Responsibility is one of those things that many people say they want until they discover what it requires. People want greater authority, better compensation, larger titles and more influence, but responsibility is not primarily a reward. It is a form of trust. Before a leader gives you something important to own, the leader must believe that you will protect it, apply sound judgment and deliver the expected outcome without needing to be pursued constantly.
This is particularly important in the workplace. A company cannot grow if every meaningful task must return to the founder or if every employee must be monitored before doing what they promised to do. The organization grows when more people become capable of carrying important work independently and reliably.
Recently, two separate incidents made me think more deeply about what it means to become that kind of person.
Divided commitment eventually appears in the work
We have recently encountered people who were working more than one full-time job without being transparent about it. In some cases, they eventually had to resign because their performance at Eazipay had become average or mediocre. Their divided attention was already appearing in the quality, speed and reliability of their work before we knew what was causing it.
One incident was particularly revealing. As our payroll business has grown, we have continued to serve more Nigerian companies. One of the businesses enrolling on Eazipay happened to employ someone who also worked with us. Our system includes controls designed to detect potential duplicate payroll payments, and it alerted us that the same person appeared to be receiving a salary from both companies.
The fundamental issue was not simply that the person had another source of income. People may undertake consulting work, run small businesses or pursue other interests where their employment terms permit it. The problem arises when someone secretly takes on competing full-time obligations and can no longer fulfil the commitment already made to an employer. It becomes a question of honesty, judgment and performance.
When a company employs you full-time, it is not merely purchasing the visible hours during which you attend meetings. It is trusting you with attention, responsiveness, creative energy and responsibility for outcomes. If another full-time commitment makes you unavailable, consistently late or mentally absent, you are no longer giving what you agreed to give.
The lesson for me was simple: trust is difficult to separate from truthfulness. You cannot become someone people trust with greater responsibility while concealing facts that materially affect your ability to deliver. Even where the work initially appears manageable, divided commitment eventually leaves evidence. It appears in missed details, slower responses, inconsistent output and the excuses that begin to surround ordinary assignments.
Responsibility requires range
The second incident came from a conversation with our head of engineering about how engineers are using AI.
Over many years of leadership, I have noticed that when people are asked to do something outside the area in which they are already comfortable, the first attempt is often mediocre. The explanation is usually that the assignment is not their specialty or that they have never done it before. After experiencing this repeatedly, a leader can become reluctant to give people unfamiliar responsibilities.
That reluctance, however, creates a ceiling for both the employee and the company. If people can only do what they have always done, the organization must keep hiring another person for every new problem. The employees also remain trapped inside increasingly narrow job descriptions.
Our head of engineering had encouraged some backend engineers to attempt frontend work because AI tools now make it easier to cross technical boundaries. The result was so poor that he eventually told them not to attempt frontend work again. What made the experience surprising was not that a backend engineer failed to produce the work of a world-class designer on the first attempt. It was that people with a strong technical foundation, access to intelligent agents and almost unlimited learning resources still produced work that showed insufficient care and initiative.
We live in an age in which access to information is no longer the primary limitation it once was. A person can learn unfamiliar concepts, study strong examples, ask an AI agent to explain a process, generate an initial version, examine the result and continue correcting it. Someone who already understands software engineering has an even greater advantage when moving from one part of product development to another.
This does not mean expertise has become irrelevant. It means that “this is not my area” can no longer be an automatic excuse for producing careless work. There is a difference between needing time to master a discipline and refusing to think beyond the narrowest interpretation of your role.
People who can be trusted with responsibility are willing to learn what the outcome requires. They do not abandon standards merely because the task is new. They ask questions, study examples, use the available tools and keep improving the work until it becomes respectable. Their first attempt may not be perfect, but it demonstrates seriousness.
The first person who must trust you is you
Becoming trustworthy begins with the standards you maintain when nobody is watching. Many people perform when a supervisor is present or when an immediate reward is visible. We often call this eye service. The person appears diligent when recognition is available but relaxes when the work itself must provide the motivation.
Long-term responsibility cannot be built on eye service because important work frequently happens outside public view. The difficult analysis, repeated corrections, private learning and extra attention that produce excellent work may never be seen directly. People may only see the final outcome.
You must therefore trust yourself to pursue excellence without requiring constant applause. You must be able to picture what you can become and believe that the discipline you practise today is preparing you for responsibilities you do not yet have.
There is a saying that the reward for hard work is more work. That may sound unfair until you understand that greater work often brings greater influence, capacity and opportunity. People continue giving important assignments to the person who has proved capable of carrying them. Responsibility compounds.
