A reflective look at the philosophies of Eddie Jones.

Coaches love big ideas until pressure hits and the ideas melt. Today we share our drafted chapter on Eddie Jones and pull out the hard, usable lessons that survive heat: culture as behavior, observation as a craft, and high standards delivered without resentment. After nearly 50 interviews with elite rugby minds, Eddie’s lens still cuts the clearest path from theory to team habits you can see and measure.

We start by redefining culture as what people correct in each other when it’s awkward. From Leicester’s “we don’t do it like that here” to Springbok players pushing back on language, Eddie reads non‑negotiables as the true map of a group’s values. He shows why diagnosing the room beats importing templates, and how a team’s game model should mirror its social DNA—contain and strike for England, speed and relentless work for Japan. That coherence turns slogans into self‑policing standards.

Then we go deep on “walk the floor.” Eddie treats observation like a superpower: who stands with whom, who lingers for extras, who drifts to leadership without a title. Small social cues—pre‑meeting chatter, post‑training extras—become live metrics for belonging. The goal is player ownership, where leaders gather units for work unprompted and the coach nudges rather than drives. To test it, try the teabag test: add pressure and see if conversations hold, habits stick, and the group stays connected.

Finally, we break down coaching without resentment. Keep the bar high; change the delivery so people can hear it. Eddie’s switch from blunt critique to data‑led self‑review shows how standards and dignity can coexist. He also normalizes doubt and builds a “second set of eyes” ritual to turn emotion into decisions. You’ll leave with simple actions: diagnose before you design, name your identity in one sentence, map cultural leaders, track the tiny tells, and tailor your corrections so they land clean.

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Chapters

• 2:23 Setting Up The Project
• 3:23 Why Eddie Jones Matters
• 4:06 Culture Is Behavior
• 8:07 Honor Non‑Negotiables, Change The Rest
• 12:22 Match Game Identity To National DNA
• 16:35 Start As Listener, Not Preacher
• 19:03 Walk The Floor: Observation As Craft

