In most internationally-operating Indonesian organisations, there is a recognisable pattern. One person — sometimes two — who handles the English communication that the team cannot. They speak in the cross-border meeting. They review the report before it goes to the regional office. They are the ones called when an international stakeholder needs to be managed.
This arrangement is rarely designed. It develops naturally, over time, as teams find the path of least resistance. And in the short term, it works. The work gets done. Communication happens. No one raises a concern.
But the cost accumulates in ways that are slow to become visible.
The first cost is to the person carrying the load. Their time and attention are divided between their actual function and a communicative responsibility that was never formally assigned to them. Their career development is shaped by availability and language fluency rather than expertise. And they often cannot say no — because the alternative is a gap the team cannot fill.
The second cost is to everyone around them. Colleagues who might otherwise develop their own communicative capability have no reason to. The pressure that would drive development is absent, because the safety net is always there. Over time, the capability gap widens — not because people are unwilling, but because the organisational structure has removed the need.
The third cost is to the organisation’s decisions. When communication concentrates in one person, so does influence. The ideas that get articulated in English are the ideas that a person can represent — not necessarily the ideas most worth representing. Expertise and voice become misaligned, quietly and consistently, across every meeting where this pattern plays out.
None of this appears in a training report. Attendance is recorded, completion is logged, and the capability gap continues.
A team that depends on one person to communicate is not a high-performing team. It is a team with a single point of failure that has not yet been tested.
ELC Coaching helps organisations distribute communicative capability across teams — so performance is not concentrated in one person, and expertise and voice stay aligned.
