Coaching Culture with Ben Herring
Coaching Culture with Ben Herring is your weekly deep-dive into the often-overlooked “softer skills” of coaching—cultural innovation, communication, empathy, leadership, dealing with stress, and motivation. Each episode features candid conversations with the world’s top international rugby coaches, who share the personal stories and intangible insights behind their winning cultures, and too their biggest failures and learnings from them. This is where X’s and O’s meet heart and soul, empowering coaches at every level to foster authentic connections, inspire their teams, and elevate their own coaching craft. If you believe that the real gold in rugby lies beyond the scoreboard, Coaching Culture is the podcast for you.
Coaching Culture with Ben Herring
Why Winning Teams Still Have Culture Problems | Ross Neal
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If someone had to “explain” your culture to a new hire, would it fall apart the moment pressure hits? Ross Neal joins us to get brutally practical about what culture actually is: what you do and how you do it, so clear that a person could sit in your environment for a week and tell the truth about it. From pro rugby locker rooms to corporate leadership teams, Ross shows how culture is built in the small moments leaders leak through mood, reactions, and what they choose to reward.
We dig into the research-backed behaviors that separate high-performing teams from polite, underpowered ones. Ross breaks down information elaboration, the habit of asking sharper questions that clarifies intent and improves decisions, and why it often disappears in top-down, military-style environments. We also talk psychological safety as a facilitator, including simple “real world” tests you can run in one-to-ones to see if people truly feel safe enough to say, “I don’t understand.”
From there we get into coaching and management mechanics: how to use silence to pull thinking out of the room, why process over outcome matters most when things go well, and how a neutral review keeps standards consistent whether you win or lose. We also explore why structure often beats coaching, how onboarding accelerates “speed to excellence,” and what business and sport can steal from each other on recruitment, buy-in, and meeting design.
If you lead a team and want better decisions, more ownership, and a culture people can feel, press play then share this with a colleague. Subscribe, leave a review, and tell us: what’s one small change you could make this week that would get your team asking better questions?
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Welcome And What Culture Really Is
SPEAKER_03If you have to tell someone about your culture, you've probably gone down the wrong angle. A lot of the time you show people culture, right? The best test is if someone came into your environment and sat there for a week. When they came out of that, what would they say? That's your culture. What a lot of coaches do is they get very used to filling silence, they get very used to fixing, they get very used to giving advice. But a real tough skill is sitting in the silence and letting people speak. Arseholes can be fantastic managers because they just don't care as much about how they're perceived. Everyone started building a decision-making muscle, started to think about what they're doing. If you're constantly reactive to an outcome and you're emotional about it, then people get a bit numb to it. And we want to be able to bring emotion when we need it. I've had managers and coaches that are some of the worst people and couldn't stand them. I had one guy that used to, he managed to weaponize a handshake.
SPEAKER_00Welcome to Coaching Culture, the podcast about cultivating culture and leadership. I've been Herring. I've been loving this side of the game for bloody ages. Today's guest is Ross Neal. Ross's been a decade in professional rugby on the wing for teams like London Irish, London, Scottish, and Wasps, a total of seven different teams and 13 different head coaches having first hand exposure to a diverse leadership collective. Today he's founder of the Culture Chain, a bestoke training program for leadership teams and business, where he takes his on-field lessons learned through the challenges of high-performance sport over sometimes more traditional textbook learning. His social media posts are some of the most insightful I have seen, and his corporate leadership sessions are so engaging. I love watching every little snippet I see of him. His audience both laugh and learn, which is a massive element to a fantastic culture. Ross Neal, welcome to the Coaching Culture podcast.
SPEAKER_03Hello, Ben. Thank you very much for that intro. And yeah, absolutely pleasure to be on. Big fan of what you've been doing as well. It's um very, very impressive.
SPEAKER_00Well, mate, I love this space, mate, as do you. Um and so we'll just rip straight into this question, mate. How do you define culture?
SPEAKER_03Question. Um The one with for me with culture, I think it's pretty there's lots of technical definitions, but for me it's just it's what you do and how you do it. Like a culture, I was thinking if you have to tell someone about your culture, you've probably gone down the wrong angle. A lot of the time you you show people culture, right? Like the best test of if someone came in into your environment and sat there for a week, when they came out of that, what would they say? That's your culture. So whatever they say, what was it like to be there? And what it's like to be there is is your culture, I think. So yeah, what you do, how you do it, and it's quite an over overarching thing, isn't it? It's very hard to pin down exactly, but it's what you do, how you do it.
SPEAKER_00I think that's right, man. I think that's a really good one. If you have to say, you probably haven't there's it's not there, is it? If you have to sort of say what it is, but if people should be able to feel it, see it, experience it like that, right?
SPEAKER_03I was thinking with um teams that tell you a lot when you go in, and you sometimes see this. I don't know if you've ever seen Gordon Ramsay's uh Kitchen Nightmares. Have you seen that show?
unknownI have.
SPEAKER_03You know where he always uh his is by the way, if you actually look at what he does, his show is basically culture change. What he's doing is he goes in and like changes the culture, and then there's the food thing on the side. But whenever he goes in, he speaks to the owner, and you speak to the owner, and the owner's kind of you feel quite sorry for the owner, he's like, Oh, I put all my money into this and the restaurant's not working. And then Gordon then goes and talks to all the staff, and the staff give him the real picture. And I find a lot of sports teams and business teams are a bit like that, where the person at the top has this idea and they're like so frustrated with everything, and realistically, it probably all comes back to them and the way they've set it up. With a culture a lot of the time, um, it's a little bit like driving in a foreign country and you're trying to figure out what speed to go at, and you're like, I don't know what speed to go at, and there are no signs. So, how fast you go, you go at the same speed that everyone else is driving. Um, and that's kind of the thing with culture, right? Like a strong cult, it will indoctrinate you in its own different way, how we do things around here, sort of thing. So um, yeah, that's that's kind of how I how I would define culture.
SPEAKER_00I love that phrase, mate. A strong culture will indoctrinate you. Well, while why do you think leaders often have a different outlook than the people they lead? Like in that Gordon Ramsay example, we talked to the the the staff and they speak very differently than what he just spoke with around the the the leader of the restaurant. Why do you think leaders have that different perspective?
SPEAKER_03I think leaders tend to have the most skin in the game of everyone. So they have more responsibility for the whole environment. And I think when you have that, and especially when things are going wrong, you you tend to see a lot of communication break down, especially upward. So upward communication gets distorted in so many different ways that they're not even hearing a lot of the things, and everyone becomes slightly yes men around them as well. Um and they also see everything, so their perspective is very different. So me as a, you know, um, and I appreciate your intro, but so for anyone listening um who may not have heard of me, which should be 99% of people, um I was a squad player for most of my career. So I was always on, you know, the periphery. So what I would get to see of an environment was a very small wedge, right? So I'm a squad player, I'm not in the leadership conversations um apart from when I was maybe in Seattle later on and a couple other places. I'm not in Scottish, but you see a very small wedge of what's going on. Whereas the leader of the organization sees what's going on, the physio room, the SNC, the playing department, the coaching department with the owners, with everything. They have a very uh wide view. So I think they have that weight of responsibility and they're involved in everything. So their perspective is different, and therefore they probably have more frustrations with different areas where me as a squad player, I only really have to worry about how I play. And so I might have more gripes with things, I only see that bit. So I think when you're the owner, you probably have larger scope for frustration because you're dealing with much more of an organization. I only have to deal with the gripes of how maybe the coach is getting on and how I'm playing. I don't have to worry about all the other stuff. So maybe that slightly, but also that communication piece. People don't tell you a lot of the time they tell you what you either want to hear or they tell you things late and it's all very frustrating. So between those two things, probably why.
