Calling the Chairman by His First Name Is Either Teamwork or a Firing Offense, Depending on the Day

🇧🇯 Benin · 🇳🇬 Nigeria

By Priya Mehta, The Global Office

A Nigerian bank trainee recently called her chairman "Tony" at a company event and was publicly corrected on the spot, told to use "Mr Elumelu" instead — even though the same bank reportedly promotes first-name address across ranks as part of its culture, and the same chairman had been called "Tony" without objection at a Stanford event two years earlier (The Guardian Nigeria). It's a small, viral moment that captures something real: Nigerian office social rituals are famously warm and performed with genuine enthusiasm, right up until they brush against who actually holds power. Next door in Benin, a smaller, French-administered civil-service culture runs on a quieter, older-fashioned social script — shared meals, formal greetings, proverbs about patience — where the hierarchy was never pretending to be anything else.

Do's & Don'ts

🇧🇯 Benin

🇳🇬 Nigeria

Benin

Office social ritual in Benin runs on a French-administered civil-service inheritance, formal but warm. Business guides aimed at incoming partners describe meetings that open with genuine small talk and well-being check-ins before any substance, formal address by surname, and shared meals treated as the actual mechanism for building trust rather than a logistical necessity (ClickUp business etiquette guide for Benin). One recurring proverb captures the expected pace: "Patience can cook a stone" — a line hosts reportedly offer newcomers who are visibly rushing a decision.

Practically, this shows up in benefits as much as behavior: a 13th-month salary, meal vouchers or subsidized canteen access, and transport allowances are described as standard supplemental benefits across employers (Rivermate Benin employment guide), on top of a 40-hour standard week. The ritual and the compensation structure both point the same direction — relationship and provision over speed and individual flash.

Nigeria

Nigerian office social rituals are, by most accounts, genuinely warm, performed enthusiastically, and more collective than transactional — colleagues describe close personal bonds, informal nicknames, and a real emotional register at work, with one tech worker summing up her team as having "a good working and personal relationship," especially among fellow Nigerians on staff (Zikoko, first-person accounts). The "food manager" office archetype — someone who takes lunch orders, collects money, and coordinates delivery for the group — functions as a genuine daily bonding ritual, not just an administrative task (Zikoko's "7 People You'll Meet in Every Nigerian Office").

The catch is that the informality has a ceiling, and that ceiling is exactly where hierarchy actually lives. Organizations that promote first-name, flat-feeling culture don't always mean it evenly: the viral UBA incident is instructive precisely because the bank's own stated culture encourages first names across ranks, right up until a junior employee applied it to the chairman in public. A columnist's verdict on the episode was blunt — "hierarchy disguised as egalitarianism" — and it's a dynamic plenty of Nigerian office workers recognize even without a viral video to point to (The Guardian Nigeria).

The Reckoning

Here's the real contrast: Benin's office culture is formally hierarchical and openly says so — nobody is confused about who outranks whom, and the social rituals (greetings, titles, shared meals) are designed to soften that hierarchy without disguising it. Nigeria's office culture often performs flatness — first names, group lunches, after-hours bonding, a genuinely collectivist social register — while the actual power structure stays as rigid as anywhere else, which is exactly what makes moments like the "Tony" correction land as a public reveal rather than old news.

For a foreign hire, that means reading the room very differently in each country. In Benin, formality is the entire signal, and you calibrate your warmth inside clearly marked boundaries. In Nigeria, the warmth is usually genuine and the invitation to informality is usually real — but you test how far it extends with someone below the top of the chart before you test it with someone at the top.

The Part the Brochure Left Out

Zikoko (Nigerian lifestyle platform, reader-submitted accounts) — Kelechi, 21, a UX designer at a US-based startup working remotely, described the team's virtual after-hours hangouts as genuine relationship-building, not just scheduled fun: "we have nice hangouts – remotely of course – and get to know each other and bond outside of work."

Zikoko (Nigerian lifestyle platform, reader-submitted accounts) — Israel, 21, recalled a small but telling kindness from a supervisor who noticed he was having a rough day and asked if he "wanted some loud to make my day better" — not a formal team ritual, but exactly the kind of informal care that makes Nigerian office relationships feel more personal than purely professional.

The Guardian Nigeria (columnist Onome Amawhe, on the viral UBA "Tony" incident) — Describing the double standard exposed when a trainee calling the bank's chairman by his first name was publicly corrected despite the bank's own first-name culture, Amawhe's verdict was pointed: the practice amounts to "hierarchy disguised as egalitarianism" once you watch who it actually applies to.

Rivermate Benin employment guide (official HR/compliance reporting) — Benin's supplemental benefit structure — 13th-month pay, meal vouchers or canteen access, transport allowances — is presented as close to standard practice across employers, a provision-first approach to office relationships that contrasts with Nigeria's more bonus-and-recognition-driven incentive culture.

A note on sourcing: Reddit, Quora, and Internations returned essentially no fetchable first-person content for Benin specifically, and limited results for this exact pairing on Nigeria; the voices above were sourced from Zikoko's reader-submitted accounts and named Nigerian press commentary instead.

Conclusion

If you want an office culture where the rules are stated plainly and the social rituals exist to make a known hierarchy pleasant rather than to hide it, Benin will feel refreshingly honest once you learn the formality. If you want genuine warmth, real collective bonding, and a workplace that feels more like extended family, Nigeria delivers that in spades — just watch very carefully which parts of the flat, friendly culture actually apply once you're standing in front of the person at the very top.