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 1:36

Hey team, welcome to the Midweek Reflections. Today we're going to do something a little bit different because we're coming up to 50 interviews I've done with some of the best coaches on the planet for this rugby game that we love. And what I thought I'd do is I've started writing up my notes that I've taken from the shows. Got a lot of great learnings from every episode. And I'm actually putting into a book and um or a series of books called How to Be a Great Coach. And I've done the first 15. The first 15 episodes I've put into a book and it'll be out before Christmas. And I just thought I would take this moment to to the community and put it out there, the first chapter. I'm going to go back through all the episodes, writing up my notes of what I've actually got out of all these awesome interviews that I've done. So I thought I'd share with you today the first chapter. And that was with my first guest on the show, which was Eddie Jones. So today I am just going to go through the chapter of the book Eddie Jones from How to Be a Great Coach by Myself, which will be out just before Christmas. So here it is. Chapter number one, Eddie Jones. Eddie is one of Rugby's great cultural experimenters. He's coached at the very top for more than three decades: Wallabies, Brumbies, Springbox, Japan, England, and back to Japan again. He is one of those rare generational coaches who have seen firsthand society's shifting attitudes and behaviors and stayed flexible enough to survive them. What emerged for me in this conversation is a coach who thinks deeply about human nature. For Eddie, culture is behavior. Coaching is part teacher, part detective, and part philosopher. You've got to be constantly watching the room, spotting patterns, weighing up what is negotiable and what is potentially sacred, and trying to correct people without breaking the relationship. Three things that I loved that ran through his thinking and our first conversation were these. Number one, culture is simply how people behave, especially under pressure. Number two, the coach's first job is to observe, walk the floors, and help players own the team. And number three, high standards matter, but the way you deliver correction decides whether people grow or resent you. So what follows in this chapter is the those three coaching lessons drawn from Eddie, Eddie's interview with me and the philosophy that sits underneath them and little takeaways for us all as coaches, which I've added my own context to. So here we go. Lesson one culture is behavior. Culture is the way you do things, the way you behave. That's a quote from Eddie. Not what's printed on the wall, what you actually do day after day when the coach is not in the room. Eddie said at a player at Leicester, back in those days where the Leicester way was well known, he took a quick line out, and before the ball had even landed, the tighthead prop whacked him on the back and said, We don't do it like that here. In one sentence, he felt the culture. The team already had an agreed way of playing, and everyone, even the front row, enforced that. I thought it was awesome. Later, he said as coach at the Spring Box when they were at the World Cup, he was expecting to find sort of a coach-driven environment based on his own external expectations. Instead, he found senior players quietly guiding standards from within. They pulled him up immediately on his use of swear words. And he felt that this was a deep part of the culture. And he made big concessions in his coaching vocabulary. Japan, when he comes there, the ritual of leaving dressing room spotless, he said, was a custom that is ingrained in Japanese wider society. It's a behavior that is a custom, and those new to the country must bend to it if they want to find success within the culture. And for him, these little details are not just subsidiary, nice to have. They are the culture. Culture is not about what people say they believe, it is what people are willing to correct in each other when something is off. The first real value of any group is the one they will protect even when it's awkward. I thought that was really cool. He says, quote, honour the notion honour the non-negotiables, change the rest. And that's a cool statement. He said, when he walks into a new team, he's not trying to drop a template from his last job. He's trying to work out which behaviours are non-negotiable in that society and which ones are flexible. At the Springbox, like we talked about, when players asked him not to swear at training, that one sentence told him a lot. Swearing was not just a language habit, it cut across a deeper layer of respect. To fight that custom would be to fight the people. And so he adjusted himself. The philosophy here is almost anthropological. Before you lead a tribe, you first must understand some of its taboos. I think that's really powerful, whether that's a country or otherwise. Now Eddie views teams through the lens of their societies and he coaches international teams. But whatever level we are coaching, we can do a shrunken-down version of the same. For example, uh in English sport in Eddie's eyes, it's a polite, you know, conservative, uh, adverse to public confrontation, rich in sarcasm. And with the English national team, he leaned into playing a way that matched that nature. That they would not try to be like a flashy sort of all seven side. They would contain, squeeze, and strike when the moment came. They would lean in, double down on the conservative nature that carried weight in the English DNA. Now, at international level, you can't build a strong rugby identity if you ignore the national identity. Your style of play is an extension of how the people see the world or how your people see the world. Likewise in Japan, when he was there, he doubled down on Japan's fast, agile nature and combined it with their steadfast hardcore work ethic. The players were used to the way he pushed them, um, as it was reminiscent of