SPEAKER_00Well, the it's probably important for coaches and leaders, if anything, is not to have too many yes people in their environment, right? To so that when they are asking genuine questions of their employees and staff and people they lead, they're actually getting honest answers, right?
SPEAKER_03Yeah, I mean it's it's an old adage, but you know, a lot of what I do when I go and work with companies is um because culture is quite fluffy. You have to be able to put metrics on there. There have been thousands of studies on team performance, whether it be in sport, whether it be in business, because it's quite easy to study. Um and to try and pin down what actually leads to performance is is a hard thing to do. But there have been loads of studies and quite a few meta-analyses as well, where they take all of the studies and start looking at what are the key things that actually drive performance. So you can start to work it out and you can figure out what each thing's relationship to performance is. So if one is a direct relationship to achieving your goals and performance, and minus one is direct negative, we can break everything down from trust to psychological safety to this to that, and what its relationship is to performance. So anything over a 0.4 is really high. Now, one of the big things when it comes to performance, so actually the number one um strongest relationship performance is something called information elaboration. Now, information elaboration, very simply, is Ben, if I ask you to do something and say, Ben, I need you to go and fix the BAX moves for this week, go and lay out the plans. Now, if you just go and do that, that's fine. However, if you say to me, Well, Ross, do you want me to line up moves to attack more of a word space, or do you want me to do it based on this team, or do you want me to build it as sort of for philosophy moving forward for all the games? Now that's something called information elaboration. You have asked me more about what I've said to you. Um and the reason that's so important, has such a high correlation to performance or relationship with performance is that it's indicative of care around the role. You are the person who is closest to that job and you are thinking about that job and how to do it best, as opposed to just taking me, who might be responsible for forwards, backs, and all the staff. I'm telling you to do something. If you're asking me questions, it means A, you're comfortable to do that, but B, you're really thinking about how you're doing it, as opposed
Why Leaders Hear A Filtered Truth
SPEAKER_03to just doing it. And a lot of organizations, um, that doesn't happen. So you get what's called a top-down culture where I'm at the top, I say what happens, you hear it, you do it. Very military um uh military-esque. And there's a great book by David Marquette. I don't know if you have you read it, Turn the Ship Around?
SPEAKER_00No, I have not.
SPEAKER_03Really good. He took a submarine that was one of the bottom performing submarines in the US fleet and in two years turned it to like the best performing. And one big thing he changed was something called uh intent-based decision making. And the whole idea behind it was uh they were getting lots of mistakes and they had very top-down. So exactly like I said, there, no information elaboration. And what it meant was people who were closest to the job weren't thinking about the job. They were just doing what they were told to avoid blame. So he changed it. So anyone who had a question, instead of saying, Ben, should I do A or B, they had to come to him with a decision and say, Ben, this is the scenario I'm actually thinking about going with option A, and this is the reason why. What do you think? And then if there was a problem, the captain could say, Well, actually, have you thought about this? But if not, you'd say, very well, off you go. And what that did is everyone started building a decision-making muscle, started to think about what they're doing. So instead of being given the answers and not learning or thinking about it. Um and so information elaboration is huge. And the good thing you can do with this, and if there's any coaches that want to test this, is when you have a little meeting with your backs or your forwards or anything like that, or if you're not, if you're just a manager at a business, next time you have a meeting, see how many questions you get asked when you give out things that need to be done in the week or this or that. The amount of questions you get is really indicative of that information elaboration. And then the other thing you can do, because psychological safety. Do stop me, by the way, Ben. I can probably ramble on about this all day.
SPEAKER_00No, this is awesome stuff, mate. This is that's a really cool thing you just described there. Keep going.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, so the other one is everyone will have heard of it, psychological safety. Psychological safety, to be clear, has a 0.10 to 0.20 correlation uh relationship to performance, which is fairly low. So if you look at that just as that, you'd say, oh, not too impactful on performance. However, it's what I'd call a facilitatory factor. So when you have good psychological safety, things like information elaboration are more likely to happen. So you can't discount it. Same thing with social cohesion. I think it has a 0.17 relationship to performance, how well we get on basically. But again, it's facilitatory. When we get on better, we're more likely to share knowledge, which has a much higher relationship to performance. So when I work with teams or when you work with sports teams, for example, you can analyse all these things. And the other tests you could do that I, when I work with sales teams, I always get them to do this in one one-to-ones, is um they have to make up an acronym. And they're when they're in a one-to-one, I'll sit there uh to make sure and say, bring up, so we call it uh CLB. And in the conversation, they have to drop in this acronym and say, you know, make sure your CLB is all taken care of and then move on to something else. And we're testing, does the person say what is CLB? Because we've made it up. So we're basically trying to test, does that person feel confident enough to say, I don't know what that is. Because if they don't, that's a problem. Because if they don't say that, it means, hmm, how many other things are they letting slip by? How many other questions are they not asking? Because we need everyone to understand and feel comfortable, because otherwise there's missed bits of knowledge from people who are close to the game. So we've got players who are uh fullback and you know we want them to be talking about how they're feeling and what they're seeing. Now, if they don't want to speak up when they think something, that's a problem. So we want everyone feeling like they can do that. So we can use that as a very simple test. And if you're a coach, slip something in. If you've got a group, it's likely there'll be one strong-willed person that will say it. Um, but you want to test everyone's will. Um and it can feel a bit a little bit deceitful, but also we need to figure out where we're at with these sort of things. And if you put it in a survey, which is often what I will do, is you send out a survey first. Um, do you feel comfortable speaking up if you think something is wrong? And they'll go, yeah. And then you do the test, CLB, and they don't say a word. Most people, because they don't feel confident enough to do that. So we can look at the coach and we can look at the player there. We can say, as a coach, are you creating an environment where people feel comfortable to say, hold on a second, I I'm actually behind on that. And the reason people might feel like that is because A, maybe you came down on someone really hard once, and everyone else who didn't come down on hard but goes, shit, don't bring that up again. So those are two little uh things we tend to look for. But to your point around having people that will speak up and challenge you, it's crucial. And there's some great examples of people like that. Um, Abraham Lincoln and had his cabinet of rivals where he deliberately put people in his cabinet that he knew were from the other side of the bench that disagreed with him. Um, same thing with JFK following the Bay of Pigs. They realized that one person spoke up at the Bay of Pigs disaster where they'd sent people in to try and stoke up an uprising in Cuba. What they hadn't realized is that the people who were Cuban that were giving advice were people who'd already left a selection bias there, i.e., we already don't like it. So it's a bad set. But one person spoke up, said I don't think this is a good idea. And uh I think it was JFK's brother sort of took him to the side and was like, mate, you we've already made the decision, we need to go with it. And so following that, JFK was like, right, we need a very different decision-making process because no one's
The Performance Metric Most Teams Miss
SPEAKER_03telling me when they think I'm wrong. So again, long-winded way of saying that, but essentially a team is only as good as all the opinions in the room, and you need people being engaged and interacting. That's information elaboration. Information elaboration happens most likely when you have high psychological safety. There's a few little tests you can do there to actually see if you've got it.