However, this growth requires discomfort. You will have to learn and relearn. You will have to take bold steps, attempt unfamiliar work and accept correction. You will sometimes discover that the standard you considered excellent was only average. A person who always protects their ego cannot expand their capacity.
Become uncomfortable with unnecessary slowness
One quality I increasingly value is speed. This does not mean careless haste. It means refusing to spend hours or days on work that can be completed properly in minutes with the tools now available.
I recently finished a meeting in which someone suggested that we spend time going through several ideas and discussing how to execute them. My immediate question was: why are we using the meeting to begin thinking about something that an AI agent can help us resolve immediately?
I took screenshots of three relevant pages, explained the problem to an AI tool, made the necessary adjustments to the design in Figma and prepared the corrections for implementation. The process took about ten minutes.
The point is not that every problem can be solved in ten minutes or that people should accept the first answer generated by AI. The point is that the cost of producing, testing and improving a first version has fallen dramatically. If your old process takes two days, you should be asking whether the task still deserves two days. If the answer is yes, you should be able to explain what those two days are buying in quality, safety or judgment.
Someone trusted with responsibility learns to distinguish between work that requires deep patience and work that is merely moving slowly because nobody has challenged the process. That person thinks on their feet, uses available tools intelligently and shortens the distance between a problem and a useful answer.
Speed also communicates ownership. When an urgent customer problem appears, the responsible person does not allow it to sit unattended while everyone debates whose job it is. They establish the facts, involve the right people and move the issue towards resolution.
Become comfortable with the truth
People who want greater responsibility must become comfortable hearing the truth, particularly when it is unpleasant. Feedback is not always delivered perfectly, but mature people can separate the useful truth from the discomfort of hearing it.
If someone tells you that your work is slow, inconsistent or below the required standard, your first response should not be to construct an explanation that protects your self-image. You should examine the evidence. Is there a recurring pattern? What expectation did you misunderstand? What would excellent work have looked like? What must change before the next assignment?
This is not an invitation to accept abuse or every opinion uncritically. It is a demand for enough humility to investigate feedback before rejecting it. The person who cannot be corrected cannot safely be given increasing responsibility because every mistake will become an argument rather than an opportunity to improve.
Make your word predictable
Trust also depends on consistency. I once gave feedback to a member of staff and explained that I did not know what to expect from him. Sometimes his work was excellent. At other times it was mediocre, and on some occasions the experience was simply frustrating.
That unpredictability affects appraisal because a leader cannot confidently assign critical work to someone whose standard changes from one day to another. Excellence on Monday does not compensate for carelessness on Wednesday when the Wednesday assignment affects a customer, a payment or an important deadline.
To become trustworthy, make your word predictable. When you say you will deliver something, do everything reasonably possible to deliver it when promised and at the agreed standard. If circumstances genuinely change, communicate early. Do not wait until the deadline has passed before explaining a problem you discovered several days earlier.
Predictability does not mean you will never make a mistake. It means people know how you will respond when something goes wrong. They know you will speak honestly, take responsibility, correct the problem and learn from it. Over time, that pattern becomes your reputation.
Care about the customer, not only the assignment
Finally, a person trusted with responsibility must care about what the business exists to do. You do not need to be the founder, but you must have enough belief in the work to care about the customer who depends on it.
If a customer repeatedly encounters a serious problem and your response is always that you do not know what to do, that you are unavailable or that the issue belongs to another department, you are not yet thinking like an owner of outcomes. In a startup especially, job descriptions cannot become hiding places. The company is still developing its systems, and customers cannot wait for the organizational chart to become perfect before receiving help.
Thinking about the customer changes how you work. You ask whether the problem has actually been resolved, not merely whether you sent a message. You examine whether your delay is creating anxiety, financial loss or additional work for someone else. You remain with the problem until there is a clear owner and a credible path to resolution.
That is what responsibility ultimately means: other people can place something valuable in your hands and feel confident that you will not treat it casually.
You become that person through repeated choices. Tell the truth about your commitments. Refuse to use unfamiliarity as an excuse for mediocrity. Learn quickly. Move with urgency where urgency is required. Receive correction without allowing pride to block the lesson. Keep your word, maintain a dependable standard and care about the customer whose problem gives the work its meaning.
The title may come later. The promotion may come later. The greater compensation may come later. Trust comes first, and it is built every time your actions make someone confident that giving you more responsibility will reduce problems rather than create new ones.
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