What Jobberman Taught Me About Leadership: The Day My Boss Celebrated Losing a Star Employee

There is a day at Jobberman I have never forgotten. It taught me more about leadership than any book or course ever has, and it happened quietly, almost in passing.

I joined Jobberman in 2013, fresh off my first interview and still finding my feet in the corporate world. By 2015, the company was still young, only a few years old, but it was buzzing with ambition. We had just moved into a brand new office: 15th floor, Elephant House, 214 Broad Street, right in the heart of Lagos Island. New space, new energy, everybody feeling like we were part of something that was going somewhere.

Then one of our best talents got a job at McKinsey.

He was one of our product people, a UX designer, and a very good one. McKinsey, the global consulting giant, had looked at the Nigerian talent market and decided that one of the people they wanted was sitting right there in our office. The offer on the table was over one million naira. In 2015, for a young designer in Lagos, that was life changing money.

Now, here is where I expected the story to go the way these stories usually go. I expected tension. I expected the boss to feel slighted, to take it personally, to make the exit difficult, to let a little bitterness creep in. We have all seen it. Someone announces they are leaving for somewhere bigger, and suddenly the warmth drains out of the room. The person who built something feels abandoned, and the person leaving is made to feel guilty for growing.

That is not what happened.

Our co-founder, Lekan Oludé, was genuinely happy. Not fake happy. Not polite happy. Proud. He was proud that a company like McKinsey had looked at the people we were building at Jobberman and found one of them valuable enough to headhunt. To him, it was proof of something. If a global firm wanted our talent, then we were growing the right kind of people. We were a place where real talent was being formed.

And he let the young man go cleanly. As I recall, all that was required was for him to repay one month’s salary, part of the terms at the time, and he was free to walk into his new life. No drama. No bad blood. No attempt to hold anyone hostage out of ego. They parted on good terms, and everyone in that office felt it.

I remember standing there thinking, so this is what a secure leader looks like.

It was one of the first times I had ever seen a boss respond that way. Most people, when they lose a star player, feel the loss first. They think about the gap, the inconvenience, the cost of replacing someone good. But Lekan looked at the bigger picture. He understood that you cannot build great people and also expect to keep them forever. Sometimes the mark of how good your company is shows up in who comes to take your people away.

That day quietly shaped how I think about work and leadership, and I have carried the lessons with me ever since.

The first lesson is that great leaders build people, not cages. If you are good at developing talent, the world will notice your talent, and some of them will leave for bigger rooms. That is not failure. That is evidence that you did your job well.

The second lesson is that how you let people go matters just as much as how you bring them in. The designer left on warm terms, and I am certain he still speaks well of Jobberman to this day. People remember how you treated them on the way out far longer than they remember the salary you paid them.

The third lesson is about abundance. A small mind sees a departing employee as a loss. A big mind sees a company that produces McKinsey level talent as a company worth being part of. One of those mindsets attracts more great people. The other quietly pushes them away.

I was still early in my career then, just a young man watching how the senior people handled things. But that single moment, a boss smiling because a global firm had come for one of us, told me everything about the kind of place I had joined and the kind of leader I wanted to become.

Years later, it still guides how I think about the people I work with. Help them grow. Celebrate them when they fly. And never, ever confuse keeping someone with leading them well.