The Nigerian Executive Who Has Never Been Managed and Why That’s a Problem
There is a specific professional experience that shapes how leaders lead: the experience of being well-managed. Of working under someone who gave clear feedback, set specific expectations, had the difficult performance conversation when it was needed, and created the conditions under which you could do your best work.
Many Nigerian executives do not have this experience.
They reached seniority through a combination of technical excellence, personal drive, and navigation of institutional politics: all genuine capabilities. But the management they received along the way was often informal, inconsistent, and rarely modelled the specific practices that produce high-performing teams.
When they lead their own teams, they default to what they absorbed.
This is not a character problem. It is an experiential one. And it is producing management cultures in Nigerian organisations that are limiting team performance in ways that are difficult to diagnose precisely because the leaders themselves do not have the reference point to recognise what is missing.
What Missing Management Experience Looks Like in Practice
The executive who has never received a genuinely useful performance review tends to conduct performance reviews that follow the format without producing the outcome. The conversation happens. A rating is assigned. The employee leaves with no clearer understanding of what they should do differently or what would change their trajectory. The executive has complied with a process they do not fully understand the purpose of. The team member emerges from the review unchanged, because the information needed to change was never provided.
The executive who has never had a manager who proactively managed their career development tends not to do this for their team. Not because they do not care, but because they have no internal model of what it looks like. Career development, in their experience, was something that happened through initiative and self-management rather than through deliberate investment by a manager. Their team members are experiencing the same thing they experienced, and calling it normal.
The executive who has never been in an environment where honest upward feedback was genuinely welcomed tends not to create that environment for their team. The signals they learned, that some information travels upward and some does not, that certain concerns are career-limiting to raise, that the manager’s visible preferences shape what the team surfaces, are reproduced in their own leadership, often without conscious intent. The team operates with a filtered version of reality that the executive will never see clearly.
Research consistently shows that managers account for 70% of the variance in team engagement. This variance is not primarily driven by intelligence or technical capability. It is driven by the specific management behaviours that create or destroy the conditions for high performance. And those behaviours are largely learned rather than innate, which means the executive who has not been in an environment where those behaviours were modelled is at a genuine disadvantage that no amount of ambition or competence compensates for.
The Specific Gaps That Surface in Nigerian Executive Teams
Three management capability gaps appear with particular consistency in Nigerian executives who have not had strong management role models.
A. Specificity in feedback. The feedback that Nigerian executives most commonly provide is directional rather than specific. “This could be better.” “The quality is not where I need it.” “I expect more from you.” These statements identify dissatisfaction without providing the information the team member needs to change their behaviour. Specific feedback describes the observable gap, explains why it matters, and identifies the change the manager needs to see. It is a learnable skill, and it requires having received it in order to understand what it looks and feels like.
B. Separating performance from relationship. The Nigerian management culture in many organisations conflates closeness with the leader with career opportunity. The team member who is in the leader’s circle gets stretch assignments, sponsorship, and visibility. The equally capable team member who is less socially proximate does not. This is not necessarily corrupt. It is the management style of someone who does not have a structured approach to identifying and developing capability, and who therefore defaults to relationship as the primary allocation mechanism. The result is a team with wide, invisible variance in development investment.
C. Holding the difficult conversation early. The pattern of avoiding performance conversations until the situation is undeniable is particularly pronounced in Nigerian executive culture, where direct negative feedback can feel like a challenge to the social hierarchy of the organisation. The conversation about underperformance is deferred, then deferred again, until it arrives as a crisis rather than a structured management interaction. By the time the conversation happens, the employee is often surprised, because they received no signal that anything was wrong, and the organisation has absorbed months of below-expectation output that earlier intervention would have addressed.
What Changes When It Is Named
The reason most of this remains invisible is that nobody names it directly. The executive who has never experienced high-quality management does not know what they are missing. They are managing in the only way they know how, and the results, while suboptimal, are not dramatically wrong in ways that produce obvious failures.
The value of naming it is not to assign blame or to suggest inadequacy. It is to open the possibility of deliberate development. The executive who understands that the management practices they received were incomplete, and that there are specific, learnable behaviours that would change their team’s performance, is in a different position from the one who assumes the current approach is simply what management is.
Structured leadership development, external coaching, and deliberate exposure to environments where high-quality management is practised are not luxuries in this context. They are the specific interventions that close a gap with a direct and measurable impact on team performance.
The Organisational Investment That Changes the Culture
The management culture of an organisation is transmitted downward. The executive who has never been well-managed transmits the management practices they absorbed to the leaders beneath them, who transmit them further. The pattern compounds over time.
The investment that breaks the pattern is deliberate: creating the conditions, through coaching, through structured development, through honest feedback from board members and investors, under which senior Nigerian leaders can develop the management capabilities that their career paths did not provide.
Better management at the executive level improves every layer of leadership beneath it. And better leadership throughout an organisation is the condition that allows everything else, strategy, product, talent retention, culture, to work. The compounding return on this investment is available nowhere else on the balance sheet.
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Research Sources
– Gallup: Managers account for 70% of the variance in team engagement
– Harvard Business Review: The experience gap in executive leadership: how management quality is transmitted through organisations
– McKinsey & Company: Leadership development and organisational performance in emerging markets
– Enboarder: 83% of managers have no formal training in people management