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THE BUSINESS CASE FOR HUMANITY

Regardless of the sophistication and effort applied to developing strategic paths, those roads are bound to change. It’s even more important to build a powerful engine to take you down those roads, as fast and sure as you need to travel. That engine is your culture. The power of a culture to affect business performance is unequaled: if your culture wants something to happen for your business, it will happen. If your culture doesn’t, nothing will happen

Culture is where the humans gather in business. Leveraging your culture as a business asset means respecting the humanity it represents. That’s hard to do without rediscovering your own humanity as an executive/executive team. If we lose humanity in business, the world is doomed. When we save it we will have all saved ourselves.

YOUR LEGACY AS A MANAGER

No matter how you long you’ve been a manager it’s never too early to look back on your career as if it has ended. Someday it will and you will no longer be an executive. When that day happens, what do you want your career to have stood for? Do you want to have built a company, made money? These are very good things. Do you want to have had a legacy impact on the human beings who helped you do it? This is a great thing.

You don’t have to give up the very good things to get the great thing, but you have to want the great thing.

Understanding the true motivations of a culture can be the difference between your career success or failure, and MTN Nigeria’s success and extreme success. But this isn’t just about your career or the company.

As a manager you have a deep, sustained impact on the lives of the members of your culture. If they are made to feel small on the job—anxious, uncertain, diminished—that feeling won’t stay on the job. It will jump the fence and follow them home. These same people are partners, parents, neighbors, and voters. The toxic impact of an uncertain, diminished population is extreme.

A culture’s profound search for safety and meaning in an uncertain world is a reminder that we all live in the same world, we are all searching. Treating your culture with empathy and kindness is not simply a job performance tactic. It is a mirror that reflects your own humanity.

THE MOST IMPORTANT THING.

For yourself, because it’s your life that’s at stake; your life is happening to you right now and the time you spend at work is irretrievable. For your family, because the health of your family outside of the job depends in part on the health of your family inside the job. For your employee culture, because it’s not easy working in environments of constant pressure and anxiety, with little control over the decisions that affect you, for someone you only know as “management.” For your customers, because people don’t trust companies, they trust people. For your company, because MTN Nigeria is neither a telco nor a technology company. You are a human company selling these things and the pivot point upon which your strategic success rests is the discretionary effort of your human organization—you can’t sell it outside if you can’t sell it inside.

And finally, for the world, because let’s face it. Things are very weird out there right now; the world is a scary, dangerous place. And we have every indication that things are going to likely get weirder before they get better. What is it that you can do as a manager, or member of ExCom, about the conditions that affect the world at large? You can extend your own humanity to those closest to you, including your employees and your customers. Can one manager really change the world? Given the state of the world today, that’s the only way it will change: one person influencing one group at a time.

For all of these reasons…

Be human first. A manager second.