It’s Wednesday as I write and I am enjoying the prospect of watching this week’s Apprentice this evening.  It’s a kind of guilty pleasure – how is it that people willingly subject themselves to such a harsh experience?  And that’s before you even think about the possibility that one of them will go into business with the man who has fired all their rivals.

Last week I was out when Azhar Siddique caught the bullet, though I caught up with the programme a few days later and my nephew honoured the unwritten house code – not to share the results before we’d both seen the programme.  Then it was time for the debrief.  Goodness, it was a close one – how did his project manager not get fired?

My nephew, like one of the panellists on the after show, picked up on the fact that Siddique was on the right side of the argument.  Several times he’d raised the question of strategy with his project manager and some of his suggestions, which were ignored at the time he made them, turned out to be perfectly sensible.  One of them was for team members to drop off unsold stock with their fellow team mates before going to the warehouse to restock.  Instead, it went with them to the warehouse and spent time, unsold, in a traffic jam on the way.  But being on the right side of the argument wasn’t enough to stop him being fired.  Why?  Because Lord Sugar recognised that he didn’t want to go into business to someone who – no matter the quality of his insights – could not command the attention of his colleagues.

In his role as founder and managing director of a catering and refrigeration company, Siddique’s style does not seem to be holding him back.  It’s easy to imagine him setting the strategy for his company and following it through.  It’s easy to imagine that some people climb on board in response to the strength of his argument – or decide his business is not the place for him and move on.  At the same time, it has clear limitations.  Even in an organisation’s most senior role we fail – at least a little – both when we imagine we are always right and when we convey our arguments without holding our colleagues in our hearts with dignity and respect.  The risk here is that the ideas stop flowing because even the brightest and best of our staff stop sharing them for fear of our response.

In my view it helps to hold colleagues in our hearts with dignity and respect even when we are on the right side of the argument.  In the short term, it makes it more likely that we will find a way to share our message which others will enjoy hearing – a way which makes it safe for our colleagues to accept that maybe they’re wrong.  In the long term it builds relationships of safety and trust, in which the question is no longer who is right but what.  With this level of safety people feel able to bring their best ideas to the table and to find out there are better ideas – because they still feel good about themselves at the end of the discussion.  What business doesn’t want the benefit of the best ideas of its staff?

And in case you need just one more argument to convince you, it may be worth remembering that even if it’s the boss who’s wrong, especially when it’s the boss who’s wrong, there are times when your fate lies in someone else’s hands.  Standing up for what’s right can be a powerful and positive choice when you’re at your limits and ready to move on.  As long as you want to stay, it can be highly ineffectual as a way to make things happen in complex structures of people and power.  At best, it can limit your contribution.  At worst, it can lead you to hear the words “you’re fired”.