In his penultimate piece for The Sunday Times, Julian Richer, founder and MD of Richer Sounds, provides a top tips list for bosses. It's all good advice but the bit that stuck out for me, relevant to the APC, was

'Watch the cash. Businesses come and go — and more often than not go because they were not watching the cash, which is quite different to the profit and loss account. It is no good being the most profitable business in the world if you can’t pay your bills.'

Too many candidates, with weak AP&P knowledge, seem to think that the P&L and the Balance Sheet are all that matters. Cash is king, as the saying goes. Many, many businesses go bust because of poor cashflow. Take contractors, for example, they will be paying employees, buying materials etc. so if you withhold a monthly payment because of a contract dispute, that could be enough to push them over the edge.

But what about the balance sheet, I hear you say. That's a good point, sort of. You'd have to look at the BS to see what it comprises. If they're sat on a pile of cash in the bank, that's good for the above payments. But if their BS is made up of fixed assets e.g. they own their head office and a lot of vehicles, those are not so good for paying the team.

P&L and balance sheet are important. But so is cashflow.

I stumbled across an interesting theory recently, namely Social baseline theory.

Trying to simplify this, for the purposes of this website -

'Researchers have proposed social baseline theory, which suggests that the default in cognitive processes is to assume the availability of social resources (Beckes and Coan, 2011; Coan and Maresh, 2014; Coan and Sbarra, 2015). If social baseline theory is correct, then it is not a question of which cognitive processes are involved in social situations. Rather, it is more appropriate to state that our physiological, neural, and cognitive processes are almost always situated within social situations.'

It's a theory, that's all, but it resonated with me. It was explained, elsewhere, as 'I'll tend the fire, you watch for bears', splitting the tasks between two people, who are each focused on their specific task, is better than one person trying to do both. In a work context, that could be more appropriately rephrased as 'you do the comps, I'll do the statutory enquiries'. What's key about this theory, is that it proposes that our baseline, the norm, is that we are wired to assume there are others around us to help. Basically, humans think as social animals, not as individuals. Their studies showed that we can be less stressed when working with others (not always the case, in my experience). Teamworking is not an artificial construct. If the theory has any validity, we're programmed to think as team players.

I'd be impressed if an APC candidate managed to weave that into an answer about the benefit of teamworking.