Define Culture Or Drift: Why Writing It Down Raises The Bar

Ever wonder why some teams lift their standards from the inside while others grind for results that never stick? We dig into a simple chain that explains it: vision shapes leadership, leadership shapes culture, culture shapes performance, and performance shapes legacy. The magic happens in the middle. Culture isn’t a side project or a mood; it’s the daily environment that leaders design on purpose.

We start by contrasting two visions—a high-performance push to top the table versus a community-first club built on belonging—and show how each vision demands different leadership moves. Hiring, coaching time, facilities, and budget flow from that choice. From there, we reframe culture as a practical lab. Think petri dish: add rituals, language, and standards, then observe what grows. When the inputs are right, the bar rises organically. People show up early, do the small things without being asked, and solve problems together. That’s culture turning into performance.

You’ll hear crisp one-line definitions from elite coaches—“the way we do things around here,” “what we do when no one’s watching,” “the values and standards we operate by”—and why writing your own line is the fastest way to make culture real. We share how top teams schedule culture like training, from mini-team competitions to short connection drills, and how those reps turn intentions into habits. The yogurt analogy ties it all together: start with the right culture starter, and the environment transforms into something stronger and more resilient across sport, work, and home.

Walk away with a clear mission: write your culture in one sentence, put it on the calendar, and live it loudly enough that it becomes contagious. If the vision is your North Star, this is your compass. If this helped you see your team with fresh eyes, subscribe, share it with a leader who needs it, and leave a quick review—what’s your one-line definition of culture?

If you can SUBSCRIBE, RATE, and SHARE the show and series, you would be doing your bit to grow this show. Very appreciated. Ben

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Chapters

• 0:00 Welcome And Leadership Focus
• 2:16 Vision To Legacy Framework
• 3:47 High Performance Vs Community Vision
• 6:07 Culture As Petri Dish Experiment
• 8:17 Culture Is Not A Silo
• 9:57 Define Culture Or Drift
• 11:47 Schedule Culture Like Training
• 13:17 Coaches’ One-Line Culture Definitions
• 14:57 The Yogurt Analogy And Growth

