Workplace Multiplier by Tola Akinsulire

July 14, 2026

Welcome to the Workplace Multiplier newsletter. Published Monday to Friday, equipping you to achieve your professional goals faster and without burnout or overwhelm.

The Trust You Can Call On…Close to a Decade and a Half Later

Howdy ,

Last week, I ran into an old colleague we hadn't seen in close to a decade and a half. I was waiting for a friend who was going to link me up with someone else who could help for something I was trying to get.

I got there a few minutes before my friend, so I waited outside for him to arrive. It was while I was waiting that this old colleague arrived at the same place. After we caught up on the years we had missed, he asked what I was doing there.

At that point, my friend joined us. Once we told him our mission, we all went in. Interestingly, about 4-6 minutes after we went in, he saw someone else who could help. And they did…immediately.

I closed what I wanted to do earlier and faster because of an old colleague. This old colleague had an interesting thing he used to do when we worked together.

When he went client prospecting, he was usually quick to agree to whatever requirements the clients asked for… even stuff we hadn't developed.

I was usually the guy saddled with the job of making sure his clients got what he promised them. Sometimes I had to get them ready for demo meetings in short time order.

I still remember one of those promises. To deliver on demo day, I had to learn how to use Microsoft FrontPage (this probably dates me) to develop a website, create a database, and run individualized log-in access to individual contributors' investment reports.

I did. And he signed up the client. After the client said "Yes," I said, "Oya, call IT department to develop the real thing for you now o."

That investment from those years generated a level of trust in the relationship between us that I could still call upon close to a decade and a half later.

Here's what I want you to see in that story. What he was cashing in, all those years later, wasn't luck, and it wasn't a favour he was owed.

It was the Follow-Through Trust Test…one of the Five Trust Tests I teach…and I'd passed it so completely that he never had to think about it again.

Follow-Through isn't about the one time you deliver. It's about whether people can stop watching. He never checked up on whether the client's promise would hold.

He never needed to. That's what passing the test actually buys you…not gratitude, but release from being monitored.

Most people fail this test quietly. Not by lying. By delivering just enough to avoid a complaint, never enough to be trusted unsupervised.

And the world doesn't punish that immediately…it punishes it later, the way it almost cost me a faster path last week, except this time I was the one who'd built the trust, not the one who hadn't.

So this isn't a task for your to-do list. It's a test you're sitting, whether you know it or not, in every commitment you're carrying right now. And like any test, you don't pass it once.

You pass it the way character is always proven…repeatedly, including on the days nobody's checking your work.

The good book puts it plainly: "He who is faithful in what is least is faithful also in much." The FrontPage moment wasn't the test. It was evidence I'd already been passing smaller versions of it for years before that client ever showed up.

So ask yourself, honestly: on the promises you're carrying right now…the ones nobody's watching…are you building the kind of Follow-Through that lets people stop checking on you?

Or are you still being managed, one deadline at a time?

That difference is the whole distance between close to a decade and a half of trust, and a résumé of "did what was expected."

Keep winning at work and in life.

Tola Akinsulire 
Your Strategic Workplace Mentor