A notable CEO of a company in New York City at a
Tech Company makes a point that if you had hard
times in your family, would you ever consider laying
off one of your children? No, we would never do it.
Then why do we consider laying off people inside our
organisation?

The CEO implemented a policy of lifetime
employment: If you get a job in his company, you
cannot get fired for performance and economic
hardship issues. In fact, if you have issues, they will
coach you and give you support just like we would
with one of our children, who happens to come home
with a P grade from school. Its the complete opposite,
this is the reason so many people have such a
Visceral Hatred sort of anger at some of these
banking CEOs with their disproportionate salaries and
bonus structures. Its not the numbers, it's that they
have violated the very definition of leadership, they
have violated this deep seeded social contract, we
know that they allow their people to be sacrificed so
that they could protect their own interest, or worse
they sacrifice their people to protect their own
interests. This is what so offends and not the numbers, would anybody be offended if we gave a hundred?

Great leaders would never sacrifice the people to
save the numbers, they would sooner sacrifice the
numbers to save the people.


Bob Chapman who runs a large manufacturing
company in the mid west around 2008, was hit very
hard by the recession and they lost 30% of their
orders overnight. Now the large company could no
longer afford their labour pool. They needed to save
ten million dollars, so like so many companies today,
the board got together and discussed lay-offs but Bob
refused.

You see Bob doesn't believe in head counts, but in
heart counts and it's much more difficult to simply
reduce the heart count, And so they came up with
Furlough program: every employee from secretary to
CEO was required to take four weeks of unpaid
vacation. He said' it's better that we should all suffer a
little than any of us should have to suffer a lot". They
saved 20 million dollars. And most importantly as
would be expected when the people feel safe and
protected by the leadership and organisation.

Leadership is a choice, it's not a rank: Many people at
the senior most levels of organisations who are
absolutely not leaders, they are authorities and we do
what they say because they have authority over us,
but we would not follow them. Likewise many people
who are at the bottoms of organisations who have no
authority and they are absolute leaders. And this is
because they have chosen to look after the person to
the left of them and they have chosen to look after the
person to the right of them. This what a leader is.

We call them leaders because, they go first. We call
them leaders because they take the risk before
anybody else does. We call them leaders they will
choose to sacrifice for their people so that they are
safe and protected so their people may gain. And it is
when we do the natural response that our people will
sacrifice for us. They will give us their blood, sweat
and tears to see that their leaders vision comes to life.
And when we ask them why would you do that? Why
would you give your blood, sweat and tears for that
person? They will say the same thing "Because they
would have done it for me". And isn't that the
organisation we would all like to work in?

Kindly forward to booboo

In Naija, We Have Rulers