SPEAKER_00So I think that's awesome, mate. I uh like information elaboration, that is asking more questions, being comfortable to do so uh to avoid that top-down culture, that military style thing, and building that I love how you talked about building the decision-making muscle and and that decision to actually step up. What what sort of things you talked briefly about like the way to kill question making is when a coach comes hard down on something, right? What's what what's some good little things coaches can do or leaders can do to actually encourage more questions? Like, how do they celebrate? Is it just a matter of when someone asks a question early or early doors? You sort of go, Well done for asking that question. Well done. That's what we want to see. Is it as simple as that as a coach to draw out people to put hands up?
SPEAKER_03Yeah, so I think what one thing just to add is that um with all the stuff I talk about, and and you'll probably find this with culture, all the people you speak to, is it's such a gray area. And one thing that works over here doesn't work over here, and you can contradict yourself 10,000 times. So there are times where you are in a relegation scrap and you've been brought in to fix it in six months, where who gives a shit about all this stuff we're talking about? You need to win, and however, and in that chance, maybe you do need to be top down. And there's a very good reason why a lot of military people are quite topped out. There's less ambiguity. If I had a perfect world, that's what I'd do, and if I had the time. However, there'll be times where you don't need to do that. So again, and this is where it comes to leadership, having the ability to have multiple tools in your belt, right? So if the only tool in your belt is a hammer, you treat everything like a nail. So you cannot be an autographic leader all the time. It just comes down on people. You have to be able to do both. But to your question there, how do we get more information elaboration? Well, one thing is being really good at sitting in the silence. So what a lot of coaches do is they get very used to filling silence, they get very used to fixing, they get very used to giving advice. But a real tough skill, and salespeople are very good at this, is sitting in the silence and letting people speak. So if I say, right, what do we think about this? I could wait for five seconds, no one says anything. I say, okay, well, what do we think about this part of it? And I keep going, and then eventually someone speaks, but they don't really think. If I sit in that silence for longer and say, what have we got? And we just wait, eventually people will do it. Now that's slow short term, but I would say that's a skill is being able to look at it and go, right, this is going to take me a long time at the start of the season because people aren't used to it. But down the line, when they're used to it, this will start to be getting fixed by them. And I won't even really have to be doing that much coaching. I can focus much more on the technical. So sitting in silence is one, and just teasing ourselves, I'll sit here for two hours if we have to. I'll sit here for two hours until we start coming up with questions because I know we're not where we need to be. The second one is kind of what you mentioned there, and that is the way you treat people when they ask questions. We might come to this later, I'm not sure, but there's this area of decision context versus decision logic. So every single leader is creating context with every single thing they do. The way you speak to people, the energy you come into a room with, you're feeling a bit tired, you look a bit tired, you are creating context for all the interactions that are about to follow. So you come in looking a little bit tired because you've had a bad night's sleep and you're like this, you walk into that room, people have spotted that. Most coaches are the highest authority person in the room, which means they have the most impact on other people. So you come into a room and you're already looking stressed, everyone will feel that straight away. And they can see that. As soon as they've seen that, you've created a context for which the interactions are coming. So you want people to ask questions in that. If you look pissed off and in a bad mood, I'm not putting my hand up. I'll stick him away out of this. So creating context is massively important. So we can talk about process over outcome as well. Process the outcome in the way that we treat mistakes, I think is very easy, i.e., you've got something wrong. But let's look at the process, because that's what we care about, right? So the kick didn't go where you wanted it to go, but how was your process? Did you have a good, was your head down over the ball? Did you uh have a good ball drop? Did you have a good follow-through? Or did it just it just happened to go wrong, but all the process? That's really easy with process over outcome. We can do that, and coaches are very good at that. Where they're not so good is process over outcome when things go well. So if I have a player on the wing and he has two opportunities to make a simple two-on-one pass, but what he actually does is takes on the player and steps inside and gets away with it and gets through and scores a try. Now, you really want to score that try. So you start celebrating and you're like, oh my god, amazing, amazing. But actually, the process is against a better team, he probably gets tackled. Now, when you celebrate, everyone watches that. Everyone else sees that and goes, ooh. So as long as we get it right, as long as we score, we're okay here. Whereas if you then get called out and go, What the hell are you doing here? You scored the try, but that was selfish play, simple two-on-one, that's what we practice. Everyone goes, actually, I'm gonna be judged on my I'm gonna be judged on my process here and what I actually do, not just the outcome itself, because outcome is far less controllable. So, but that's again leaked context. So all context that we as leaders give is either deliberate or it's leaked. So it's intentional or it's leaked. Intentional means I'm deliberately creating context here. So I'm gonna create an environment that I think leads to the decision making that I want to happen. Leaked is I didn't mean for this context to happen. So it's either going to be good or bad, and I don't know. Some leaders are very good, natural leakers of good context, and the way they are, they create environments to make you feel good, make you feel in the right mood. And then others will be in a bad mood and they're stressed and they go absolutely mental and everyone else goes, and then that doesn't create a context.
SPEAKER_00I think it's a wonderful like thing you just talked about, process over outcome. And we normally talk about that when things go wrong, right? But you you're just throwing that other one, and then when it goes well, we disguise the process, and scoring tries in a rugby setting is easily the one which you know disguises all that all the process which potentially was wrong, right? And same with it's it's very common with coaching too. When you win games, generally everything was great. You sort of say, Oh, yeah, we've got everything right. However, it's the same thing, isn't it? You win games and then you have that lens when you look back and go, yeah, everything was good, training week was good. Whereas sometimes you've got to review it independent of the result, right?
SPEAKER_03Yeah, and that's and that's one of the big tough skills is something called I call it neutral review. Neutral review is um if I came into your meeting room on a Monday after your game on a Saturday, would I, from your review, be able to figure out if you won or lost? Now, if I could figure that out, I would say it's a slightly bad review. The whole point being, every single time you review, it should be focused on improvement, right? Always in focus on improvement because that does two things. When you're winning, it avoids complacency. And I've had it uh where I've been in a room before and someone goes over the try line and they're mucking around and they get hit and the ball pumps out and they don't score the try. But we were 50 points up, so it gets put up on the board and it's like a bit of a laugh, and it's like, oh, you what you like? Now, had that been a two-point game and we lose because of that, they that wouldn't be a joke. They'd be getting absolutely chewed out for it. Um, so again, or react if you're reacting to the outcome itself as opposed to the process, i.e., we never want you to do that, then we're gonna we're gonna get complacent. And this this can happen. Now, the other side of that is that doesn't mean we don't celebrate wins and go after things that aren't going wrong. We need to be able to do that. However, what we don't want to be is we lost the game on the weekend, therefore I'm gonna go through this with a fine tooth comb and pick out every single thing. Sorry, if we lost the game, I'm now in a really bad mood. Whereas if we won the game, I'm over the moon, we have a little quick little muck around. So on the bad side, so on the good side, it avoids complacency. On the bad side, it avoids toxicity and blame because we're not pointing fingers and trying to shift it because we know what the meeting's gonna be. The meeting is Going to be about improvement. It's always about improvement. It's always always about what we can do better. It's a really easy mental shift. So you don't feel the need to avoid blame because you're purely looking at how we can get better every time. And then it also allows for emotion. So if you're constantly reactive to an outcome and you're emotional about it, then people get a bit numb to it. And we want to be able to bring emotion when we need it. So when we're in a quarterfinal or a semifinal and we can have those sort of like Razzie Erasmus style conversations where he didn't think the levels are, he can really inject that emotion. Now, if you're doing that every week, you lose its impact. If you want to be able to bring that and have that response to it, then you need to keep it in reserve and keep yourself very process focused. In again, shades of grey with this, and it's going to be dependent, but sometimes a team needs a bit of an injection of mood or actually needs a little bit of a chewing out. But on the whole, it should be neutral review.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_00I love that, man. You just sparked me off on some of the best teams I've worked in. On the Friday, the last thing post the last sort of captain's run when we sat around and reviewed the week before the result, before the game. Right, have we done everything right? Did we get it right? What is our feeling? How did we and we actually analyze the week independent of result? So then it's you're taking that emotion of whatever happens the next day, did we get our Monday right? Are our moves flying right? And then you write that down and then you take it with the result. So you've got a something there. I think that's a really cool little thing coaches in a rugby context or any sporting context can do. And it just makes you you as a collective sit down and and go through the process of did we get our nuts and bolts right? What did we get wrong? What should we shift for next week before you're influenced by the result?
