Lesson #7: Do What You Say You’re Going To Do

Did you enjoy playing the Telephone Game as a kid? Where players whisper a message from person to person in a circle and then compare the original message to the final version, at which point hilarity ensues? The bigger the group, the better the game—more opportunities for the message to go awry, getting funnier and funnier the more it changed. Lots of laughs, right?

Even if you’ve never played the game, you likely understand the premise because you’ve been exposed to a workplace version of it. Only instead of being funny, the workplace version is terrible and exhausting because the stakes are higher and the consequences can be quite serious. 

It Isn’t a Game if You’re Forced to Play

With the best of intentions, most workplaces fall victim to Workplace Telephone, especially larger, more corporate organizations. To make matters worse, poorly managed service businesses risk setting their employees up for it on two fronts: internally with their own team and externally in client relationships. A telephone circle with two lines offers twice the opportunity for miscommunication, which doubles the potential consequences.

The misconception is that small teams aren’t as susceptible to falling into the Telephone trap because fewer people offer fewer opportunities for communication to get sideways. In reality, a team with fewer links in the chain of command means that each person must shoulder more of the load. The more responsibility each person has, the more crucial it becomes for everyone not only to complete their portion of the work, but to communicate clearly and effectively throughout the process to maximize team performance.

In a Small Business, Everyone is Accountable

Over the years, we've experienced a fair amount of skepticism from clients regarding our small team’s ability to get the work they needed done. By design, we don’t have a lot of redundancies built into our model, the main benefit of which is keeping operational costs low. Lower costs for us, in turn, means lower costs to our clients. The risk of operating this way is that we can’t afford to get the work wrong. 

So how do we guarantee that our team is doing mostly the right things most of the time? It starts by fostering an environment where communication is open, honest, and frequent—both amongst the internal team and with client partners. Once that foundation is established, you can stop Workplace Telephone in three basic steps:

1. Get Clarity and Manage Expectations

Early stage communication needs to feel almost too frequent, especially at the onset of a project or during the onboarding of a new team member. Everyone involved, clients included, should be encouraged and empowered to repeat, clarify, elucidate, restate, specify—whatever manner of making things understandable—in order to gain alignment and reduce friction. We like to refer to this as “making sure we’re all singing from the same song sheet.” This stage is the time to huddle up with your team or the client to ask questions openly and, when necessary, have frank (and sometimes difficult) conversations about budgets, timelines, and deliverables. A tight Scope of Work is a tangible outcome of successfully navigating this step.

2. Make Your Process Flexible 

Equally important to agreeing upon the assignment and who is responsible for what is building wiggle room into the plan. Not a contingency plan (often a helpful component of a good SOW), but rather designing the entire process to be more iterative. This manifests not only in the latitude we give our team to get their portions of the work done, but also in the license we give our clients to communicate and collaborate frequently and openly with our team throughout an engagement. Small adjustments made along the way can impact the trajectory of a project just as much as (and more efficiently than) a major shift later in the process. Working iteratively also removes the burden for anyone—client side or internally—to be 100% right all of the time. Everyone can just be mostly right, then collaborate to arrive at the actual right answer together. 

3. Hold Everyone Accountable

Most importantly, everyone needs to understand that managing expectations and designing a flexible process does not mean working to a lower standard. Quite the opposite, it means that each person’s task becomes vitally important to our collective success. It doesn’t matter how clearly or frequently we communicate if we don’t follow through on the tasks we’ve committed to doing. The key to increasing satisfaction, productivity, and loyalty within a team is understanding that we have a duty to each other equally as important as our duty to our clients.

Ultimately, doing what you say you’re going to do builds trust. Whether you're part of a massive organization or a lean, scrappy team, the principles remain the same: communicate clearly, stay flexible, and follow through. When everyone owns their role and honors their commitments, the noise of Workplace Telephone fades, and what’s left is a team that delivers with consistency, integrity, and purpose.

This post is part of a series commemorating our decade-long entrepreneurial journey: Top 10 Lessons from 10 Years in Business. Check back frequently for more posts; we'll be finished with the full list by the time we turn 11 in July!