Show Notes
What if the strongest teams aren’t built by hype, slogans, or “high performance” talk, but by a few clear rituals everyone can count on? I sit down with Dave Askew, deputy principal and First XV coach at Auckland Grammar School, to get a behind-the-scenes look at how one of New Zealand’s most storied schoolboy rugby programs builds culture that holds up under pressure. We talk about the daily assembly as the “big hall” that creates belonging, recognition, and a shared start line for 2,000-pl...
More from Coaching Culture with Ben Herring
Poor culture doesn’t just create problems you can see. It quietly steals the best parts of your team: the extra effort people would have given, the performance you expected from talented staff, and the potential that never gets a chance to emerge. We bring a high performance lens from elite sport into everyday leadership, because the same culture patterns show up in offices, businesses, and teams of every kind. We unpack three big costs. First, lost effort: when people do “just enough” becau...
A school can have great buildings, strong results, and a proud sports history and still miss the thing that actually makes young people thrive. We sit down with Andy Turner, principal of Tauranga Boys’ College in New Zealand, to unpack what he calls “invisible strength” and why school culture and team culture start with beliefs and values long before they show up as traditions, standards, or slogans. We get specific about boys’ education and leadership: the biggest message young men share is...
Coaching hasn’t gotten softer, it’s gotten more human. We’re seeing it in sport, in business, and in everyday workplace leadership: the old model where players and employees simply adapt to the coach does not hold up the way it used to. So we share the framework we teach in our Coaching Culture workshops and keynotes, built for modern coaching, modern teams, and modern expectations. We walk through the Three Bs of modern coaching: Build, Bring, Become. First, we build the environment and tea...
A coach can win games and still lose the room. Sean Skehan joins us to get brutally honest about what actually holds a rugby program together when pressure hits, emotions run high, and real life at home is waiting after the final whistle. We start with parenting and identity, because becoming a dad forces Sean to rethink anxiety, post-loss frustration, and the discipline of being fully present, lessons that transfer straight into leadership and coaching culture. From there, we dig into the n...
An American-developed rugby coach taking a professional job overseas is rare, and Brendan O’Meara knows exactly why. His path runs through years of volunteering, uncomfortable learning curves, and the kind of persistence that doesn’t look dramatic from the outside. Now he’s heading to Japan rugby with the NEC Green Rockets, and we get specific about what it actually took to earn that step and what it will demand next. We unpack the “self-made coach” reality in American rugby and why ex...