Some years ago I was in charge of a small section of Navy people. There was me, a couple of other slightly more junior officers and a handful of non-commissioned sailors one of which was an indigenous Australian. As was often the case in those days he’d be ‘given’ a nick-name Sooty, probably on the day he joined the Navy. He didn’t seem to mind being called Sooty but I refrained from doing so as it seemed disrespectful in some way. That might sound like positive leadership behaviour but its not the case. You see I called the other sailors by their nicknames: Smouch, Jacko, Dusty etc but I addressed Sooty as ‘Leader’ which was the abbreviated, slightly formal version based on his rank, Leading Seaman. In trying to be respectful I was in fact excluding him in the way I addressed him.