SPEAKER_03Yeah, I really like that as a as a practice as well, the review before the game, that's that's brilliant. Um because again, it's uh the saying I use will be often follows failure. So big review follows failure. So whether it be um what what's the examples I actually usually use for this? McKinsey are an interesting one when they went to into the Disneyland parks and they went into cut costs and they looked at all these areas and they were like, oh, there's all these safety problems you've got with um parts, and you're spending too much money on safety. So I think you need to pull a few of that off. And they said, These lap bars that you have, these lap bars on the rights, right? Like you have people checking them three times a day. Lap bars never break. To which the mechanics pushed back and said, Yeah, the lap bars never break because we checked them three times a day. And so they pushed back, but then they didn't push back on another area, which was uh the amount of people they had on each uh ride when it came in to like check it and everything, and they brought that down to one person. And then I think on I think it was Big Thunder Mountain, you can there's a good book called When McKinsey Comes to Town that talks about this, but they didn't identify a little wheel at the back, and had they had an extra person, they probably would have spotted it, and then someone had a near fatality, and then they did a big review. And it's the same thing with sales teams, like they're all happy while the market's good, and then the market goes to shit, and they suddenly start looking at all their behaviors, and it's like if you wait for failure to do your big review, it's gonna be really hard to salvage that. I remember when London Irish got relegated when I was there, they did a massive review into the team after relegation, and they found all these fantastic things. However, they would have found all those same things to improve three years before. However, after we got relegated, 50 people in the organization lost their jobs. So had we done it before we needed to do it, you would have been able to make those gains. So I think trying not to be reactive with improvements is so, so crucial.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I think that's awesome. You just sparked, I remember uh chatting to Franz Ludeker, a fantastic coach in South Africa, and he he he he came out with a blueprint every year, like this is what it is, and all the coaching stuff. And then on a fortnightly basis, he would they would have a blueprint check-in, like just to circle back to are we doing the things we said we do? Are we doing and and just factored that into a season so they talk about it at the start and then this is what we're gonna do, and then he would bring it up every second Friday, right? Oh, here's the blueprint we said, and just kept bringing back that process, bang, bang, bang, because once you get into it, right? You can get swept away in the weeds and the in the excitement and the emotion of playing every week,
Psychological Safety Tests That Work
SPEAKER_00right?
SPEAKER_03Without doubt. And that's uh again, like that that's really impressive because I think what a lot of teams get caught in is like a pre-season culture. The whole idea is you know, in pre-season, they lay out all these brilliant cultural things and the way we're gonna play and the way we're gonna review, and because there's nothing on the line yet, it's fine. And then you hit that first game and you have that first loss, or something happens, and it kind of unwinds. So I think what you're the chap you're mentioning there, doing that, where it's just checking into what we wanted to do, are we still doing that? That's so crucial. But without that blueprint, you can't do it, right? So that's again that planning piece of you know, what is your blueprint? What are these norms and these structures you're gonna build a team on? Actually, I spoke to a great guy called Colin Fisher, who's a Harvard organizational behavioral uh researcher. And one of the big things he talks about is it's about having structure is far more important than coaching. So big research on whether people were actually doing the coaching, like working with people that one-to-one and try and improve them. So basically, when you had really good structure, so structure being the goals that have been set, the norms in the behavior, how we do things around here, and the actual structure of the teams. When that was good, coaching would make the team perform better. So, but it was only if that was good. If that was bad, the coaching would actually make things worse. So coaching was definitely secondary to structure. So when you get your structure right, the norms and the behavior, the goals and everything, if you get that right first, coaching helps it. So that's why trying to fix a team that's not doing too well by bringing in like an experienced mentor or something like that tends not to work very well. However, if you've already got a really good structure and you bring in a mentor, it works really well. Um, so it's an interesting look on it first, though, is if things aren't going well, go to structure first. Fix structure, don't try and coach your way out of it.
SPEAKER_00Well, I like that immensely. And structure being the goals, the normative behaviors, and and actually the game structures, what you're actually doing. Get get get the skeletons of those right first. And in that kind of thing.
SPEAKER_03How you bring your meetings, how you do information sharing, all of these things around structure is more important. If you get that right, teams will do well. But again, I'm uh slightly paraphrasing from Coleman here. I'll I can I can a good book called Collective Edge, so worth a read for any coach out there.
SPEAKER_00Well, mate, you you actually I've got a quote from you, uh loosely loose quote, you and you said people don't rise above the environment you create. And that's that's kind of like that concept, isn't it? Around the structure is the environment. So if if you create one up here, people will rise to that, but not beyond it. So if you're creating something really good with your structural side of things, people can rise all the way up to that. But if you don't have that, it's very tough to go through that ceiling.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I th I I think so.
