Nigeria Does Not Need More Managers. It Needs Better Management. by Dr. Abiola Salami, Principal, CHAMP Global Leadership Consultancy
“ If an organisation spends millions training managers but managers return to exactly the same behaviours, the training has been delivered. But has the investment performed?”– Dr. Abiola Salami
Introduction
Nigeria has no shortage of managers.
We have Managing Directors, Executive Directors, General Managers, Senior Managers, Area Managers, Regional Managers, Business Managers, Relationship Managers, Project Managers, People Managers and, of course, the manager who manages the manager who manages the person who actually does the work.
We are managing but are we producing enough management outcomes?
That is a different question; perhaps one we need to ask more seriously.
Nigeria is full of management conferences, leadership seminars, executive programmes, strategy retreats, management books and professional qualifications.
Every few weeks, hundreds of senior professionals gather in a hotel ballroom to discuss transformation. There will be PowerPoint. There will be photographs. There will be applause. There will probably be a panel. And somebody will say, “We need to go back and implement.” Everybody will nod. Then Monday arrives. The emails return. The meetings multiply. The strategy document remains in the folder. And the organisation gets back to business as usual. We are very good at talking about management. The bigger question is whether we are becoming better at managing for results.
Management Should Have An Output
Consider a simple example. A restaurant manager arrives at work every morning at 7:30am. She holds meetings. She checks attendance. She signs documents. She monitors inventory. She talks to customers. She disciplines staff. She sends reports. She leaves at 7pm.
Everyone agrees that she is hardworking but six months later, sales are down, customer complaints are up, food wastage has increased, staff turnover has doubled and profitability has fallen. Is she a good manager?
We often confuse activity with management. Being busy is not the same as being effective. A calendar full of meetings is not evidence of leadership. A 60-page strategy document is not evidence of strategy. A beautifully designed dashboard is not evidence of performance. And a manager who never sits down because “there is so much to do” may simply be very busy managing symptoms.
Nigeria’s Productivity Problem Makes This Urgent
The World Bank’s work on Nigeria’s jobs and human capital repeatedly points to the importance of productivity, skills and the quality of employment for sustained prosperity. Its recent Human Capital Index Plus assessment found that Nigeria’s 2025 HCI+ score was 131, above the Sub-Saharan African average of 127, but Nigeria’s education pillar score was only 64 compared with a lower-middle-income-country median of 88. (World Bank)
This matters because a country cannot build sustainable prosperity simply by putting more people into organisations. It must help organisations produce more value from the people, capital, technology and resources they already possess. That is management’s job.
If ten employees produce the same output that eight employees could produce, adding two more employees does not solve the productivity problem.
If a company buys a new software system but employees continue using the old manual process, the technology investment has not yet become performance.
If an organisation spends millions training managers but managers return to exactly the same behaviours, the training has been delivered. But has the investment performed?
Those are different questions.
We Need To Close the Management-to-Performance Gap™
The Management-to-Performance Gap is the distance between management activity and measurable organisational outcomes. It exists when managers are doing many things that look managerial but do not sufficiently move the organisation forward. This is expensive.
Think about how much organisations spend on salaries, management development, consultants, strategy retreats, technology, systems, meetings, travel, reports, performance reviews, conferences and professional memberships.
Now ask: What changed? Not what happened. What changed?
That is the Performance Leadership™ question.
The Meeting Test
Here is one of my favourite tests. Take the last ten meetings your leadership team attended. Now ask, How many decisions were made? Not how many were discussed but how many were decided. Then ask, How many of those decisions were implemented? Then ask What measurable outcome changed because of those decisions?
You may discover something uncomfortable. Your organisation does not have a meeting problem. It has a conversion problem. We are converting executive time into meeting minutes rather efficiently. The question is whether we are converting executive time into organisational performance.
The Strategy Test
The same thing happens with strategy. Many organisations have excellent strategies.
The documents are beautiful. The strategic pillars are impressive. The objectives sound intelligent.
“Drive customer-centric growth.” “Enhance operational excellence.” “Build a high-performance culture.” “Accelerate digital transformation.”
They are all admirable. But ask five employees on different floors what the strategy means for their daily decisions. You may receive five different answers. That is the strategy-execution gap. And when strategy is not translated into priorities, ownership, resources, behaviours and measures, it remains an expensive piece of literature.
Management Is Conversion
This is why I increasingly define management through the language of conversion.
Management converts strategy into priorities, priorities into action, resources into outputs, capability into execution, decisions into results, people into productive teams, data into decisions, problems into improvements and opportunities into value.
The manager’s job is not simply to supervise activity. It is to create the conditions in which activity produces meaningful results. That sounds obvious. Yet organisations everywhere struggle with it.
The Manager Who Saved ₦50 million
Imagine a Procurement Manager discovers that her company is spending ₦200 million annually on a category of supplies. She renegotiates contracts. Consolidates vendors. Removes unnecessary duplication. Improves inventory planning. Six months later, the organisation saves ₦50 million. That is management.
