At a graduation ceremony for UBA’s Graduate Management Accelerated Programme, a trainee stood to address the bank’s Group Chairman: “Good morning, Tony”. Elumelu, visibly caught off guard, asked if she’d meant to say “Toyin”. She hadn’t. “No, you won’t call me Tony”, he replied. “You’ll call me Mr. Elumelu or TOE… I don’t subscribe to that kind of Oyinbo life, okay?” She corrected herself and moved on. The exchange lasted seconds. The internet did not let it end there.
What followed wasn’t really a debate about first names. It was two legitimate cultural logics colliding inside the same organisation.
The case for the trainee
The trainee’s instinct may not have been disrespect, it may have been socialisation. Modern corporate culture has spent two decades flattening hierarchy: open-door policies, first-name norms, and “call me by my first name” as a signal of accessibility. A 2025 workforce study found that 42% of managers claim Gen Z employees introduced a more casual workplace environment (Cake.com, 2025). This suggests the trainee was not acting out of individual rudeness but out of a generational pattern she had been systematically trained to adopt.
Similar, Amy Edmondson’s seminal 1999 research on psychological safety showed that teams with high psychological safety learn faster because members admit errors and ask questions without fear of humiliation (Edmondson, 1999). This suggest creating more accessibility can aid productivity. This is precisely why global workplaces, from Silicon Valley to Singapore, continue to encourage informality as a productivity tool, not merely a cultural preference.
If, however, an organisation rooted in African society decide to consistently cultivates Western-style informality through flat reporting structures, first-name policies, and open-door leadership. This trainee may simply have learned that lesson well and may not be acting out of malice but out of the very culture the organisation itself had imported and nurtured.
There is a Yoruba proverb for this: Akii tí ẹsẹ̀ bodo, kí a tún wà má kígbe òtútù, put your foot in the river, and you don’t get to complain the water is cold. An organisation that cultivates informality can’t be shocked when its people practice it back.
The case against her
The critical distinction the initial defense misses are:
- Generational pattern is not a universal pass: Geert Hofstede’s research on power distance explains why this collision was inevitable. Nigeria, like most African nations, scores high on power distance: hierarchy is not merely organisational convenience but existential inequality, “endorsed by the followers as much as by the leaders” (Hofstede, 2001). In such cultures, a single person can be “Tony” to friends, “TOE” to peers, and “Mr. Elumelu” to a graduate trainee at a formal ceremony. These aren’t contradictions, they’re different relational registers.
- Accessibility is not the same as an absence of context: A CEO can be “Tony” in the boardroom over coffee, but “Mr. Elumelu” on a podium receiving graduates. Edward T. Hall, the anthropologist who pioneered intercultural communication theory, would recognise this immediately. In Beyond Culture (1976), Hall distinguished between high-context and low-context communication. In high-context cultures (like many African and Asian societies) much of the meaning is carried by the physical and relational context or is already internalised by the participants, while relatively little is contained in the explicit words themselves (Hall, 1976). Hall’s distinction remains useful, even though cultures rarely fit neatly into either category. In a Nigerian setting, forms of address routinely carry relational information that extends beyond the literal words: age, status, occasion and familiarity all shape what an apparently simple greeting communicates.
Therefore, when a Nigerian trainee applies Silicon Valley informality to a Lagos boardroom, she is not necessarily being disrespectful; she is translating a low-context signal into a high-context environment without realising the context has changed.
The Yoruba Adage, “Tí a bá rán ni ní iṣẹ́ ẹrú, a fi ti ọmọ jẹ́ ní,” (If one is sent on the errand of a slave, one executes it with the thoughtfulness of a child”.) reminds us that an instruction requires not merely obedience but judgement and discretion.
Consequently, the trainee did not fail because she was Gen Z; she failed because she lacked ritual intelligence (the ability to read the emotional and symbolic weight of a moment). The organisation taught her informality; it did not teach her when to temporarily suspend it. That is not entirely her fault, but it is entirely her responsibility.