SPEAKER_03And you look at all the great teams throughout history, like they they've they are teams. They work really hard on creating teams. And I think most cultures I don't know if you've ever seen an airport where you have those um like travelators where you like they speed you up when you walk. And there'll be one one going this way, one coming the other way, and then a little space in between where you can just walk at normal speed. Like most cultures are one of those three things. They either speed you up and help you get you to where you're going, they're neutral and do nothing, or they actually are actively inhibiting what you're trying to do there because the structures are bad and everything's when you're creating a culture, you are trying to have everything lining up to help you all move forward at a better speed. And that is a structural thing. It doesn't matter who you are when you come onto that, that thing is either going to speed you up or not. So your environment, you are trying to make it something that speeds you up. So when you look at everything quite forensically, and this is this is my job now. Um, this is what I do as you go into environments, you look at is everything in this environment structurally helping people get better quickly? So when we recruit them, how good is our recruitment first? Are we being really specific with who we're bringing in from both a character point of view and an aptitude point of view? Um, and then when they get there, how good is our onboarding? Now, this is something that I think is crucial within teams on that ramp time. So speed to excellence. For most people, when they join a new club, they may have met someone for a coffee and then they arrive, and people are friendly, but on the whole won't want to have huge amounts of small talk. The best places I've seen, they don't leave it to chance. I even remember when I went to Saracens, now I was only at Saracen's for a couple of months, so the incentive to get to know me or onboard me would have been very low. But when I first arrived, you're a bit awkward, you're a bit of a squag player, so where do you see it? Who are you going to chat with? And I think Alex Good um saw me and went, Ross, take a seat, we want to hear your story. And then they all turned around and like genuinely chatted to me for like 20, 30 minutes, made a big effort. And what that just meant is when I went out onto the field, instead of, again, information elaboration, instead of just trying to put on a brave face when I don't know a call, I already feel like I have five people that I could ask a question to. And like I say, the incentive to help me get to bed in is very low for them. But that didn't matter because it was the culture. The structure is we go further than just a hello and some small talk to get to know you so you feel comfortable. And we do that multiple times with everyone so that everyone feels good when they're there and it's much easier so you can get to learn to the plays easier so you can prepare the team better, whatever it is. But it's creating that structure of this is how we do things around here. These are the norms we expect from people, these are the structural things around that. So uh it's stressful when you move clubs, have uh you'll set up your new Wi-Fi, you'll sort your new house out. Um maybe your partner doesn't know anyone in the area, so they're completely reliant on you for social interaction. Um, you don't know any of the players, you don't know any of the plays, you don't
Silence And The Context You Create
SPEAKER_03know the SNC staff, you don't know the physio staff. That is all stress that you don't have uh other places. Like we just said before, Ben uh Darwin will know a lot more about the stats around this as well, about cohesion, how long it takes to bed in. But again, if you're deliberate about that, you might be able to bring that forward because some clubs, there's one club I went to that um they would have sorted your Wi-Fi, your house out. The girlfriends in the group had already reached out to your girlfriend, invited them for low to coffee,'s got them involved in the local, local area. You, you know, your child is sorted out in a nursery. Um, a few lads are taking you for a round of golf. When you get there, they make massive efforts to get to know you. Um, they do good social things, they take you out for a beer, they do all these sort of things. So all of the things they can take away, they do take away. But it's very hard to measure. So very easy to sort of push to the side because we can't figure out how many in early conversations will lead to tries on the pitch. But we know that if we do this with every player that comes as consistently as we can, their likelihood of um playing quickly and doing well is much higher. So again, to your question, another long-winded one, so I do apologize from me, but structure, norms, goals, behaviors massively important. And the coaching is that little seasoning that will just heighten it, as opposed to being your main thing is how I'm going to coach. Structure and everything is going to help that on its own because the structure works a lot faster than you can as a coach. You're only there for how many conversations you can have. The structure is constantly working. So you need to get that right first.
SPEAKER_00Structure works faster because you're a coach, you're only one person, but the structure actually allows everyone to be pushing in the same direction. I love that. And and I think it's a cool one to note when you you sparked off on me. When I think of those big sort of legacy coaches, the likes of Alex Ferguson, that man you, those kind of coaches that have created these amazing structures. You don't hear too many people when they're referring to those sort of iconic coaches talk about their technical coaching prowess. You sort of when you think Alex Ferguson, you everyone sort of talks about he maintained standards, he was consistent, he he put things in place which you knew were your stand. It was very clear around the boundaries and the standards and the normative behaviors that he expected. And that's what they talk about those sort of coaches with, right? Like it's you'd you very rarely hear someone talking about Rassi Erasmus saying he's an excellent technical coach around the ABC area. It's about you know, you talk about Rassi and you know what he's there's just this thing he's creating, everyone knows what the environment is like.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_03But hang on, and don't be wrong, like you spoke to a lot of coaches, so I imagine that's kind of like a minimum requirement when you're a coach, right? That you'll have technical expertise. Um and then the really good ones are the ones that can create ecosystems for which they are not required to drive everything. They are going to be driving a lot because you know the buck stops with them. How many, and we can look at this through like conversational dynamics and collisions and things like that, how many interactions are they not a part of in that team? Huge amounts. They can only be in the amount that they're in. And they might be more high impact because they're the lead coach, but all those other interactions are going to be somewhat governed by the environment and ecosystem you create. So it's really worth your while to spend more time on structure, ecosystem, environment before trying to coach everything and take control of everything. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Love it. Is the same, is it the same outside of say sport? And like, and you you obviously got a lot of corporate and business, is it the same for leaders of anything?
SPEAKER_03Yeah. And a lot of the the research around that I was talking about with structure over coaching, some of it's done in sport, but a lot of it's done in um sort of uh corporate environments and looking at uh how they're set up and the changes we can make around that. And uh if you're in any kind of business team, this is also massively important. If you're someone that's having to sort out everything, you you're limited. Whereas if you create that structure and ecosystem, it'll go a lot faster.
SPEAKER_00Well, what are some of the things that like high performance sport gets right about culture that that business often misses? And and and vice versa, what does business get right that potentially high performance sport, you know, could learn from business? You got any sort of comparisons there?
SPEAKER_03Yeah, so what does sport get right that business doesn't? So sport has a level of ownership and conformity that business just finds very hard to replicate. Same thing with the military. So when you go to a rugby environment, the quick conformity is is much better because firstly there's no HR team, so you don't have to worry so much about like, oh, am I doing the right thing? Am I following the right processes? Like, and as you as you'll know, like if there was an HR person at a rugby team, they they would be crying by week two.
SPEAKER_00But health and safety would be even worse when they're watching a mauling session or a live tech like session.
SPEAKER_03Oh my god. Well, people are fighting again today. Oh, sorry, someone's called someone a wanker and it or someone's taking the piss out of this, they're talking about that. It would be awful. But what you can do in that environment is if people are late, you can set certain rules that people have to stick to. There are initiations. You go out drinking in certain ways, and when people come in, they have very shared identities very quickly. It doesn't matter where they come from. They have a few things that we all know that we all probably have. We all play rugby, we all do this. And so that level of conformity, also, if you don't want to buy into that, it's going to be quite tough for you. And also, people can get rid of rugby players far easier than in corporate environments. Um, you know, there's no employment, people aren't quite as aware of employment law as they probably should be as a rugby player. Um, however, that level of ownership means you can get conformity and buy-in that businesses really struggle to. So if you think about rugby, um, most rugby players on the whole have wanted to do that as a passion since they were, you know, a a young lad or a young girl. Um so when they're there, there is an inherent drive to be the best you can be. Go into a business environment. Now, no offense to them, I say this to a lot of groups, like you'd be very concerned if your seven-year-old said, I want to work in insurance when I'm older. Like you'd be like, what the fuck? Like, that'd be very odd. You don't have that inherent drive and belief in a business environment that you're you take for granted in professional sport. Uh, when I sat down with Stuart Lancaster to talk about this, he was like, when I was at Leinster, it was like pushing an open door. Everyone was desperate to learn about leadership and be the best they can be. You go to corporate environments. Most people, this might not be the most important thing in their life. This is something they do that pays the bill, but actually it's it's far more about what they do outside where they want to hang out with their friends, they want to spend time with their family. And this bit the this thing is uh it's not not that important to me. Whereas in rugby, it is pretty central to their identity and who they are and what they want to do. So that means you can do a lot more when it comes to team building that you probably can't do in in business.