their experiences throughout Japanese schooling. And Eddie was first to admit, this level of training, and I quote, wouldn't work in too many other cultures. He knew Japan culture intrinsically, with a Japanese mother and and uh wife, and how the nuances of the wider Japanese culture would affect his team's success. So a big statement is diagnose the room before you design the culture. Now, for coaches and leaders, Eddie's approach sort of lays a bit of a method. Number one, start as a listener, not a preacher. Spend your first days asking people at every level, what do you think this team stands for? What do we do well? What annoys you? Don't correct, just collect. Number two, look for the behaviors that people protect. Notice the things that draw instant feedback timekeeping, language, cleanliness, humility, work rate, that sort of thing. Treat those as non-negotiables to respect, even if you choose differently. Number three, name a clear identity for the game itself. If your players cannot answer what are we good at in a sentence, you do not yet have a rugby identity. Decide together are we fast and light, brutal and simple, territorial and kicking, or anything else. That clarity makes cultural work real rather than abstract. So Eddie's philosophy here is kind of humble and it's and it's quite sharp as well. You don't you don't arrive as a savior. You arrive as a student who knows that you will only be effective once you see the real culture that already exists. And that's pretty cool. Now, lesson number two is this, and I love this one. Walk the floor. Absolutely love this one. Observation is your primary tool. Um, Eddie joked in the in our first interview that the coach is a quote, a bit like being a psychopath. You're always watching the room, trying to pick up patterns, relationships, little signs of stress. It sounds harsh, but underneath, it's actually quite a serious idea. Most of the important information in a team is not said in meetings. It is visible in who stands with whom, who avoids whom, who stays to work, who drifts away, all that stuff. And Jones has this habit of walking the floors. And his way of, for him, it was his way of capturing this sort of information. And he would regularly walk around the change room, the gym, the field, and just observing and chatting. He mentioned he looks for how players talk before he walks in the room, the groupings of people they choose when they're left alone, who drifts towards leadership roles, and who is isolated. And just by walking the floor and watching, just to see the environment, putting away the techniques and rugby chat for a moment, also creates something a lot deeper in a group of people. Observation is a form of respect. When you genuinely watch people, you're treating them as a complex human, not a piece on a board. You are saying, I am interested in how you are, not only what you produce. And that attention starts to build belonging. Without being able to articulate this, people appreciate the subtle care this implies. Now, Eddie has two little measures which, in his experience, are easy wins that observing can pick up about the state of the health of a culture. Number one, before a meeting, is there light chatter and energy or stiff silence? And number two, after training, do players rush to the car park or do they stay in small groups and work on extras? Now, of course, these are not perfect statistics, but they're pretty reliable hints and can give you a little bit of an overview of where you're sitting culturally. Now, he also mentions this statement the best teams make the coach redundant. Now, for Eddie, the end goal of culture is simple. The players own the team. His role then shrinks to nudging and staring the wheel a few degrees either way. He describes the hugely successful rope-leaded the Penrith Panthers, uh, where he spent time observing. Uh he said, after training, playmaker Nathan Cleary naturally gathers the flyhouse to kick. No coach tells him, he just feels responsible. And he said, that's a picture of a healthy culture. I think that's pretty cool. This links to something, you know, a bit a deeper view of human nature. Eddie believes that humans are a belonging animal. Our greatest achievements from building massive buildings to flying in space come from our ability to cooperate. Quote from Eddie: even when young people seem more individual, the need to be part of something bigger has not gone away. The coach's job is to redirect that instinct towards the team rather than a social media feed. End quote from Eddie. Quite a cool statement, right? It also explains why he thinks the real test of culture is pressure. He talks about the teabag test, and it's this you do not know how tea tastes until you put the bag in hot water. Likewise, you do not know how strong your culture is until results go bad or the media turns or selections don't go your way. Then you get to see whether your players still talk, still stay, still work together. I reckon that's a great little test, the teabag test. Add pressure, see what happens, and then you get a real gauge. He mentioned you gotta start you've got to turn watching into an art. That's what the best coaches do. So here's a little way that you can apply this in your environments. Number one, schedule time to simply watch. Not in the office, not with a laptop, but on the floor where your people work and gather. Notice who energizes who, who drains them, who listens, who avoids. Do that. Number two, map who your cultural leaders are. Identify the two or three people others naturally follow. Involve those people early in your decisions. Ask them quietly, how does a group feel about this? And what are we missing? That sort of thing. Number three, use simple social cues as measure. Amount of chatter before meetings, like we talked about. How many stay after practice? Who pairs up with who when you let them choose? Treat these as live feedbacks on belonging. Number four, delegate cultural work. Now, this is not only to save you time and