CorpComms Magazine

In business, it's important to communicate effectively - it's also important to communicate consistently. Liverpudlian optician Gavin Winstanley forgot both of those messages and paid the price in Lord Sugar's boardroom last night. This was the buying task - the one where the teams have to source a series of unlikely objects in a limited time, negotiating the lowest possible prices - items this time including a top hat and cloche (no, they didn't know what it was either) for the new-look Savoy Hotel. The teams were mixed up a bit from last week, and right from the outset Team Logic captain Gavin seemed to be the one under pressure.

Team Venture, led by the decisive Susan Ma, certainly made their own mistakes - principally making forays into the most upmarket corners of the West End and expecting to strike a deal. (What did they end up with? The princely sum of 1p off a top hat priced at £350.)

Gavin showed early enthusiasm by keenly volunteering to be Project Manager - even though he later admitted on You're Fired that this was the type of task he hated most. No strategy either then.

In his audition for the programme, Gavin came over as a bouncy, enthusiastic bundle of energy. He kept up this style on You're Fired. But on the task itself, he seemed to fall into a slough of indecision. The energy was sapped from him. He couldn't enthuse or convince his team, in fact he could barely communicate with them at all. They wasted nearly three hours thumbing through the Yellow Pages trying fairly unsuccessfully to get leads, before finally getting out on the road - a huge handicap. Then, they wasted more time going from appointments in one end of London to another, as Gavin hadn't realised that the city was so big and the team were each looking at different local editions of the Yellow Pages, rather than multiple copies of the same one as he'd imagined. A massive communications breakdown which cost vital time, so a number of items weren't secured.

So which of the two Gavins we saw was the real one? In normal circumstances, probably the bouncy version. But under pressure it all seemed to ebb away, his voice was flatter, his language disjointed. This lack of confidence spread through the team, there was little sense of leadership or decisiveness, and they lost. In the boardroom afterwards, Gavin was unable again to convincingly explain why one of his team-mates should have been the one at the receiving end of the Sugar finger.

As with any big company or brand, he should have remembered that consistency is key. You may feel tired and on your uppers, but at the critical moments you have to summon up the energy to convince the world you are full of fight. It's the same for a minister being interviewed on Newsnight - by the time the programme goes on the air, he or she might have been up for 16 hours, but just for that four or five minutes the adrenaline kicks in and the tiredness apparently falls away. Sadly, Gavin simply failed to ensure his usual confident, authoritative and witty self stayed to the fore.

www.mediatrainingassociates.co.uk

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