Teaching Communication
Advice on how to create an environment which encourages communication
I frequently get asked questions about how to improve communication within teams. So here’s all my thoughts spilling out.
It’s important to realise communication isn’t a tap. You can’t just turn it on and the problem I see in a lot of teams that want to communicate better is they want to go from 0 to 11 immediately. You need to have cultivated the right type of environment for it to thrive. But how do you do that?
Barriers to Creating Communication
Let’s start by looking at some of the barriers you might face and how to solve them. Working on these together
Incorrect expectations. You, as a coach or captain or strong leader are probably a natural communicator.
Players don’t know what to say
Players can’t read play quickly enough
Players are too quiet/shy/afraid to say the wrong thing
Incorrect Expectations
This is definitely a trap I fell into for a long time.
Just demanding more communication doesn’t work, or if it does it’s very temporary because you haven’t addressed the root causes. I’m definitely a naturally vocal person during competitive activities. If you ever have the misfortune to play a board game with me I apologise in advance I won’t be able to stop trash talking you even though my inner voice is screaming at me to shut up! And if I’m on your team for any sport again, sorry, I talk a lot.
This is completely opposite to my personality doing anything else so you think I’d have an understanding that not everyone is naturally vocal but it took me way too long to figure this out. Knowing this earlier would have saved me a lot of stress and would have enabled me to create better environments quicker.
This is such a classic coaching trap (being naturally good at something and expecting the same of everyone else so you stink at teaching it) that I’m embarrassed to admit it. It’s certainly been an overly long learning curve for me so I hope everything below helps you.
Players Don’t Know What to Say
OK so the most obvious problem is players just don’t have the vocabulary to communicate on the pitch. Teaching a clear vocabulary is something I’ve placed more and more emphasis on throughout my coaching career. It’s a never ending battle because most players are coming to the sport with zero background knowledge so everything has to be taught from scratch, and even on experienced teams there’s a real lack of consistency.
How to fix this:
Assume at least one person on the team doesn’t know what your team wants to say in any situation you are teaching and include that in your clarification.
Be consistent with your expectations, and don’t gloss over what you want from the players in terms of communication. So if I’m running a game to work on switching I would like to say ‘We’re playing this game to work on switching on handlers, these are the rules of the game, what I expect is to hear the word switch in this situation and I want to be able to hear the call from the sideline”.
Players can’t read play quickly enough
Even if players know what to say in theory they don’t necessarily have the ability to process the game quickly enough to get out the words that you’ve taught them. The classic example of this is teaching switching in teams, running a drill where you have predictable patterns of cuts that players switch on, then they go into a game and nobody calls a switch. When I’m writing that out it’s obviously dumb to expect a different outcome but I’ve done this countless times!!
How do you fix this?
Patience. This takes time.
Probably no surprise to regular readers that I’m saying this…but a more games based approach is going to help players learn to read the game better than doing drills then expecting them to pick out the same scenarios in the chaos of an actual game.
Players are quiet/shy/afraid to say the wrong thing
I left this for last but arguably it’s the biggest roadblock.
Using a questioning/discussion based approach to training instead of a directive approach gets players talking about the game more frequently throughout training. If your session has you talking all the time during breaks then I don’t think you can expect players to be very vocal during play. Once you get people’s voices going it’s much easier for them to continue talking. This can be painful for everyone at the start but it’s worth persisting with.
Encourage players to have conversations about the game themselves at practice. One of the most frequent things I do during games at practice is ask two players to talk to each other about a situation that just happened. This is a good way to break through reserve between players and also helps them solidify a mental image of the situation so that it’s more likely they’ll notice the opportunity next time.
Playing games, particularly ones with a dynamic ruleset, generally encourages more talking than in a drill. Yes, it can be easier to impose a simple communication rule in a drill (e.g. talking to the force in a breakmark drill) but the focus of that is so singular that it doesn’t easily translate to gameplay - talking to someone in a game you need to be able to perceive where the threats are when there’s 6 potential throwing options and not just the one in the drill.
Playing Games to work on Communication
I get asked if there’s any games that can be used to create better communication. I usually provide some ideas (and happy to do that for anyone that asks) but I do think it’s probably not quite the right approach. Building good communication is a gradual process, and I think you’d be better served by making it a stronger emphasis point where it’s needed. For example, if we’re playing a game to work on switching the force at the correct times in force middle I can have a rule that any change of force that’s not audibly called adds +1 to the attacking team’s score. So if communication is something you think is an issue that you want to work on I would recommend trying to find ways to add more emphasis to it in what you’re doing anyway rather than doing something artificial to work on communication specifically.
Summary
An environment that is conducive to creating good communication in a team doesn’t start with lots of noisy shouting from the sidelines and on the pitch. That’s the endpoint. To get there, you start with more talking at training. If you talked more this week than last week you’re on the right track. Again: this is not a tap you can just turn on and now you’re a loud team. It’s a gradual process.
And to return to the first barrier: if you are a coach/captain and natural communicator it’s potentially going to be painfully slow. But one final bit of advice: if your team is quiet then crankily giving out to them for not being loud/lacking energy is more likely to see people go further into their shells. So be careful with that. If your team is normally a loud energetic team and they aren’t today then yeah, demanding more noise will probably work in that scenario.