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:47

Welcome to Coaching Culture Reflections, the midweek spark for anyone who loves leading teams and growing through that journey. I'm Ben Herring and I've been loving this side of the game for bloody ages. Each week I'll break down key components of leadership from culture building to communication, from mindset to motivation, all to help you lead with more impact, heart and clarity. And level up. Let's get into it. Hey team. Today we're going to look at culture again, because this is the theme of the podcast, but had a great little presentation today, which I talked to a company about various parts of culture. And I want to just touch on something which I think is kind of cool and kind of important. So here is a couple of quotes. Vision drives leadership. Leadership drives the culture. Culture drives the performance, and that's what leaves the legacy. That's a quote from Pat Lamb from the Bristol Bears, who picked it up from New Zealand Rugby Union. And I just think it's massive because it offers a framework that we put our culture in. And I just want to say it again so we've got it. The vision drives the leadership. The leadership drives the culture. The culture drives the performance. And that's what leaves the legacy. Now, this is big for Pat because he said any place that doesn't have a vision, it's very hard to then shape your leadership around what it is. And I'll give you an example of what that looks like. If your vision for your club or school or team is super high performance, we want to be the best team in the league. If, say, that's your vision or the higher authority's vision, then the leadership which comes from that is very different. Like you have to then factor things in for that when your leadership, like recruitment, both for coaches, both for players, both for facilities. All that stuff has to be at a different level if you're aiming for those sort of results, super high performing, results-based visions. At the other end, it could be we just want to be a really fun-loving community club where people can find a place to turn up to on a Saturday morning and have a beer or coffee. And results are irrelevant. And hence the money that you throw into it is different as well. Now, if you're a leader, a coach in that group, and that's the vision, it's at the other end of the spectrum. And your leadership has to adjust accordingly. You have to then plan for, well, maybe I actually just seeing we won't have a budget, uh, I might just have to be on the grass more and actually be really present and engage with the do the players that do turn up, whether they're good, bad, or otherwise. So the vision shapes the leadership. The leadership then drives the culture. And the culture is what happens every day. And I define culture as like that petri disc where you're the scientist dropping little bits into the petri dish to see if the culture changes. You know that bacteria that roll around in a petri dish? That's a culture in biological terms. And the scientists will test the culture by experimenting on it. Does this addition to the culture make a difference? Sometimes, yes, it feeds on that introduced substance and it grows into something different, bigger and better, and it's it it changes, it feeds on itself as it changes. And it can also change for the worst as well. And the culture is a series of experiments by the leader, that scientist, to then see if the environment changes. That then becomes the driver of performance. If that culture is going as such, then a bar rises organically. Things start to change, people start to enjoy what they're doing in an environment. And there's a sentiment which rises, which drives a different level of performance. It drives a different bar. And that's that raising the bar from internal rather than external sources. And that's what leaves the legacy, the performance. So there's five things in there: vision, leadership, culture, performance, and legacy. And I want to talk specifically about culture. Culture lands smack bang in the middle of all those five things. It is the meat in the sandwich between vision and leadership and performance and legacy. It is in the middle. And I want to say culture does not operate in a silo. A lot of times when the word culture is bandied about, it's in isolation. And people talk about it as this whimsical thing that, oh, we might do some culture now, as if it's a separate standalone thing. But I want to drive home the point. The culture isn't standalone. It's part of a sequence, it's part of a chain of events, it's part of a flow of things. And they're all combined together and they have different weightings. And it's not linear, it's all over the show. But they're together, they connect to each other. The vision affects culture, the leadership affects culture, culture affects performance and legacy. And any of those things don't operate well in isolation. A lot of coaches often fall into the performance trap where we gotta win. We gotta win games of rugby. And then they hang the hat on that statement. And that's an outcome. But as we know, outcomes are derived from the things that happened before and they leave things after. So the performance is outcome. And it's determined by the vision, the leadership, and the adaption of the leadership, and the culture, which is a series of experiments to make that environment the best it can possibly be, raising the standard to a level which performs the best it possibly can. And I think that's a massive statement. And I just want to dive in a little bit more on this word culture, because I talk about it in the podcast all the time. It's the first question I ask. I ask international caliber coaches in rugby and coming up other sports as well, about what their definition of it. And the bulk of people say after or before the show, when I say that question, is they had never really given it credence before. Not really something that's been done. And I would suggest, I was in a room today giving this presentation as I as I do, and I asked how many in this group of 40 have actually sat down and defined the word culture for them in their context. And the answer was a shaky one out of 40. And even then I would say it was thought of as I was talking. So effectively, zero people had actually written down the word culture and then defined it for them in their context. And when you stop and think about how that is not done, and then you think about the word goal and goal setting. Now, most people