When you ask some people to do something, you don’t really need to track them down afterwards. You just trust the work is going to get done.
But then there’s others who you know you’ve got to check in with. You’ve learned from experience that they may not follow through as you expect, or at all.
We learn to sort people into these two groups from past experiences. If you let someone down once, it’s going to seem more likely to them that you’ll let down in the future. Follow through, even on the small stuff, has to be consistent, otherwise you risk being lumped in with the people who can’t be relied on, because…you can’t be relied on.
The maxim “How you do anything is how you do everything” feels apropos here. To be the kind of person you’d want to work with – the kind of person that can be trusted to get the job done, you have to earn it, by actually getting the job done, each and every time. It feels redundant to say, but the way to be seen as reliable is by being consistently reliable.