The HR Decoded: Episode 7
Your Company's Biggest Retention Problem Has a Name. It's Called Your Manager.
“Underperforming. Bad attitude. Missing deadlines. Terrible team player.”
When the team lead walked into Olapeju Akanbi‘s office, those were her exact words about a colleague.
Olapeju listened.
Then she did something pretty rare: she went and spoke to the employee in question, and then to everyone else on the team.
That’s when the truth came out.
Every single team member said the same thing, different words, same pattern:
“Our boss talks down on us publicly, and we’re afraid.”
The “underperforming” colleague wasn’t lazy. She was terrified, waiting for the next public dressing-down, and working in a state of constant anxiety.
The manager had built a team that ran on fear instead of clarity.
Olapeju didn’t raise it as a war. She shared just enough with the manager to create awareness without triggering defensiveness, and the manager softened (for a while).
A few months later, the manager walked away. The “underperforming” employee stayed and continued to thrive.
This story should not be unusual.
But in most workplaces (Nigerian or otherwise), it never happens this way.
When retention drops, companies audit the salary structure. When engagement tanks, they run a culture survey. When a strong performer leaves, that’s when management begins an inquest.
Nobody asks the harder question: Is this manager the reason good people keep leaving?
That question is rarer than it should be in Lagos, London, New York (and anywhere else in the world).
Welcome to The HR Decoded, Episode 7. Today, we’re talking about managers: the people your company trusts most with your employees’ daily experience, and holds least accountable for what they do with that trust.
Everyone knows. Nobody acts.
Kim Rohrer, a people and culture leader who has built HR systems at multiple global companies, said it simply:
“People most times don’t leave companies. They leave managers.”
You’ve probably heard this before. You may have said it yourself.
Here’s what most companies do with it: nothing.
They hear it, nod, maybe put it in a slide at a leadership offsite, then continue promoting the same people into management roles using the same criteria they’ve always used.
Because the uncomfortable version of that sentence (the one nobody says out loud) is this:
If people leave managers, then managers are where your retention problem lives.
Not your benefits package. Not your office location. Not the generation of employees you’re hiring.
The specific person you put between your employees and their work.
And if that person is damaging the team, no salary review, no team retreat, and no new HR policy will fix what they are breaking every single day.
The person who actually runs your work life
When I say manager, I don’t mean the CEO who appears at all-hands meetings twice a year with a polished slide deck.
I mean the person directly between you and senior leadership.
Your team leads. Your department head. Your line manager.
The person who assigns your work. Gives you feedback or doesn’t. Signs off on your leave. Decides whether to escalate your concerns upward or absorb them quietly.
This person holds more power over your daily work experience than anyone else in the organization.
In most companies, this person hasn’t received training to manage.
Ololade Odunsi, an HR professional and people strategy expert who has built systems across companies on the continent, put it plainly:
“A lot of companies don’t have a consistent recruitment system. They don’t know what they want. The most senior person in the organization will want to be the one to interview and hire, even when they have no framework for doing it.”
They were promoted because they were excellent at the job below management.
Not because anyone tested whether they could manage other people doing that job.
So they show up to management with one tool: the way they personally work.
And they use that tool on everyone.
Kim has watched this play out more times than she can count.
“The best engineer gets promoted to management. Not because they want to manage. Not because they have the skills to manage. Because they’re the best engineer, and promoting them feels like the obvious reward.”
Now they’re not engineering anymore.
They’re managing people and being held to standards they’ve never been measured against. Barely doing the things that made them excellent.
But here’s the part that doesn’t get discussed.
It’s not just the promoted person who suffers.
It’s everyone they manage.
Because now you have someone who:
Never learned how to give feedback without it feeling like a verdict
Never learned how to hold a one-on-one that actually develops someone
Never learned the difference between managing work and managing people
Defaults to doing the task themselves rather than delegating, because delegation feels slower and messier than just getting it done
And when the team underperforms (as teams do when they aren’t led well), this manager has only one explanation available:
“The team isn’t strong enough.”
They cannot see themselves as the variable because nobody ever told them they were supposed to be.
How bad management hides
Daniel Orjikalu, who builds culture and operations systems for startups and has consulted internationally, told me about a manager at a Lagos startup.
