Clive Woodward
Most leadership teams can describe their culture in a slide deck. Few can name the specific behaviours that would tell you, from the outside, whether those values are real. The gap between what organisations say they are and how their people actually behave is ultimately a leadership problem, and closing it takes more than a communications campaign.
Sir Clive Woodward works with organisations on the specific behaviours that turn talented groups into high-performing teams, drawing on his work coaching England to the 2003 Rugby World Cup and directing sport for Team GB at London 2012.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Sir Clive Woodward
- Built the same culture system in two radically different contexts. In rugby, England moved from sixth in the world to World Cup winners. Across Team GB’s 26 Olympic sports he contributed to the country’s most successful modern Games at London 2012. The framework travels.
- His “Teamship” model is a written operational system. England’s Black Book ran to roughly 240 rules across 35 sections, drafted and owned by the players themselves. Audiences work with a documented method they can apply.
- One of the very few elite sports coaches to have turned his own methodology into an enterprise learning platform. Hive Learning, founded with Blenheim Chalcot in 2012, now works with Sky, Deloitte, Jaguar Land Rover, PepsiCo, Halma and the International Olympic Committee among others.
- Named tools audiences can use: Teamship, TCUP (thinking correctly under pressure), the DNA of a Champion and critical non-essentials. Each is a specific leadership discipline with a defined practice.
Biography highlights
- Head Coach of the England men’s rugby union team from 1997 to 2004, winning the 2003 Rugby World Cup. England reached world number one during his tenure and remain the only Northern Hemisphere side to have won a World Cup.
- Director of Sport at the British Olympic Association, supporting Team GB across the Beijing, Vancouver and London Olympic Games. London 2012 produced Britain’s most successful modern Games by medal count.
- Head Coach of the British & Irish Lions for their 2005 tour to New Zealand.
- Founder of Hive Learning, a digital learning platform built with Blenheim Chalcot and now working with organisations including Sky, Deloitte and Jaguar Land Rover.
- Author of Winning! (2004) and How to Win (2019), both setting out the Teamship methodology.
- Inducted into the World Rugby Hall of Fame; knighted in the 2004 New Year Honours; member of the IOC Entourage Commission since 2012.
Biography
England rugby were sixth in the world when Woodward took the head coach’s role in 1997. Six years later the team lifted the Rugby World Cup in Sydney, holding the world number one ranking and an unbeaten home record at Twickenham. England remain the only Northern Hemisphere team to have won the tournament.
The underlying framework was what Woodward called Teamship: a written, player-owned set of behavioural standards covering everything from punctuality to media conduct. The Black Book that held these rules ran to roughly 240 entries across 35 sections. Its premise was that values only matter when they translate into specific daily behaviours, and that the team should write those rules itself.
He took the same approach into the British Olympic Association from 2006, serving as Team GB’s Director of Sport through the Beijing, Vancouver and London cycles. London 2012 produced Britain’s most successful modern Games by medal count. The task across 26 Olympic sports was closer to running a diversified business than to coaching a single squad.
In 2012 he founded Hive Learning with Blenheim Chalcot, codifying the Teamship approach into an enterprise learning platform now used by Sky, Deloitte and Jaguar Land Rover, among others. His books Winning! (2004) and How to Win (2019) document the same method in full. The underlying conviction: culture is a design problem, and the rules that sustain it should be written down.
Key speaking topics
- High-performance culture
- Leadership under pressure
- Team performance and behavioural standards
- Building winning teams
- Learning cultures
- Performance in elite environments
- Culture change across large, federated organisations
Ideal for
- Executive teams and boards treating culture as a measurable performance lever
- CEOs, CPOs and heads of learning leading organisation-wide behaviour and capability programmes
- Leadership teams integrating businesses after mergers or major reorganisations
- Organisations operating in high-stakes environments where team cohesion directly affects outcomes
Audience outcomes
- A working method for writing behavioural standards that teams author and enforce themselves, drawn directly from England’s Black Book
- Specific language for diagnosing culture problems in behavioural terms
- A framework for running performance culture change across large, federated organisations where no single leader commands the whole system
- Perspective on building through setbacks, grounded in the six-year arc between the 1999 and 2003 Rugby World Cup campaigns
- Named leadership tools including Teamship, TCUP (thinking correctly under pressure), the DNA of a Champion and critical non-essentials
Talks
A detailed account of how the England squad built and operated its Teamship model on the way to the 2003 World Cup, including how the Black Book was drafted, maintained and enforced by the players themselves.
Key takeaways:
- How to define a culture in specific observable behaviours rather than in values statements
- The role of player or employee ownership in making standards actually bind
- How the same model was adapted for Team GB across 26 different Olympic sports
Based on the conviction that great teams are built from great individuals, the talk identifies four criteria that distinguish champion performers in sport and business, and shows how those criteria can be coached rather than assumed.
Key takeaways:
- Why talent alone does not produce winning performance
- Four specific characteristics found in champion individuals across sport and business
- How these characteristics can be coached in teams of already-talented people
Drawn from England’s six-year arc to the 2003 World Cup, including the chastening 1999 tournament exit, the talk treats setbacks as testable parts of a winning programme.
Key takeaways:
- How to design a programme that learns from defeat
- What the 1999 World Cup failure taught the 2003 squad
- Why recovery from setbacks is a designed leadership process
An argument that sustained competitive performance depends on daily learning disciplines, shaped by Woodward’s work with champion individuals across rugby, Olympic sport and business.
Key takeaways:
- The distinction between people who absorb learning (“sponges”) and those who resist it (“rocks”)
- How to build daily learning routines into teams already under performance pressure
- What Hive Learning’s experience has shown about scaling learning culture across large workforces
Videos
Fees
| EUR | GBP | USD | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Home Country | €12000 to €40000 | £10,001 - £35,000 | $15000 - $50000 |
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