Now imagine another manager who conducts 12 vendor meetings, creates 18 spreadsheets and produces a 40-page procurement report. The report is excellent but costs remain the same.
Which manager performed?
The answer should be obvious. Yet many organisations reward the second manager because the activity is visible. The first manager created value. The second created paperwork. We need to get better at knowing the difference.
This is why managers need performance literacy. Managers should be able to answer four questions about everything they lead (a) What outcome am I responsible for? (b) What must change to produce that outcome? (c) What behaviour or action will cause that change? (d) How will I know whether it happened?
That is performance literacy. Without it, managers can become excellent administrators of underperformance. They can keep systems running without making the system better. They can maintain yesterday’s processes beautifully while tomorrow passes them by.
The African Management Opportunity
This conversation is particularly important for Africa. The continent does not simply need more educated people. It needs institutions capable of converting talent, resources and opportunity into value at scale.
The World Bank notes that skills development can reduce underemployment, increase productivity and improve living standards. However, skills sitting inside an organisation do not automatically become organisational capability. Capability must be deployed and deployment requires management.
A brilliant employee in a poorly managed system can still underperform. A competent employee in a high-performing system can grow dramatically. Management is the bridge.
What should better management look like?
Perhaps we need to move from manager as supervisor to manager as performance architect. The performance architect asks 10 questions (1) Where are we going? (2) What matters most? (3) Who owns what? (4) What resources are required? (5) What decisions are blocking progress? (6) What behaviours are helping or hurting execution? (7) What should stop? (8) What should start? (9) What should accelerate? (10) What evidence will tell us that we are winning?
That is a very different job description. It requires courage. Because sometimes the most important management decision is not what to add. It is what to stop.
Nigeria does not need more activity
We need to become suspicious of activity that has no measurable consequence.
If someone calls for another meeting, ask Why? Another report? For what decision?
Another training programme? What capability should change? Another strategy? What behaviour will be different? Another consultant? What problem will be solved? Another KPI? What decision will it improve?
This is not an argument against meetings, reports, strategies, training or consultants.
It is an argument for purposeful management. Everything should have a conversion pathway.
Input → action → output → outcome → impact.
If the chain breaks, performance suffers.
The Management Scorecard We Need
Every manager should be able to show five things:
1. What resources were entrusted to me? People, money, technology, time, authority.
2. What did I do with them? Decisions, processes, projects, interventions.
3. What did they produce? Outputs.
4. What changed because of those outputs? Outcomes.
5. Is that change sustainable? Impact.
That is how management becomes measurable. And when management becomes measurable, leadership becomes more accountable.
The Uncomfortable Conclusion
We don’t need to insult managers. We need to raise the standard of management. The manager who works 14 hours a day is not automatically better than the manager who works eight.
The manager who attends 30 meetings is not automatically more valuable than the manager who attends ten. The manager with the biggest team is not automatically the best manager. The manager with the loudest voice is not automatically the strongest leader.
Performance is not theatre. It is evidence.
And perhaps Nigeria’s next management revolution should be less about producing more managers and more about producing managers who can consistently answer “What is better because I am here?”
That is a powerful question. Every manager should ask it. Every board should ask it. Every CEO should ask it. Every organisation should ask it. Because the ultimate measure of management is not how much management happened. It is how much value was created because management happened.
Nigeria does not need more managers. Nigeria needs better management. And better management begins when we stop celebrating activity and start measuring outcomes.
About Dr. Abiola Salami
Dr. Abiola Salami is the Principal Performance Strategist at CHAMP – a full scale professional services firm trusted by high performing business leaders for providing Executive Coaching, Workforce Development & Advisory Services to improve performance. He is the Convener of Dr Abiola Salami International Leadership Bootcamp ; The Peak PerformerTM Festival Made4More Accelerator Program and The New Year Kickoff Summit. You can reach his team on hello@abiolachamp.com and connect with him @abiolachamp on all social media platforms.
NB
If you are a Supervisor, Manager or Team Lead, Take the Manager’s Execution Scorecard Assessment to see where execution may be breaking in your team.
If you are a Senior Executive, Look into the Invisible Toll Mirror to see the toll of the weight you are carrying.
About Dr. Abiola Salami
Dr. Abiola Salami is the Principal Performance Strategist at CHAMP – a full scale professional services firm trusted by high performing business leaders for providing Executive Coaching, Workforce Development & Advisory Services to improve performance. He is the Convener of Dr Abiola Salami International Leadership Bootcamp ; The Peak PerformerTM Festival Made4More Accelerator Program and The New Year Kickoff Summit. You can reach his team on hello@abiolachamp.com and connect with him @abiolachamp on all social media platforms..
For private coaching, boardroom recalibration, or executive healing strategy, connect email me directly at hello@abiolachamp.com to begin your private Executive Coaching Session.