The fourth actor: the algorithm
Twenty years ago, this stays a minor, forgettable correction. Today it becomes content — and content changes the physics of the interaction entirely. What began as Elumelu addressing a trainee became Elumelu, trainee, camera, platform, commentariat, algorithm, and millions of readings none of the original participants controlled.
Marshall McLuhan’s famous dictum that “the medium is the message” has never been more urgent (McLuhan, 1964). McLuhan argued that the personal and social consequences of any medium result from “the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves”. The camera doesn’t understand context. The algorithm doesn’t understand embarrassment. A ten-second clip becomes a referendum on someone’s character, and both parties likely lost control of what their moment meant the second it was uploaded.
The sender asks what they meant; the public asks what it says about them; the algorithm asks only what will travel. That last actor is now the most powerful one in the room.
Learnable Lessons
For Communicators
Twenty years ago, this might have remained a brief workplace interaction. The original communication would have been: Elumelu → trainee.
Today, it became content. Web 2.0 transformed it into: Elumelu → trainee → camera → social media → algorithms → public interpretation.
The camera does not capture context, it captures moments. The algorithm gave it a second life. And that creates a new communication reality: a corporate executive may think he is having a brief human moment. The smartphone may think otherwise.
For the camera does not understand context, the algorithm does not understand embarrassment, and the repost does not preserve nuance. Hence, the message sent is not necessarily the message received, and the message received is not necessarily the message amplified. This is why a ten-second clip can become a referendum on an individual’s personality, leadership philosophy or cultural values — because the internet rarely waits for the complete story before forming an opinion.
The incident therefore illustrates an increasingly important principle: today, communicators must think about a fourth actor. The algorithm, which can determine which interpretation travels furthest, is no longer external to the crisis; it is part of its architecture.
For leaders and for employees
Leadership teaches culture whether it means to or not. Encourage informality, and people become informal. Encourage boldness, and some of that boldness will eventually be aimed back at you in ways you didn’t anticipate. Put your foot in the river, and the water was always going to be cold. That is not betrayal, it is the culture working exactly as designed.
For employees: confidence doesn’t cancel context. You can be bold without being careless, modern without being tone-deaf. Know exactly when “Mr. Elumelu” is the sharper choice than “Tony.” Don’t be more western than the west, African societies have historically placed considerable importance on relational codes of age, status, kinship and respect, and those codes do not automatically disappear when someone enters a modern organisation. If you don’t want to embarrass yourself and your family, remember what the Yoruba say: “Ọmọ tó bá sọ ilé nù, ó sọ àpò ìyá kò” — a child who throws away the home has hung his bag of humiliation.
Conclusion
If the question is who is wrong, the honest answer is both — the answer nobody wants but the one that actually teaches something. For the trainee, cultural intelligence ultimately requires reading the room before choosing the register. For the organisation, the standard is the one Elumelu himself set: if it does not subscribe to that kind of Oyinbo life, it cannot selectively import Silicon Valley informality and expect employees to sense, unaided, where that informality ends. The trainee’s instinct is legible inside modern organisational culture, where informality signals accessibility. Elumelu’s correction is legible inside African norms around age, status, and address. But reducing this to “young people have no respect” versus “elders are too rigid” explains nothing.
The real lesson is not about Tony or Toyin. It is about meaning.
The same word can communicate equality in one culture, familiarity in another, and disrespect in a third. The effective communicator therefore asks not only: “What did I say?” but: “What did my words mean in this context?” And in the age of Web 2.0: “What will this look like when someone who knows nothing about the context sees it?”
Because once the camera starts recording, private intention becomes public interpretation. And once the algorithm starts distributing it, public interpretation becomes public judgement.
That is why the modern communicator needs both cultural intelligence and communication intelligence. The best communicator knows not only what to say, but what it will mean, and how far it will travel.
Ishola Nasirudeen Ayodele, FIMC-CMC, is a strategic communication practitioner, author and Dean of the School of Impactful Communication (TSIC). He specialises in message engineering and strategic communication. He is the author of PR Case Studies: Mastering the Trade. He can be reached via ishopr2015@gmail.com