Soft-spoken. Professionally credible on paper. The kind of person who passes any interview. Who gets described in performance reviews as a “strong people leader.”
She ran daily standups with her team.
In those standups, she yelled.
Not occasionally. Not in moments of genuine crisis.
Routinely.
The team had learned to brace for it. Then one day, in the middle of a standup, a team member had a panic attack on the call.
You could hear them gasping for air.
Still, nothing changed.
It took two clinically diagnosed cases of severe depression (both traced directly to the environment this manager had created) before anyone in senior leadership asked the question that should have been asked much earlier.
“What is this manager doing to this team?”
This is how bad management survives for so long.
It doesn’t look like cruelty. It looks like standards. It looks like pressure. It looks like “we expect a lot here.”
And because organizations don’t measure psychological safety the way they measure quarterly targets, the damage accumulates quietly until someone breaks loudly enough that it becomes impossible to ignore.
The accountability vacuum
Here is the structural truth underneath all of this.
Managers in most companies operate in an accountability vacuum.
They have real power over the people below them; however, there’s almost no accountability to the people above them because senior leadership is too far removed from the daily mechanics, feedback rarely travels upward, and the dominant cultural assumption is: if someone holds a management title, they must deserve to be there.
Which means the escalation path for “my manager is the problem” runs straight through the manager, their manager, and an HR team that can’t act without sign-off from both.
The person causing the problem sits at every checkpoint of the process designed to address the problem.
Daniel has built a different approach into every cultural system he designs:
“Someone in top management must have 1-on-1s with every team member at least once every 2 months. Also, whatever rules we set (including the ones I set as COO), if I default on them, I face the same consequences as anyone else. Nobody is above the culture. Including the person who set it.”
That sounds obvious. It is rarely practiced.
The culture of accountability doesn’t live in the mission statement or the employee handbook.
It lives in the daily decisions of whoever has the most power in the room.
When the team lead is also your friend
Olapeju told me a case that felt almost comedic until it didn’t.
A team lead and a junior colleague were friends outside of work. Both were in sales.
The team lead had divided the business accounts unevenly, giving himself the larger and more lucrative portfolio because he was carrying more responsibility as the lead.
The junior colleague took silent offence but didn’t say a word.
Instead, she quietly started following him into the field to work on his accounts and did little work on hers.
The team lead took notice but said nothing directly to her.
He proceeded to give feedback on her missing deliverables in a standup.
When he did, she blocked him on WhatsApp. He found out through a mutual friend. The mutual friend got pulled in. She took offense at the mutual friend, too.
By the time it reached Olapeju, a disagreement about account distribution had become a full relational collapse.
“I don’t just begin mediation. I first ask: Is this a relationship issue? A role issue? A process issue? Because the intervention has to match the actual problem. If you treat a role issue like a relationship issue, you fix the wrong thing and the same conflict comes back in a different shape.”
In this case, it was all three. The resolution required work on all three levels.
However, if this team lead had received basic management training when he took on the role, he would have known: managing someone you’re also friends with requires explicit ground rules.
Not improvised trust.
The feedback ambush
There is a particular flavour of bad management that never gets labelled as bad management.
It gets labelled as high standards.
It’s the manager who watches you struggle for months without saying a word. Who notices every error, every missed mark, every gap.
And saves it.
Then they present your failures at the annual review, or worse, at a public meeting where they put you on a performance improvement plan.
Olapeju describes what this actually does:
“She had been working in the dark. She assumed silence meant she was doing well. She had no idea there was a gap she was expected to close because no one had shown it to her. And then she got all of it at once. The year was already gone.”
This is not high standards.
This is hoarding.
And it produces the exact opposite of what performance management is supposed to achieve.
Because by the time the feedback arrives, the damage is done, the year is wasted, and the employee is in a defensive posture, trying to dispute the pattern rather than learn from it.
You cannot develop someone retroactively. You can only develop them in real time.
A manager who waits until the annual review to tell you about a problem they noticed in February is not managing your performance.
They are managing their own discomfort with difficult conversations.
And they are doing it at your expense.