effort, but it actually empowers others. Give assistance and leaders, empowerment by, you know, have small little cultural projects like running mini-team games or mixing the groups up. It's absolutely powerful. The philosophy behind all of this is that you're trying to move from a coach-driven team to a player-owned team. And when players are the ones who stay behind to help others, who call out standards, who plan extra work, you know, the culture has taken root. And it makes your job as a coach a whole lot easier. And the team's success a whole lot greater. I think that's absolute gold. Number three, lesson number three from Eddie. And this is if you're going to take one thing away, it's this statement. Coach without resentment. High standards, human delivery. Eddie refuses to soften his expectations. Never has. He believes one of the problems of mod coaching is too much comfort, not enough correction. Players want to be corrected, corrected. They want to clear information about what they need to get better at. The art of this is to correct them without leaving a scar. Now, he borrows the inf the famous John Wooden basketball coach's phrase, coaching without resentment. The ideal is a relationship where you can tell someone a hard truth and they walk away feeling challenged but valued, not humiliated. And he knows from experience that this is not simple. He recalls an England player who clearly resented his direct feedback. And every time he'd correct him, the eyes would roll. Now, rather than double down, he changed his approach. He started giving the player a bit of data and clips and asking him to review them. That player, being sort of a bright guy and analytical, came back having found the same gaps. Now the correction was self-generated and the resentment disappeared. The standard didn't drop, but the delivery did. And I think that is the art of coaching right there. The philosophy here that there's no single strong way to coach. Strength is not volume, it is your commitment to the standard, plus your willingness to adapt your method so the other person can actually hear it. Love it. Now, when we're talking about respect, reflection, and useful doubt, Eddie dives into this and he pushes back on the idea that fear should be a tool of leadership. Now, many people may feel nervous around him, but he doesn't aim for fear. He aims for respect. The fear he suggests usually comes from his standards, not from any need to dominate. Now, Eddie in the podcast, in that first episode, episode very one on the Coach and Culture podcast, tells a story from his childhood where he says his father came back from Vietnam and the local RSL was supposed to cut the family's lawn. But when they did arrive, they saw his Japanese mother and they refused. Her response was simple. No complaint, just quiet dignity and work. And this sits under his own approach, own approach. Don't waste energy on resentment. Do the job. I think that's one that all coaches can do because it's a pressured job. At the same time, he's honest about his own cracks. He admits that sometimes he's let things get to him and he's disappointed in that. And he openly talks about waking up at 4 30 in the morning, sweating over decisions he wishes he'd made. He's met business leaders who feel the same. And one billionaire told him he wakes up every day convinced he's bankrupt, which keeps him sharp. So for Eddie, he talked about this: that doubt is not the enemy. Doubt will always be present. It's the dealing with doubt that's that's the part of the craft. The real danger is pretending you do not doubt and then becoming rigid in how you think and how you act. Feel the doubt, examine it, choose an action, then move. To keep himself steady, he uses what he calls a second set of eyes. In previous teams, he meets trusted colleagues for coffee each morning, and together they would ask, What happened yesterday? Who needs a conversation? What is the real priority? These sort of questions. And for him, this sort of ritual pulled him out of that emotional swirl and back into sort of deliberate actions. Now, these snippets from Eddie on that first interview sort of sit on the a simple belief that leadership is not about being unshakable. It's about being honest enough to notice when your ego and emotions are driving the car and humble enough to be able to correct yourself. High standards without reflections becomes tyranny. Reflection without standards becomes softness. And we don't want to be either of those things. So here's what we can do. Number one, make no resentment a goal. Before a hard message, ask, if I say this this way, will they feel attacked or supported? Change place or tone or timing until the answer feels right. Number two, customize your feedback. Some people respond well to blunt words. Others need questions or data or time. Just take a moment to notice how each person reacts and adjust your method. The standard stays firm. The path to it bends. Number three, create a simple daily review. At the end of the day, ask yourself what Eddie asks himself. Did I miss a coaching opportunity today? Maybe someone needed encouragement, maybe a standard slip, maybe you lost your temper. Naming it to yourself turns guilt into learning. And from there, that learning, action can be applied. Now, often Eddie is painted in extremes, and his own words reveal something that I reckon is way more interesting. He is a coach who's always watching, always doubting, always trying to piece together human behavior into something that can win test matches and still feel right to live inside. He sees culture as a behavior. He treats observation as a craft and he believes in correction but spends a lot of energy trying to deliver it without resentment. He knows that teams are at their best when they no longer need him to drive everything, when they can own their own standards and he can simply guide and support and potentially agitate along the way as well. So to sum up that first interview with four key points, it's these.