The Authentic Leader — Rebuilding the Payments Squad

A four-round, intermediate leadership-development simulation set inside Sahel Digital Services Ltd., a Lagos technology-services firm (620 employees, NGN 9.4 billion revenue, 28% attrition). On Monday 6 April 2026 you are appointed lead of the business-critical 12-person Payments Platform Squad — the same morning the firm's largest client (NGN 1.6 billion ARR, 17% of revenue) issues a 90-day notice to re-tender, citing instability. The previous lead was walked out on Friday for bullying. Team trust sits at 2.4/5 and engagement at 2.7/5 (both bottom-quartile), two senior engineers holding ~70% of platform knowledge have competitor offers, and on day one a junior privately discloses that one of those seniors has been inflating completed-ticket counts — the exact metric the client is now auditing. You have no honeymoon. Playing the new lead, you operationalise Henry Onukwuba's four components of authentic leadership under deadline pressure: (1) DIAGNOSE the trust collapse and your own authentic stance — distinguishing people, process and prior-leadership causes, and deciding what NOT to promise in week one (self-awareness); (2) RUN the first listening session — choosing how to open, how much vulnerability to disclose, and co-creating 3–4 norms rather than arriving with a finished turnaround plan (relational transparency); (3) CHOOSE one development/retention action under pressure — a stay-interview round, a stretch promotion, a team skills investment, reactive retention bonuses, or knowledge redistribution — sequenced against the 14-day client deadline and consistent with the norms just set (balanced processing); and (4) RESOLVE the values conflict — confronting the inflated tickets restoratively without throwing the engineer under the bus or covering up, protecting the team's integrity with the client, and projecting the four 90-day KPIs (internalized moral perspective). The math rewards calibrated transparency, behaviourally-consistent norms, proactive non-coercive retention and an honest restorative resolution — and punishes the five classic errors the facilitator decision tree exposes: arriving with a plan before listening, over-disclosing and dumping anxiety on the team, solving flight risk with bonus-only counter-offers that teach the team that threats get rewarded, burying the dishonesty to keep the engineer (turning one lie into the leader's cover-up), and violating in week two the norms set in week one. Final KPIs track Trust, Engagement, Performance and 90-day Retention probability — with a Behavioural-Integrity gauge that penalises any action contradicting a stated norm.