Teamship rules for communication

Every game has rules, whether it be on the sporting field, in a board game or in the board room.

In all of these scenarios, these rules allow the participant to know what they should be doing.  Enabling things to flow smoothly and with clear expectations for everyone involved.

Sir Clive Woodward has created a way which nicely encapsulates these rules.  Through a team sitting down together and coming up with a set of Teamship rules to better communication.

The first stage in this process is identifying the areas that the team that require some more structure.  Then sitting down to spend time on each individual area, discussing, debating and finding a set of rules that suit every individual within the team.

Sir Clive talks about his experiences when coaching the England Rugby team to victory in the 2003 World Cup.
He encouraged the team to sit down as a group and talk about scenarios such as what would happen when selection for the team was made and, how they all wished to be treated, whether they were successful or unsuccessful.

Bringing Structure


This is a fantastic structure to have in the organisation and can really bring teams together, allowing every individual to participate on an equal footing and enabling people to handle situations the same way as the next person.

In an ever-changing world with constant technical advances, one area within the business that needs ongoing consideration is communication.

I’m 2015, 205 billion emails were sent on a daily basis; numbers of those could most probably have been avoided, and many of these go unanswered due to overfilling inboxes.

Now let’s look at the impact that this could have on deaf members of the team.

A Total Jobs article (click here) talked about what it’s like to be deaf in the workplace and described how easy it is for hearing colleagues to pick up the phone and quickly get the answer to a question where a deaf employee may need to send an email and wait for the answer needed to carry out the task.

This offers the perfect opportunity to consider Teamship rules for communication with your team.

Sit together as a team – and ALL openly discuss what works and what doesn’t.  This will give some time to see which communication methods are working and which are not, and also can excel the teams’ general ways of working in the process.

We have such rules in our business.  If we can make a call rather than an email to a customer, this is what we will do, and we absolutely will get back to customers within the working day – these are two communication rules that we stand by.

What communication rules will you put into place today?