SPEAKER_00Um Yeah, you don't have to coax people along the stuff, do you? It's people want to be part of it, they want to do it so there's not you less coaxing you have to do.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_03And in rugby, right, if you if a player's not aligning, there are other players who are desperate to be there, so you can probably pick someone else. Whereas in business, some people have organizational knowledge, they're quite hard to get rid of. It's a very different um power dynamic, I think. You know, you become a really senior player, that might shift a bit. But on the whole. Um and then the other way around, I think what what does business get right? Sometimes they can look on longer time horizons, but one thing that some businesses get a lot better is in their recruitment practices. So there's a couple of companies I've worked with that will have 11 rounds of interviews where they are so unbelievably careful with who they allow into their environment because they know the cost of a bad hire. They know how much, how many hundreds of thousands of pounds it can cost them if they get it wrong. So they really invest in that. Now, not all businesses, I'll be really clear on that. Some are terrible, but um, the really good ones are unbelievably good at not looking at just the technical skills, but who the person is and going through loads of rigorous tests. And that's something I think, you know, I've seen rugby teams go, yeah, we just need a big South African lock, just go and find one. And that's it. Um it's like that can't be right. Actually, I heard that sort of guy called Sam Lana, who was doing some helping with some recruitment, and that was his that was his mission. He was like, okay. But uh that's probably an area where rugby's not quite the same level.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Now it's it's really fascinating, isn't it? Like the there's so many parallels, but then like being able to take from the different things like business can take from high performance sport, and sport can take from business. I was just on a uh conversation the other day with the Hurricanes actually, who mentioned they reached out to like a drama student because they wanted to improve on that area and in order for delivery and tone and speaking ability, they brought in some drama students to help teach the players off-field how to hold themselves better when they're talking to media and things like that. So there's so much crossover if you're open to it, if you open up your lens right, like there's there's so much learning you can do from all of these things. It's all interrelated related, right? And they help you get on that travelator and speed up in the right direction.
SPEAKER_03Without doubt. I think that's one thing. And you look at some of the best sports coaches around, they definitely leverage learning off people from other sports. There's a good theory on this with creativity within environments, is like the longer you are in an environment, so they call it a digging holes book by Edward Du Bono on lateral thinking. But the idea is um the longer you're in an environment, the deeper the hole you've dug in that environment. So the more you accept things as the way they are, the longer you're in the environment, right? So unlike someone like Rassi Erasmus, who's constantly looking at things in new ways. But what happens is very hard
Process Over Outcome With Neutral Review
SPEAKER_03if you've been in rugby all your life to look at rugby differently because you've been in it for so long that everything feels so solid, and actually some of it isn't. Um now, it's very hard for you to go and dig a new hole. However, if you go and speak to someone that's fresh into the game or plays a different sport, they'll look at it from very different ways. You go and look at NFL team and go, oh, hold on a second. That's how you run a meeting to do that. That's really interesting. But they can give you a new way of looking at it because you you've allowed these things to become um almost like solid angles. So, you know, talking to how how do drama students deal with pressure, how do um how does a politician deliver a deliver a get a message across? You know, th there's how the military plan like that's a really interesting way. And then you might look at what you do and go, and for example, meeting mechanics, like how many people we have in a meeting? Well, we know how much information is retained when we go above four people, and we know how likely people are to ask a question versus when they're in a one-to-one. And so we can start to now rearrange this. And if you're a rugby coach, what's the normal done thing? Okay, well, we have a backs meeting, we have a forwards meeting, and then we have a team meeting. Well, that's how we've always done it. However, in that big long hour, long meeting, we know that retention is probably only going to be 20%. And when we're talking about some line out stuff, the backs are gonna switch off and then they might miss something they actually need to know. Now, I'll blame them because what I know to do is I give you all the information, you remember that, and deliver it on the weekend. I'd say that's lazy. I'd say your job as coach is to make sure that your message is landing. You're better off having a really short, punchy team meeting and then diversifying the messages in one-to-ones on the pitch on the head because we know that retention from a one-to-one is 70-80%. Retention from a big team meeting is 20 to 30%. So hold on a second here, are we wasting our time? Or do we want smaller meetings because you're 35% more likely to speak up in meetings under four people than you are? Oh, so we can now start going, well, how do we want to run our meetings? Is this more about mood? Do we want people in a really good mood? If in which case, let me make an effort to make this a little bit funny or get someone doing a song or getting their personality out. And then when we go on the pitch, we're into business. So that's where we can start getting quite clever. And that's when I talk about structure is okay, well, that might not make a big difference this week, but across a 40 week season, the amount of information that is retained is so much higher from each individual player that now we're way ahead from other people, and that's an edge. That other people might not be looking at. So yeah, this is where structure can be more important than coaches.
SPEAKER_00That's what what's that what's that number on I I love that concept around the meeting group size. Like is it the statistics are once you go more than four people, you start dimin get diminishing returns.
SPEAKER_03I'll um I'll I'll I'll fish it out. I've got a big sheet on meetings execution mechanics is what what we call them uh within business. But yeah, we know that so meeting participation drops by 35% um per person if you're online versus in person. That's an interesting bit of a hot topic right now in uh in the business world. But also, so your likelihood of putting your hand up and asking a question when you go above four people in a meeting drops off a cliff. Um I can't remember exactly how much it is, but it drops a lot. But you're most likely to ask a question in a one-to-one. Uh and again, if it comes to we spoke about decision context versus decision logic. So this is one of the biggest things that I think the top coaches really get, and most coaches don't do. And the reason is so uh let's say decision logic is um I sit down with you as my coach Ben and I say, uh, and you're my coach, and you say, right, Ross, let's review this, what happened on the edge here? And it's like, okay, well, you had a you had a three, uh, you had a three on two there. That's pretty clear. The fullback was way back, so that was a simple just hands to the edge, and we get a really easy soft edge, and we probably make 30 yards, um, and you've carried the ball. Now you and I will sit there in that meeting. That's the logic of it, right? Um, we've trained that all week, so why haven't you done it? Um you're in this situation, you've seen the picture, we can look at that, you should pass the ball. That's decision logic. Now we look at decision context. The context is I'm out of contract's end this year. Now, a simple 3v2 to the edge doesn't do anything for my contract prospects. However, carrying and getting an extra 10 yards, okay, that might help me. That's context, and I'm never in a meeting going to say that to you. I'm never gonna say, yeah, but Ben, I need a new contract, so I need to get over the ball. Like, I'm never gonna say that. So that's an unspoken thing that impacts my decision making that I'm I can't deal with as a coach, or sorry, you can't deal with as a coach unless we have that sort of relationship or you understand the context. The other context might be I made an error in the week that I don't usually make, I'm feeling a little bit underconfident. Um, and actually I'm just gonna carry this because I don't want to embarrass myself. That's context. There's so much context from psychological and cognitive biases that as coaches, I think it's really worthwhile understanding. Um, so whether that's social pressure, identity pressure, the way things have gone, you know, there's so many honestly, decision context is the thing I probably spend most time on. So, how do we create environments? So mood is a big one, right? So great study on Wall Street traders. Um, and they'd measured their testosterone in a tra on a trading day on the floor. And if a trader made a good trade early on, testosterone spiked. Their likelihood of making another good trade would go through the roof. But not just that, they would stand taller, they would joke more, they would all these sort of things. Now, that is hormonal. So that's context, though, because we're not sat there going, yeah, my testosterone was high, therefore I did this. You're never gonna say that. Well, oh, I felt a bit felt a bit vulnerable. Now, I as a player was very a big victim of this because the other side of it is if you made a bad trade early, your likelihood of making another good trade was far lower. You would talk less, you became more risk averse. Now I look at my own game. I was a big victim of this. If I started well, I would stand tall. I'd demand the ball a bit more, I'd expect to get over the top of someone. If I started badly, I'd either chase the game, I'd feel a little bit negative, I'd think more about the game, and we talk about being in you know flow states when we perform. The best players aren't thinking when they're doing. We think when we we want to think when we train, but when we're actually playing, we want to be really quick. So the ability to spot um a weak shoulder is automatic. And if we're thinking too much, we think about handing off as opposed to just handing off. So when I'm really confident and full of testosterone, my likelihood of being in the moment is higher. If I'm risk averse and something's gone wrong, I'm actually going to think about it more because I'm trying to get into the game. Now, again, that is context. That is not logic, because I'm not going to sit there and talk about, well, I was a bit nervous after the first thing that happened. You want to you'll talk about the logic. Now, if you just talk about the logic, you'll miss a huge amount of the picture. So then we talk about mood. How do we then create a mood? So we don't, how can we try and spike testosterone? How can we try and reduce cortisol? How can we get people feeling good before the game? And everyone's different with that. So this is creating context environments that lead to decision-making behavior we want on a long-term basis. So I think this is where people can maybe think about things in a in a slightly deeper, deeper way.
