A Bigger Room, and a Familiar Challenge
Here’s something every leader suspects but rarely sees in action: the message you send is not the message your team receives.
Not because your people are careless. Not because they aren’t listening. But because layered communication, the kind that flows through hierarchies, across departments, and between shifts, degrades naturally. Like a photocopy of a photocopy, each handoff loses clarity.
The question isn’t whether this is happening in your organization. It is. The question is: how much is it costing you?
In a recent team coaching session Coach Jie facilitated, two deceptively simple exercises made this invisible problem impossible to ignore, and the results were as revealing as any engagement survey.
The Exercise: One Pose, Three Layers of Telephone
The setup was straightforward. A senior manager looked at an image of a person in a specific pose. Their job: describe that pose, using only words, to a group of middle managers. The managers then relayed the description to the frontline workers. The workers had to recreate the pose.
No pictures. No demonstrations. Just words, passed through three layers. Sound familiar? It should. This is how most instructions travel through your organization every single day.
What Happened
The senior manager described the pose clearly. But at the second layer, when a manager received and retransmitted the message, something critical shifted. The manager didn’t fully understand the description of the left arm position. Rather than asking for clarification, they passed along a vague version of what they thought they’d heard.
The result? The final pose was approximately 60% accurate. The body position was correct. The legs were right. But the arm that should have been held horizontally was held vertically, a meaningful deviation that changed the entire posture.
What 60% Accuracy Costs in Real Work
That 60% accuracy rate isn’t just a party game statistic. Consider what it means when applied to:
- Project briefs passed from leadership to execution teams
- Safety protocols communicated across shifts
- Client requirements translated from sales to delivery
- Strategic priorities cascaded from the C-suite to frontline operations
This isn’t about blame. It’s not a lack of capability, and it’s not intentional. Sometimes someone says something and you genuinely believe you understood it, but what you understood simply isn’t what the other person meant. That’s exactly what happened here. The manager didn’t ignore the instruction. More likely, they heard it, interpreted it in their own way, and passed on what made sense to them.
This kind of gap happens dozens of times a day in every organization, and it’s the communication pattern that quietly derails projects, frustrates teams, and breaks trust. People don’t ask for clarity because they don’t realize they need to. After all, they believe they already understood.
The coaching insight is about awareness. Once the team saw this gap happen in real time, the conversation shifted from abstract (“we should communicate better”) to concrete (“I do this, and here’s when and why”).
The Game: 40 Ping-Pong Balls and an Idiom Puzzle
The second exercise was even more revealing. This one wasn’t about communication accuracy, but about how people instinctively approach collaborative problem-solving.
The coach prepared 40 ping-pong balls, each labeled with a single Chinese character. Every participant received one ball. The task: find other participants whose characters, combined with yours, form a complete four-character idiom (chengyu). For example, someone holding “一” (one) needed to find the people holding “石” (stone), “二” (two), and “鸟” (bird) to form “一石二鸟”, the equivalent of “killing two birds with one stone.”
Participants were divided into groups, each with a designated team leader.
What Happened: Two Very Different Instincts
What happened next was a masterclass in organizational behavior, completely unscripted.
Pattern A: The Self-Starters. Some team members immediately began circulating, checking other people’s characters, proposing combinations, and actively building solutions. They didn’t wait for instructions. They took ownership of the problem and went looking for answers.
Pattern B: The Delegators. Other team members walked directly to their team leader, handed over their ball, and waited. Their implicit message: “You figure it out.” The team leaders who accepted this (and some did, without question) found themselves sitting alone with a pile of balls, doing all the cognitive work while their team stood idle.
What This Tells Us About Initiative
Neither pattern is inherently wrong. But when observed side by side, the contrast is striking, and it maps directly onto how work gets done (or doesn’t) in the real world.
The self-starters demonstrate ownership thinking.
They see a problem as everyone’s problem. They don’t need permission to contribute. They look outward, collaborate laterally, and bring solutions back to the group.
The delegators demonstrate command-and-control conditioning.
They’ve learned, perhaps from experience, perhaps from culture, that problem-solving is the leader’s job. Their role is to wait for direction, execute what they’re told, and stay in their lane.
And the team leaders who silently accepted every ball? They reinforced the exact dynamic they probably complain about in meetings: “My team doesn’t take initiative.”
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: people don’t take initiative in environments where initiative isn’t expected, rewarded, or even noticed. If the leader always does the thinking, why would anyone else start?
What Leaders Can Take Away
If these exercises resonate, here’s what to consider:
Build a culture where checking understanding is normal.
The telephone pose exercise showed that communication doesn’t only break down when people are afraid to ask questions. It also breaks down when people believe they understood, but didn’t. Make it a habit to confirm and repeat back what was heard, especially when passing instructions to the next person. Model this yourself, and encourage your team to do the same.
Watch how your team solves problems, not just whether they solve them.
The idiom ball exercise revealed default working styles that are normally invisible. Pay attention to who reaches out, who waits, and who absorbs all the work. These patterns are data about your culture.
Your Culture Is Showing
Every organization says it values communication and initiative.
But culture isn’t what you say. It’s what you do when no one is scripting the conversation.
A 40-ball idiom game with no instruction manual will show you more about your team’s real dynamics than any performance review.
The question isn’t whether your team has these patterns. They do.
The question is whether you’re willing to see them, and whether you’ll create the space for your team to see them too.
That’s what team coaching does. Not by telling people what’s wrong, but by creating the conditions for them to discover it themselves.
And discovery, unlike instruction, tends to stick.
Looking to help your teams communicate with more clarity, ownership, and awareness across every level?
Contact us to explore how we can support your organization.
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