Workplace Multiplier by Tola Akinsulire

July 7, 2026

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

What two years of walking the halls bought me

Howdy ,

For two years, I didn't sit at my desk waiting for people to come to me.

I walked departments I had no direct reason to be in. I stood in the lunch line instead of having a table reserved for me. I asked people about their weekend before I ever asked them about their numbers.

None of this was calculated strategy.

It was closer to a discipline…a belief that if I wanted the right to demand more from people later, I had to first understand what their "more" already cost them.

I call this relationship capital. It's not a soft skill. It's an asset. And like any asset, you can spend it…but only if you've actually built it.

Here's where most leadership advice gets this wrong.

It treats relationship-building as a way to make hard conversations easier.

Build enough goodwill, the thinking goes, and your team will take critical feedback without flinching.

I believed a version of this myself for a long time. I don't anymore.

What relationship capital actually buys you

A few weeks ago, my marketing team turned in a set of creatives for an OOH campaign — billboards, the kind of work that's publicly visible and hard to walk back once it's live.

It was genuinely good. A real step up from work they'd submitted before.

I sent a short note:

"The creatives for the OOH are a vast improvement from some of the stuff you have done in the past. Good work on that."

The reply I got back:

"Thanks boss! It's your guidance, and we are tired of turning in 'CRAP.🙃"

Read that again.

A team, on its own, calling its own past work crap...laughing emoji attached, not a hint of defensiveness. That's not a team I praised into complacency.

That's a team that has been pushed hard enough, for long enough, to internalize the standard and start holding themselves to it, even when I'm not in the room.

That reaction didn't happen because I went easy on them. It happened because before I ever pushed hard, I'd spent real time earning the standing to do so.

In my coaching language, this is what we call getting a team to Perform or Own...the point where accountability stops being something you impose and starts being something they carry themselves.

You don't arrive there by being liked. You arrive there by being trusted enough that your critical feedback reads as investment, not judgment.

What relationship capital does not buy you

Here's the part most leadership content leaves out, because it's less flattering: even strong relationship capital does not guarantee a smooth reaction every time you spend it.

The same week as that OOH exchange, I sent a different kind of message…about protecting my time on a colleague's meeting request.

I wrote it the way I write most things: direct, a little blunt, no padding.

It didn't land the way I intended.

Someone else not directly on my team read it as harsh and told me so, in fairly strong terms, on behalf of a colleague who'd put real effort into the work in question.

My first instinct was to defend the reasoning behind what I'd written. And honestly? The reasoning held up.

But here's the fix I had to make myself sit with: reasoning that lives only in your head isn't the same as reasoning that made it into the message.

What the other person receives is the sentence, not the thinking behind it.

A well-reasoned point delivered bluntly can still land as dismissive…no matter how sound the logic, no matter how much relationship equity you think you've banked.

That's what I want to be honest about. Relationship capital didn't stop that moment from stinging. It didn't stop someone I work with from being upset enough to say so directly.

What it did do was keep the relationship intact enough for the conversation to continue instead of rupturing.

It gave me a reason to sit with the feedback instead of dismissing it.

The distinction that actually matters

Relationship capital is not a painkiller. It's a foundation that keeps the structure standing after the hit.

If you're building trust with your team hoping it will make your critical feedback painless to receive, you're building it for the wrong outcome.

You'll be disappointed the first time someone still pushes back hard, even after everything you've invested.

Build it instead because it's the only thing that makes people willing to stay in a hard conversation with you at all.

Because it's the difference between a team that goes quiet when you raise the bar, and a team that says, half-joking, "we're tired of turning in crap ourselves."

Nice doesn't get you there. Neither does results alone.

What gets you there is doing the slow work of the relationship first…and having the humility to know that even after all that work, some conversations will still hurt.

Survivable, not comfortable. That's the standard.

Keep winning at work and in life.

Tola Akinsulire

Your Strategic Workplace Mentor