This week’s Celebrity Apprentice was an object lesson for just how badly people can handle conflict.  Women are particularly guilty of avoiding conflict so they won’t have to hurt anyone’s feelings. 

Cyndi Lauper has consistently been a distraction to her team in the first three episodes of Celebrity Apprentice.  Several of her team members on Tenacity, the women’s team, have whined about her in their camera confessionals.  While all of the women claim to “love” her, they all agree that she is a confounding presence, as they labor through each task to the background melody of her stream-of-conscious narratives.

In Episode 3, Tenacity won the challenge, which was to create a multi-page advertorial for Lifelock and Norton 360.  However, Summer Sanders gave a surprisingly weak performance as Project Manager, due in part to her inability to handle Cyndi in an honest and respectful way. 

During Tenacity’s brief meeting with the client, Cyndi dominated the conversation with all kinds of random questions about her 11-year-old son’s use of the internet.  From there, the team moved quickly on to finding a job for Cyndi that would minimize her disruptiveness and allow the rest of the team members to focus, just like they did in the previous two challenges. 

Instead of anyone pulling Cyndi aside and letting her know the effect she was having on the team, no one, the Project Manager included, had enough respect for Cyndi to address the issue straight on, although they were all fully capable of moaning about it when they were alone with the camera.

Things finally came to a head in the Board Room, when The Donald quizzed each team about their performance and their team dynamics before letting them know which team won the challenge.  When asked about her team, Summer prattled on about Cyndi and “her stories”.  Cyndi seemed genuinely surprised by Summer’s complaints and said she did not realize that she had been telling stories.  Summer continued to make an uncomfortable situation worse by nattering on about how she loved Cyndi’s stories, just not always at the time Cyndi chose to tell them. 

Even though the women won, Summer ended up in tears, overwrought as she told the camera how bad she felt about hurting Cyndi’s feelings.  This was followed by Summer having a talk with Cyndi where she apologized and blamed herself for blindsiding Cyndi with her complaints about Cyndi’s stories, missing yet another opportunity to tell Cyndi that her behavior was consistently disruptive to the team. 

My question is, how hurt will Cyndi feel when she watches the show and discovers that everyone was complaining about her and no one had the decency to tell her what was going on? Were any hurt feelings actually spared by Summer’s avoidance of the issue?

In a November 2008 article in Harvard University’s Negotiation Journal, researchers talked about the very behavior that Summer demonstrated, which is called smoothing.  “Smoothing involves giving in to the other party while ignoring one’s own needs. We found an almost 20-percent difference with females vs. males. The data indicates that women are more apt to try to smooth over the situation in order to maintain harmony.”  The article goes on to caution, “One must realize that smoothing is a temporary fix and not a long-term solution”, which is exactly what we saw in this situation.  Summer smoothed over the issue and Cyndi still has no idea of the effect she is having on her team. 

Stay tuned for next week when Cyndi’s behavior will continue to be an issue!  And talk to us about it by joining our conversation on Twitter during the show.  Just search for #celebrityPM.