have learned this behavior that you write down a goal. And why do you write down a goal? Is because it gives you a north star and where you're heading. And you don't have to go in a linear way to it. But if you write it down, it concrete concretes it in your mind, sort of materializes the end point and gives you a direction where you're sailing. If you know where you're going, you know, you can actually make adjustments to get there. But when it comes to culture, it's something that we all identify as being an important thing. But it's still, for most people, this ethereal magical thing which we talk about, but we don't dive into. Now, the star point is the way I ask in the podcast how do you define it? Now, if you haven't sat down and defined culture for you, and how if it's you and your environments, then your ambition to create a culture is almost dead in the water because you aren't putting something down on paper and concrete that you stand by, that you're guiding towards, that's your North Star. And when you stop and just think about that, you go, ooh, that's an interesting point. I've never sat down and given it time. Just like on the same measure, in professional teams and some of the best teams I've worked with, culture is scheduled into the training sessions, into each day, each week schedule, the best teams that nail their culture put it down on paper into the calendar. They say at the start of every minute, says 10 minutes of culture time. At the end of training, we're going to do 10 minutes of culture building, which will be games and things like that. Nearly all professional teams, or at least good ones, divide up the team into mini teams just to compete for connection type games, which builds culture. And those sessions are put into the calendar. Every Wednesday or Thursday, we're going to do a mini-team challenge for culture purposes. It's in the calendar, it's down on paper. If you want it to have credence, you've got to put things down on paper. So I just want to give you a couple of my standout definitions to maybe spark you off in how you actually sit down and write your own ones. So here here are some are from here's a handful of some of the shortest, simplest, to the point culture definitions from people on the podcast today. Number one, by Johan Ackerman, Bull's coach. The values and standards we operate by. Steve Hansen, the way we do things round here. Eddie Jones, what we do when no one's watching. Glenn Delaney, it's an observation that others will make of you. Karen Crowley, it's your identity. And Franz Ludaker, the glue that binds people together. Now there's th they should be little kick starters for you. Some of those will resonate. In fact, they're all sort of similar, but not quite. You know, th there's been experience which has shaped these coaches, which made them tweak those wordings to make it right for them in their context. And I and I encourage you to do it the same. I'll give you my one as one last one, is that my definition of culture is an environment suitable for growth. And it comes from like biology terms, as I talked about earlier. It's that petri dish example, the yogurt example, that that's a culture of bacteria which can be shifted and changed by the scientists or the culture starter. I used to have these when I grew up, these easy yo yogurt makers they were called, and you bought packets of yogurt mixture, and then you bought a packet of culture starter. Now you mi you sprinkled in the culture starter to the packet, you mixed in some water, you put the lid on, you left it overnight, and that substance had turned to yogurt. The culture had changed completely, had fed on itself and grew into something completely different, something bigger, better, stronger. Now, I love that analogy, and it's not just for my rugby teams, it's for my work environment, it's for my family life, it's actually even for my marital life. Me and my wife, big learners, we love chewing the fat over anything to do with growing. We grow each other. There's not a single person in this world that has grown me more than my wife. I feel privileged to have an environment in our marriage that it is very suitable for growth 20 years on. Love that. So I would encourage you now. This is a little mission, a little bit different from most of these midweek reflections episodes. After going to this presentation today, I asked the group, go home and think about how you will define culture for you in your context. Because when you define it, let's say, for example, your one is what Eddie Jones says. Your definition of culture is what we do when no one's watching. That gives you a North Star for how you're going to behave, what you're going to value, and what you are going to do. And it's going to come up in funny ways. You might be walking down, you know, your environment after everybody's gone, you'll see an old yogurt container, and you'll stop and you'll pick it up and you'll put it in the bin. Because you know, when no one's watching, I'm going to do the right thing. But if you don't have that written down as cemented in your mind as yours and what you do and how you define it, you might have little questions come up in your head, like, uh, yeah, I don't want to get my hands all yucky out, the cleaners will be here soon. And you may have that debate in your head, but when you've written it down, the you'll feel that strong pull because you'll have that inner thing that you've defined this thing for you. And you'll you're more likely to live and breathe it yourself. And when you live and breathe it yourself, it just has this contagious effect on everyone around you. When the leader, the coach of any team is living and espousing the values, everyone comes and follows. That is the nature of a culture. It feeds on itself and it grows into something else. So take your time, get out a pen right now, and write down the word culture and then put dot dot and then just brainstorm stuff. Just write down things you think are good. And maybe you think things that are bad. And then ultimately you're working towards coming up with a sentence or two that you can expand on when talking to people. Get on it. Write down, cement your North Star of what culture is. Led leave the lead that revolution for people. Define it like a goal. Set a marker and go for it. And then we'll see you this weekend. We've got a good guest this weekend coming up for you on the Sunday interviews. And we'll see you this Sunday and we'll see you next Wednesday. Till then, adios, amigos.