Ask any room in Nigeria whether the country should be different, and every hand in the room goes up. Ask who will stay in the office two extra hours to fix the broken process that would move it one inch forward, and the room empties. This is not a national moral catastrophe.
This is human. Everybody wants a change. Very few want the work the change requires. And once you understand that, you understand something about every team, every project, and every professional relationship you will ever be in.
You have felt the frustration. It shows up late at night, usually to no one in particular: why don’t they care as much as I do? The team member who read your document at 60% comprehension. The colleague who agreed to the deadline and blew past it without a word.
The peer who came to the meeting with none of the reading done. And you, meanwhile, are still up at 1 a.m. re-editing the deck for the third time, wondering if this is going to be another week where you carry it alone.
If you have felt that, welcome to working life. And now here is the hard turn: your first job is not to fix them. Your first job is to stop taking it personally.
Because here is the truth—not everyone around you is at your level of commitment, and they do not have to be. Your commitment is a function of your role and your responsibility.
You are the one whose name is on the outcome. They are not. It is entirely possible for a colleague or a subordinate to be a good, decent, honest professional—showing up, doing solid work, going home on time—without also being consumed by the mission the way you are consumed. That is not moral failure. That is a normal working life. What is abnormal is you expecting everyone in the building to burn at your temperature.
Now here is where it splits, because this problem wears two different faces.
When it is a direct report, you at least have room to act. You can match the ask to the person. You can move the heavy carrying to the small circle of your team whose role actually demands it, and let the wider team do lighter, competent, on-time work without the added guilt of a fire you never gave them the assignment for.
Deep responsibility for deep work; lighter alignment for lighter work. Stop asking rubber-band-level commitment to do glass-level tasks, and stop punishing people for not being who you are. Design around the gap. That is what leadership is for.
But when it is a colleague—a peer, another department head, a partner on a joint project—the work is harder, because you have no authority over them. You cannot restructure a peer. You cannot rewrite their job description. And this is where most senior professionals lose the plot. You take the gap personally. You start reading every missed follow-up as disrespect, every casual comfort with mediocrity as an insult to your effort. You draft angry emails you never send. You mentally add the colleague to a private list of people who don’t get it. And every time you have to work with them, the resentment shows up before the meeting does.
Here is what actually works with peers, and it is a ladder, you climb it one rung at a time, not all three at once.
Rung one: have the conversation. Not a passive-aggressive comment in the group chat. Not a sighed complaint to a mutual friend. A direct, professional, private conversation where you name the gap plainly. I noticed the deliverable was late by two weeks. What happened, and what do we need to change so it doesn’t happen again?
Most gaps close at this rung, because most people are simply operating on whatever pressure the environment is applying to them, and a peer applying respectful, direct pressure is often enough. The mistake here is skipping this rung out of politeness and jumping straight to resentment. Have the conversation. Adults respond to adult communication.
Rung two: put it in writing. If the conversation does not shift things, the next move is documentation. Not a paper trail to build a case against them, but the normal apparatus of professional work: meeting minutes with clear owners and dates, follow-up emails that restate what was agreed, status updates that name deliverables and their state.
Writing changes behaviour on its own, because a gap that lives in a WhatsApp voice note is deniable, but a gap that lives in an emailed minute with a name and a date beside it is not. Most of the time, this rung is enough. People sit up when the record is visible.
Rung three: let leadership see for themselves. If the gap continues after conversation and documentation, the mature move is not to run to your shared boss with a complaint. It is to let the documentation do the work. Keep sending clean status updates. Keep the minutes accurate. Keep looping in the right people on the right threads.
Leadership reads gaps in performance without needing you to underline them, and a peer who consistently shows up on the pending line of every status update tells its own story. This protects your name, avoids the “you’re a snitch” trap that offices punish very quickly, and respects the chain of command.
Now, a caveat that matters. If your office is safe enough to raise a peer’s performance directly with a shared superior, without political fallout, then yes, you can. Some environments genuinely welcome that kind of directness. But most Nigerian offices are not those environments, and reading yours accurately is part of professional wisdom. When in doubt, let the documentation do the work. It says everything you would have said, with none of the risk.
What this ladder is not, is a licence to quietly do their share of the job. That is the single most common mistake senior professionals make with under-committed peers. You start absorbing their portion because it is easier than the confrontation. You re-do the analysis they should have done. You cover for them in the meeting. You tell yourself you are being collaborative. What you are actually doing is training them that your labour is available for free, and training yourself into a resentment that will one day come out sideways. Do not carry a peer’s work. Make the gap visible instead.
There is a quiet freedom in this. You stop carrying other people’s commitment as if it were your job. You stop measuring your worth by whether the room caught up to you. And you get your evenings back, because you are no longer conducting a private courtroom in your head every night, prosecuting people who never showed up to defend themselves.
The commitment gap is not a referendum on your leadership or on their respect for you. It is a fact about the world. Read it. Address it professionally. And save your fire for the small circle who are actually running the same race at the same pace.
This week: Pick one person—direct report or colleague—whose gap has been costing you sleep. Decide which rung you are actually on. Have you had the direct conversation? Have you put the last agreement in writing with an owner and a date? Have you kept your documentation clean? Take the next rung this week. Not two rungs. One. And then stop carrying the part of their work that was never yours.
The reward for professional maturity is not everyone caring as much as you do. It is doing your work well, at your depth, without needing the room to match you before you can breathe.
With all the fire in my heart,
Bisola.
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