Andrew Morello winner of the apprentice – Yellow brick road – Real Estate Online Marketing

Andrew Morello –

Head Of Business Development at Yellow Brick Road

Winner of the Apprentice

Question 2

From being on The Apprentice – what did you learn about others?

The biggest thing I learnt about being with others, is being empathetic and understanding as to where people are coming from.

There is very much a culture on reality television, that if someone does something wrong, people are keen to get the camera crew to come over and film it. If the camera crew wants it on them at the time….. for example, there were instances where I saw people say to the camera crew.. Come over here and then they would go and corner someone and say…. Why have you done this or why have you done that?

I learnt very quickly about having 12 different personalities in one house together and seeing each other every day – male and female.

I don’t think I’d lived with a female apart from my sister up to that point.

Understanding those emotions and what goes through peoples heads was very important to me. What I used to do is, if someone did something I didn’t agree with, and people will often ask, what was your strategy? I didn’t really have a strategy. It was just trying to be as honest and as transparent with people as possible but as private as possible. Which is very hard to do, when there’s a camera crew there.

I would, say if it was time to go to bed, I would go to someones bedroom and say Hi Lisa, today when this and this happened, I didn’t really appreciate that. I think tomorrow, when it comes up in the board room, this is probably what I’m going to say. I gave them an opportunity to actually come up with their rebuttal, and gave them the consideration. That was a wonderful thing.

In the book, The 7 habits of highly effective people, the author talks about understanding where people come from. He tells a story about how one day a man was on a train with his 3 kids. The kids were running around. They get to about 7 or 8 stops down the line and all the passengers were looking at the kids, running around going crazy. A guy turned to the father of the 3 kids and said, Mate.. don’t you think you should control your kids. The guy replies, look I really apologise, we just left the hospital about an hour ago. Their mother just died and I don’t know if they really realise what happened and I’m in a bit of shock myself.

All of a sudden, your accusing someone of not looking after their kids, as you don’t know where they have come from. When you know where they have come from, you can start to be a bit more empathetic and understanding.

That was one of the big things I learnt living in a house with strangers for 10 weeks.

Catch up with Andrew Morello – Linkedin here