When I graduated from university and was posted to a multinational oil marketing company here in Ghana, one of the first things they did was sit us down for orientation. Somewhere between the health and safety briefing and the dress code policy, a line manager said something that quietly unsettled me: “In this company, we operate a first-name policy. You will address everyone — from your line manager to the Managing Director — by their first name.”

I remember shifting in my seat. Not because I didn’t understand English, but because everything in me rebelled against what I was hearing.

I am a Tadi boy. In my house, and in every compound in Kwesimintsim where I grew up, respect for elders was not a suggestion — it was the air we breathed.

We did not call an older person by their bare name. We preceded it with something: Brɛda (brother) for the young men older than us, Sister for the young women, Auntie and Uncle for the ones who had earned that title simply by being older, and heaven help you if you tried that with a grandfather or a grandmother. You greeted properly, you lowered your voice a little, you let the elder finish speaking before you did. This was not fear. It was training in humility.

So there I was, fresh out of school, being told by a multinational that all of that was to be set aside at the office door.

I struggled. I really did not succeed, if I am honest. With the “aunties” especially — the older female colleagues who reminded me so much of the women who raised me — I simply could not bring myself to drop the “Auntie.” It felt disrespectful in my bones, no matter what the policy said.

Some of the men made it even harder for me to hold my ground, whether I liked it or not. The Finance Director, for one, would not let “Sir” pass quietly. Call him that in a meeting and he would shout on the spot — “My name is not Sir!” — and then state his own first name plainly, insisting that was what you should call him, there and then, in front of everyone. Though I confess, I never fully believed he meant it in his heart. There was always something in the way he carried himself in a room that told me the title still mattered to him, policy or no policy.

Where I did manage to comply fully was in official emails. There is something about the written word, at a safe distance from the person, that made it easier. I was not standing in front of them, searching their face for permission. By the time we were a few months in, most of us young graduates had settled into an uneasy compromise: first names for the younger colleagues and the ones who insisted, “Auntie” and “Uncle” quietly preserved for those we could not bring ourselves to strip of that honour.

A Familiar Story, Told on a Bigger Stage
I was reminded of all this recently when a video went viral out of Nigeria. A young graduate, at the passing-out ceremony of a major bank’s management training programme, stood up in front of the outgoing Group Chairman — a widely respected investor and businessman in his sixties — and greeted him with, “Good morning, Tony.”

He did not let it pass. He told her, plainly but firmly, that she should call him “Mr. Elumelu” or by his initials — not by his first name, and certainly not in that manner. He added that he did not subscribe to that kind of foreign, “oyibo” way of doing things.

To her credit, she did not dig in her heels. She corrected herself immediately — “Good morning, Mr. Elumelu” — and went on to ask her question. Watching the clip, I found myself nodding at her composure. It takes something to be corrected in front of a full hall and still find your footing to speak. That kind of confidence will serve her well in a corporate world that increasingly rewards people who can hold themselves together under pressure.

But I also found myself thinking about that hall full of young Nigerian graduates, many of whom — like me, years ago — had probably been raised the same way I was. Taught to bow slightly when greeting an elder. Taught that in some homes, greeting means kneeling, or in parts of Nigeria, even prostrating fully on the ground before an elder. And yet here she was, in a room full of her own people, on African soil, reaching for the very “first-name culture” that so many of these corporate orientation programmes now import wholesale from the West.

I do not think she was wrong to be confident. I think she was simply, for a moment, standing in the wrong terrain with the wrong map.

Policy Is Not the Same as Culture
Here is what I have come to understand, years after that orientation room in Accra: a company’s internal policy does not override the culture of the society it operates in — especially not in front of the very elders that culture teaches you to honour.

A first-name policy inside a boardroom, between colleagues of roughly the same age and standing, trying to break down hierarchy so that ideas can flow more freely — that, I understand. There is real value in an organisation where a graduate trainee does not feel too intimidated to challenge a senior manager’s thinking in a meeting. But there is a difference between informality as a tool for collaboration and informality as a blanket erasure of age, seniority, and the quiet debts of respect that our societies are built on.

The wisdom is in reading the room. Is this an email, at a safe distance, where the policy is expected and understood by both parties? Or is this a public gathering, in front of elders and dignitaries, where the older, deeper cultural script is the one actually being watched? A policy handed down in an HR manual does not always know the difference. You have to.

What I found most instructive about that viral moment, however, was not the slip. It was the recovery.

She did not argue. She did not insist she was right because “the programme trained us to do this.” She heard the correction, adjusted immediately, and moved forward with grace. That, to me, is the real lesson — not for young graduates alone, but for all of us navigating spaces where the written policy and the unwritten culture pull in different directions.

We Africans pride ourselves, rightly, on our regard for elders. But that regard should not make us brittle when a young person makes an honest mistake reaching for confidence in unfamiliar terrain.

Equally, our young people, dazzled as they sometimes are by the language of “flat hierarchies” and “first-name cultures” borrowed from elsewhere, must learn to read their audience — to know that Accra is not always Amsterdam, and a graduation hall in Lagos is not a Silicon Valley open-plan office.

Confidence will take you far in this corporate world we are all trying to rise in.

But confidence paired with cultural discernment — knowing when to lead with your voice and when to lead with “Auntie,” “Uncle,” or “Sir” — will take you further still. And when you get it wrong, as we all sometimes will, may we all have the grace that young lady showed: to correct ourselves quickly, without excuse, and continue with dignity.

That, more than any HR policy, is the true first-name culture worth building.

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Author: Felix Ekow Eshun

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