SPEAKER_00I I think it's I think it's wonderful, man. I think it's a good one for coaches too. Around uh I love the I've seen a lot of research on that the affirmation of you do something well once, twice, then the third one's more through the roof, gonna chances are better. I remember seeing some wonderful studies, but I think that's a cool, even just on a simplified level for coaches,
Fix Problems Before Failure Forces You
SPEAKER_00is that kind of concept of have little small, easy wins early. So like when you run up, just like catching past drill, the first thing as a coach you don't want to say, oh no, that's shit, don't do that, put your hand and you know, if you can start a drill and just be like, Yep, let's go, that's good, that's good, keep it up, keep it up, get the little wins, that little sentiment. And so when you're under pressure, the your instinct as a coach is to probably try to limit mistakes. But great coaching sort of resists that that in instinct. So I I I love with the junior kids, and like for example, you just say, Right, right, young fellas, go go make a tack uh five tackles each and then we'll come back and have a look at it. And instead of saying, gotta do this, no, that's not right, gotta get your foot in place here, and if the first thing they're they're getting is like critiques and they're like, Oh, okay, yeah, it wasn't good enough, then their likelihood of attacking the next one is less in a lot of a lot of degrees. And if you make it the first couple exciting or energetic and they have good wins on it, like, oh I love that, I love where your arms went, and you say that rather than all the negative stuff, then I feel, and you could cr critique uh critique me here, but I reckon that's a a definite win for a coach, uh, just to get those wins along the way.
SPEAKER_03No critique from me on that. I think mood is is the most it's the most important thing that people don't focus on enough when we're playing. That's where having people in your team that are just like big energy people is so important because that mood is contagious, especially if they're the high status. That was the word I was trying to think of earlier. Status, fuck. But the high status people are so important. So if they're high status people that get people going and they get behind you and they genuinely it affects your chemistry of your body that then leads to what you do then. So your decision making is framed by that context and your expectation. So one of the biggest ones, drivers of team performance is something called team efficacy. Team efficacy is literally how well, how much does the team believe they can achieve the goal they're trying to achieve? Now, that sounds really simple, right? Because if you ask any team to think you can win, they're gonna be like, yeah, of course we can. But do they really? Because you'll have been in teams where you kind of don't think you're gonna win a game, but you might win the game, but you don't really think you're gonna win the game. And the second you think that, you're now framing how your decisions are gonna be made. Because that expectation of what's gonna happen, if you just believe, if you and you may have had this with some teams where you, no matter what happened, you just felt we're gonna win, even if we're 10 points. I just think we're gonna win. That's team efficacy, and it's a massively strong predictor of team performance. 0.41 if anyone's interested. But it's a massively important one. So how do you create team efficacy? Well, that's expectation of belief, and we have to perform that over time through draft and through grade. There's a lot that goes into that. But it's a hugely important one. And to your point there around mistake limitation, I think that's probably the biggest trap coaches will fall into when they're under pressure. And I completely understand why. Like, no blame at all in that one. And I think the nicest and best coaches will do it from time to time. But what you do is you go, we're under pressure here. I see mistakes and I think I can limit them. So what we do is we come down hard on mistakes, we limit that decision-making ability, and we say, look, just stick to what we the high percentage plays. But what we create then is a um high floor, low-ceiling environment. So we're not going to have many mistakes, but our ability to really go above and beyond is now reduced. So you see this in business a lot of the time as well, where you have a boss that comes down really hard on people and people will do just enough to get by, but nothing more. If we want people to go above and beyond, they have to have that freedom and that autonomy. Autonomy is a big, a big word in the in the world of performance and culture, but that ability to feel like I can try things. Because when you get against the top opposition, if you're not going to be able to do that little thing that, you know, scares the opposition, you're not going to win the game. So you then become more predictable as well. And if you've got that's why it's high floor, low ceiling. We bring the floor down a little bit but raise the ceiling, then things get a bit more interesting.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, man. Fire out. Raise the ceiling. And like I just when you were talking there, I I was just I was just spinning in my own head about something we just did the other day, which I I thought sort of sums up creating that high ceiling. Is we had young kids, like 12-year-olds, and we had one of those new screens that um those live cast screens that Silver Fernmakers, when you can I can take my phone and I can record and then I can play it back on the big screen. And we had 30 little 12-year-olds doing tackling, and I just said, just do five tackles each, and I'm just gonna film someone and I'm gonna show that person uh that person on the big screen. And we did that, they did their five tackles, and then I came back and I showed, look at little Johnny here, look how awesome his how tight his head is there. Outstanding. What else did he do as well? And they'd say things like, Oh, he got nice and closed. Yeah, great. And what else? He um squeezed really tight, perfect, right up. Everyone go back in your partners, do five more, and I'll I'll I'll film another person that I think's doing a great job. And I did that on repeat about you know, four sets of that, and each time showed a couple of people. And what it did, I never critiqued poorly once. I only showed the example, the the the person I thought was really good. And then everyone spoke up in the huddle as they watched themselves on the screen. And what I felt it was doing
Structure Beats Coaching And Speeds Onboarding
SPEAKER_00was we were highlighting the things we wanted to see, the behaviours we wanted to see, and they were so excited that every time they split off, they went as hard as they could. They trying to hit that ceiling of the the previous guy. And each rep set of reps we did, the standard of everybody just went woof. And there's a bit of motivation there because they wanted to be on the big screen. But these were little kids who uh normally, if you do that sort of stuff and tell them to spread off into gr into twos, you would have people watching aeroplanes or picking daisies or something like that. But because you know, we'd created like a really nice sort of environment where they had wins and they saw themselves and everyone wanted to be publicly praised like that, it was fantastic. And so I I I think this sort of sums up and ran the questions you talked about at the start. Like we encouraged, oh great, what else did he do? Well, oh yep, head yet, good on that's a great answer. What else? Silence. And then someone to say something, great, that's perfect. I don't off we go again. And for me, when you see it in little kids, it it's uh microcosm of what can be for anybody because it's the same principles, I think. Mate, so that just popped up my head as you were talking, and I th I think it's a a cool coaching concept for people.
