Well, it finally happened.  Cyndi Lauper was finally fired.  She has been a terrible disappointment all season, and it finally caught up with her. 

Cyndi served as project manager twice, losing once and winning once.  In Episode 1, she led the women’s team, Tenacity, in their first loss in the diner challenge.  I had expected her to be a really strong contender, and was very surprised by her miserable performance in that task.  During that episode, she demonstrated that she was not able to manage the work of other people and I blogged about how she never really “got” the point of the challenge, which was to raise money for charity.  She instead focused on running a diner, and did that badly as well.  The men’s team, Rocksolid, focused on raising money and trounced the ladies. 

In that first boardroom, Lauper probably should have been fired.  But she was Cyndi Lauper!  And this was Celebrity Apprentice!  And it was only the first episode!  We wanted to see more of her!  The public, as well as The Donald, loves Cyndi Lauper, and she benefited from the Halo Effect.

The Halo Effect, quite simply, is how one good trait in a person influences how we view them in general.  For example, an attractive person with a nice smile is often perceived as friendly, smart and likeable, even if they are none of these things. 

The first research on the Halo Effect was done by Edward Thorndike in a study published in 1920.  Thorndike asked commanding officers to rate their soldiers and found that officers tended to rank individual soldiers with either all positive and all negative traits, which led him to theorize that people seem not to think of other individuals in mixed terms; instead we seem to see each person as roughly good or roughly bad across all categories of measurement.

The Halo Effect is extremely common in the work place and one of the reasons we see people promoted to incompetence time and time again.  The ideal developer becomes the poor team lead.  The successful sales person becomes the struggling sales manager.   

PsyBlog has an article about the Halo Effect and how little awareness we have of our own thought processes in this regard.  “Although we can understand the halo effect intellectually, we often have no idea when it is actually happening.” http://www.spring.org.uk/2007/10/halo-effect-when-your-own-mind-is.php

That is exactly what we have seen throughout this season of Celebrity Apprentice.  Both the teams and the Trumps have put up with Lauper’s poor performance because everyone likes her.  Who doesn’t love the Lauper of “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun?”  We have seen and heard contestants say, time and time again, “I love her, but …” while they have tried to distract her and keep her out of the way.  No one said this about Rod Blagojevich.  They recognized him for the incompetent shyster that he is.

In Episode 6, Lauper again served as the project manager in the task to make over the image of the rising country star.  Fortunately for Lauper, her team won, or she certainly would have been in jeopardy.  She lead her team to success, but was a divisive and rude project manager, eroding her relationships with her team members, particularly Holly and Maria, and causing rifts in her team that were deep enough for trump to shuffle the team members around the following week. 

In Episode 9, the Halo Effect finally failed Lauper.  Holly Robinson Peete was the project manager, which was telling.  It was really Cyndi’s turn, as her two other team mates, Holly and Bret, had both taken a turn as project manager in the last two tasks.   But Cyndi wouldn’t step up and Holly did, demonstrating Holly’s brand of emergent leadership again. 

The task was to decorate an extended stay apartment.  While the judges liked Cyndi’s room best, during the boardroom she mentioned that Holly turned the room over to her but she had asked for Holly’s approval and Holly’s input all along, even asking Holly to choose the paint color.  She was fired for not being able to “own” anything.  She left in a wake of protestations about her hurt feelings.  The sad part is that I don’t think she ever understood why she was actually fired.