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10 | The Lion King
Feature
Our People, Our
Greatest Asset
BY Abayomi Orungbe
I
once worked for an organisa-
tion with a mission statement
that began “People are our
most important asset…” and
then completely failed to live up
to it. The result: a cancerous lack
of trust of senior management.
When things went wrong (and
of course they did) there was no
reserve of trust for the manage-
ment to fall back on, and the
company failed.
So… are people generally an
organisation’s most important
asset? This is a million dollar
question that so many leaders
extrovertly run away from.
To some organisations, people
are important to their employ-
ers, but not as important as other
key assets like: The Brand, Fixed
Assets and Profit, etc.
With a lot of organisations, intan-
gible value attached to the
brand exceeds the cost of the
personnel. To an extent that may
be true, but the cost of person-
nel is not the same as their
value. While there is no agreed
monetary measure for this, there
are plenty of different ways of
accounting for Human Capital.
Therefore, let us ask ourselves
again: How valuable are these
intangible assets without the
human capital to put them to
work?
If we recognize the essential
importance of people to the
success of our business, we
will necessarily see a need to
develop a relationship between
people and leaders based upon
mutual benefit. This is not pater-
nalistic, but instead it is based
on individual engagement and
contribution.
Consequently, it is to emphasize
the importance of engaged
leaders, teams, and individuals
in achieving excellent perform-
ance by focusing on clear