quite different ... a set of simple instructions from Aaron that told him what he needed to do first, second and third. The rest of the team, with their gregarious, outgoing personalities, also needed to be given roles that maximized their abilities. All of that, Aaron was unable to do. Of course, Aaron had a real challenge, because all the Apprentice candidates are extremely strong ... in effect, the future business leaders of America. But he didn’t rise to the challenge and he did a very weak job.

 Don’t overcomplicate things

When Surya was laying out his marketing strategies, he made the task far too complicated. He was nervous. He wanted to show off his vocabulary and his knowledge. But as I mentioned earlier, the task was really only about putting honey in bottles and selling it! Again, it was Aaron who failed to focus Surya’s talents on the task at hand. But in your life and your career, strive to keep things simple. Focus your knowledge and skills closely on the task at hand. That’s a success secret that is sometimes forgotten by very smart people especially.

Stop to cultivate interpersonal relationships

As I mentioned above, Aaron was weak and unfocused in his leadership. But did you notice that his team supported him anyway, simply because he is a nice guy? They really hesitated to set him up as the scapegoat for their loss, because they liked him. 

That s a very important lesson on The Apprentice, and in life too. The most important determinant of success is often not whether you win or lose, but whether people will stand by you because they like you.

When you look at Lee last season, you see that he actually lost more tasks than anyone else, but that he made it through to the final selection anyway. One reason was that he was a very capable and strong candidate. But another was that he got on so well with other people. Fair or unfair in business, if your company is laying people off, they will usually fire the people first who have not invested the effort to get along with other people. So remember, you can never lose sight of the personal side of building your success.

Say something!

I sat with Aaron in the boardroom firing in the previous episode and I don’t’ think he said one word. That was a mistake. He had been given the opportunity to shine in front of Mr. Trump and to say in so many words, “Hey, Mr. Trump, hire me. I’m worth it because I can vocalize my thoughts and my strategy and you need me.”

I see this problem in business quite a lot. I go into a meeting and there is one person there who doesn’t say a thing. I always start to wonder, “Is this person an intern here? Why doesn’t he or she say something?”

Don’t be that person. There will be times in business meetings when things are going way over your head and you have no idea what is going on. But say something anyway! Get something in there, even if you just agree with someone. If you remain silent for a long period of time, you end up looking like an idiot.  

And one more thought . . .

Aimee may be in a lot of trouble next week. She waffled terribly as a leader last night and had the good luck to win anyway. But now her team is fed up and is gunning for her. She has done little to build supportive interpersonal ties to the other members of her team.

Like Aaron, she could fall quickly from the winner’s seat in the boardroom and get fired in only seven days. It could happen. And next Sunday, we will know!

To learn more about putting a fine edge on your entrepreneurial skills, enroll in The Entrepreneurship Mastery Program from Trump University. Classes are now forming.