The unwritten rules nobody defends
Kim Rohrer said something that made me pause:
“The ideal worker prototype that most office work is based on is a man who has a wife staying home taking care of the kids. Anything outside that requires too much rethinking of the way we view our relationship to work.”
Mid-level managers are often the ones who enforce this prototype in practice (most times unconsciously).
Not senior leadership, they’re too far removed. Not HR (human resources), they’re processing the paperwork after the damage is done.
Wamide Animashaun, a senior operator and ecosystem builder, lived this early in her career.
She started leaving work by 5 pm (her closing time), and it raised some concerns amongst her colleagues.
Not because she wasn’t doing excellent work, but because the company’s culture had normalised it unofficially.
One day, she said clearly to her manager:
“Why can’t I leave at 5 pm?”
A reasonable question with no reasonable answer.
Most people never ask it.
Because the manager’s preference has become the unofficial policy, and nobody names it as a policy, because that would require someone to defend it.
This is how it shows up in practice:
Marking someone “not committed” because they left at 5 pm
Signaling to a new parent that their flexibility request is inconvenient
Defining “culture fit” as “works the way I work.”
Giving the best accounts to whoever is always available, regardless of who is most capable
Not always conscious. But always consequential.
The culture doesn’t live in the values poster on the wall. It lives in the daily decisions of the person who signs your leave form.
How to tell if it’s a manager’s problem, not a you problem
If something feels wrong (performance is suffering, you dread certain interactions, feedback doesn’t connect to anything you can act on), ask yourself these questions honestly.
Is the feedback specific, or just negative? Good management gives you something to do with the information. Bad management gives you a feeling (you’re not performing, you’re not a good fit) with no actionable path out of it.
Does the standard shift depending on who is doing the work? If two people do the same thing and get different responses, the variable isn’t the work. It’s the relationship with the manager.
Are you performing well everywhere except where your manager is directly involved? If your output is strong but “attitude” or “communication” keeps appearing in reviews (always vague, never specific), that’s worth examining carefully.
Has your confidence dropped significantly since joining this team? This is the quietest signal and often the most important one. Because bad management doesn’t always produce visible conflict. Sometimes it just slowly convinces you that you are the problem when the evidence says something entirely different.
What good actually looks like
Folayemi Agusto, co-founder of Tix Africa, started doing Kahoot quizzes with her team of four every Friday during COVID: a small, deliberate act of connection in a year when everything felt disconnected.
Six years later, the team is still doing it.
Daniel’s baseline as a manager: whatever accountability applies to the team applies to him. No exceptions. No title exemptions.
Kim’s test for every manager she develops: “Are you measuring whether people succeed, or are you giving them what they need to succeed? Because those are not the same thing.”
These are not expensive programs or structural overhauls.
They are decisions made by specific people to treat the people around them like human beings with limits, lives, and a genuine capacity to do excellent work.
That is the formula.
What makes it rare isn’t the knowledge, it’s the willingness.
Before you go
If you are a manager reading this:
The people on your team are not underperforming in a vacuum.
They are performing inside the environment you create every single day.
Before the next performance review, before the next escalation to HR, ask yourself one honest question:
Am I giving them what they need to succeed, or am I just keeping score of whether they do?
Those are not the same job.
One is management.
The other is surveillance with a title.
If you are an employee reading this:
The discomfort you are carrying is not always a personal failing.
Sometimes it is a signal that the system you are in was not designed for someone like you, that the manager you report to is operating without accountability, without training, and without anyone above them asking the right questions.
Survival and thriving are not the same thing.
And if you have been in survival mode for so long that it has started to feel normal, I need you to hear this clearly:
That is not the standard. That is the symptom of something negative.
I’ll be back in 14 days.
See you then.
Best regards,
Isaac, son of Adewumi.
P.S. To Olapeju Akanbi and every HR manager who has ever received a “performance issue” escalation, gone one layer deeper, and found a manager instead of a problem employee; thank you for doing that.
P.P.S. If you’ve worked under a manager who hoarded feedback until it was too late, ran a team on fear and called it high standards, or made you feel like surviving was the performance benchmark, my DMs are open.
Because silence is permission.
And I’m done being silent.
Are you?