SPEAKER_03But it's also there's a really interesting point, a guy called Vince Walsh, who's he's done a lot of work with the sort of psychology and neuroscience with sports teams, and he did something where they were what they were doing a it was a football team and they were doing this thing where they had to pass the ball from the middle to the edge, they ran it down the side, and they put in a cross to a striker who would put it in the back of the net. The drill was for the cross, so that's what they're really looking at is how we get these crosses in better. And he counted them, like I don't know, it was like 20. And he was what he was counting was how many got actually put in the back of the net. And it was something like I think maybe eight out of the 20 actually got put in the back of the net. Because it wasn't about the guy in the middle, he was kind of just mucking around and just putting it in. And he said, from a neuroscience point of view, if you're training something poorly, your brain subconsciously doesn't know that that's not what it's supposed to do. So you're basically creating patterns of the wrong thing to do. And so when you're training, you want to be in that 80-20, 90-10 range of getting it right because your brain doesn't know what's right or wrong, it just knows what it does regularly. And yes, you can attach your own feeling to it, but it's so crucial. So perhaps what you've just done there is you've created a vision for what is good, and you're not allowing anything else to go in. So you're training that pattern. They're seeing it, they're seeing it, they're doing it, they're doing it, they're seeing it, they're seeing it. That's good. Um, but at the professional level, every bit of the movement counts. It is crucial.
SPEAKER_00Well, mate, Ross, with mate, this conversation has absolutely flown by, mate. I'm I'm I'm loving it. But we do like to keep it to an hour, mate, because that is the commute level for a lot of people. So we will, mate, ask you the last question, which is the one which I'm really intrigued on for you. It's one we ask regularly is what's one belief that you hold about either leadership or culture that you believe in that you think others would not believe in or disagree with?
SPEAKER_02Okay.
SPEAKER_00Or an unpopular opinion, you reckon?
SPEAKER_02I think I'll go. So it's a truth. Can can I give you a truth that I wish wasn't true? Yes. Arseholes can be fantastic managers.
SPEAKER_03And the reason I say this is because I wish it wasn't true, but in short, some short-term tasks, they're really good because they just don't care as much about how they're perceived. And the amount of place I go into, I see it. Now, it's not it's not an opinion I believe. I think there's better ways to do it and far better ways to do it. That shouldn't be the thing. I wish it wasn't true. But sometimes you go, Oh, you can really do with someone who's a bit of a real like I've had managers and coaches that are some of the worst people and couldn't stand them. I had one guy that used to, he managed to weaponize a handshake every Monday morning, he'd come in and shake everyone's hand. And if you had played well, it'd be like a scruff of a hair, a big handshake. If you'd played well, if you played poorly, sorry, he'd walk past you like this and he'd go, you know. And I was like, you are such an like we'd like we'd laugh about it with other players being like, oh, you got the bad handshake. But it made you feel like such a commodity, which of course all Robbie flesh road players are, but you don't want people to feel like that. But after my career, I look back and anything he did, I was like, rubbish, like awful coach, awful coach. But actually, he did a load of things really well. But sometimes those people can be really successful short term. And I think there are a lot of coaches out there that people wouldn't describe as like an amazing bloke or but they can be really effective at certain things. So I think people who believe that good coaches and good people are better coaches, which is my belief. Let's not dispel some of those bad coaches and some of the things that they do do really well, because they do things really well, they create clarity really well. They do let's just keep an eye on what we can take from them as opposed to just writing them off as arsehole. Perhaps that's my belief. Let's not ignore the truffles of wisdom we can get from the arseholes because they do things really well that we can steal. Does that is that count?
SPEAKER_00Is that does that count as that counts really well?
SPEAKER_03Okay.
SPEAKER_00Just to back that up, I remember a a mate of mine said to me, he was a smoker back in the day, and he says, mate, you should never smoke. It's a disgusting habit. I was like, What are you talking about, mate? Like you're a smoker. And he goes, just because I'm a smoker doesn't mean I'm not right with what I'm saying here.
SPEAKER_02And it's it's Yeah, there you go.
SPEAKER_00And I was like, oh, that's very true. Yeah, and same with an arsehole, right? Like just because he's an arsehole doesn't mean what's coming out of his mouth and his leadership is not fantastic.
SPEAKER_03Some of the things he did were brilliant. He was so good on detail, but I couldn't accept it because he I hated him. So I couldn't accept it. But you know, some of the wisest people are the ones who have made the most mistakes, so you can't write them off because they've um because they've done bad things. But um anyway, that's a bit of moral relativism to finish.
SPEAKER_00Mate, yeah, well, moral relativism to finish, how good. Ross, what a pleasure to have you on the show. If I may, I would like to just wrap up with my three key takeaways that I absolutely loved hearing from you. And I and I I think so much of it sticks, but it's hard to pick three, mate. But here they are. Number one, your concept around information elaboration, that ability for the people you're speaking in front of to actually ask good questions back to you, not just accept a top-down culture, that kind of military style, but to actually go further. And you talked about building decision-making muscle, and that's important in teams where people care when they're asking more about the order you're putting in. And as a coach, you mentioned being able to sit in silence and let people speak is one of the first things you can
Sport Vs Business Culture Lessons
SPEAKER_00do to really encourage that question-answer and asking facet. Number two, love this when you talked about process over outcome, not when we lose, but actually when things go well. And it's something that we often miss as coaches when the results go away or the or the outcome is what we wanted, we sometimes gloss over the process that went before. And you talked about the neutral review on a Monday that if a guest came in, they wouldn't be able to tell if your team won or lost. And I think that's really important. You sort of elaborate more by head coach reflects the standards of what you're accepting. And a head coach neutralness is an important skill set for coaches have. And we we did go to a slide too about a Friday review session before the outcome influences your thinking, and I love that. And number three, this concept around coaching is coaching secondary to structure, and I think that is a really cool concept around that, that putting in goals, normative behaviors, and game structure is really important. First, that coaching can be the seasoning, and I love that because you talked about the travelator. If you put a good travelator in, anyone that gets on board goes in the right direction and quicker, and that is a key thing about creating great environments. And I just loved it because it's a little bit different to normal thinking, and a lot of people would think the coaching is absolute paramount, but the structures that some of the legendary coaches, and we reference Alex Ferguson, put in, is just absolute gold. So when any anyone comes into the environment, they fall in line with the structure and away they go. There's clarity, uh simplicity, and intention, which helps the whole thing move in the right direction and fast. Ross Neal, what an absolute pleasure to have you here with such great insight, mate. Yeah, it's it's absolutely awesome. Before you leave, where can people find you, mate? Like uh in in terms because I know a lot of people would be keen to hear more from you. Where can they find you?
SPEAKER_03Um, yeah, so I'm just uh Ross J Neal, N-E-A L on Instagram, YouTube. Just yeah, type in Ross Neal, and then uh those are kind of the two main ones that I'm on. Oh, LinkedIn, Ross Neal. So just type in it's not too early. You'll find me on the internet. You'll find you, yeah.
SPEAKER_00Well, I I I highly recommend getting into Instagram and just and just the little insights, the snippets you do to the corporate world is is what got me engaged, mate. And I I absolutely love them. Um you you do wonderful things, mate, and it's a it's a pleasure to have you on this show talking to our coaches.
SPEAKER_03No, thank you, Ben. I appreciate it. And just to give you your flowers as well, I mean, um I I have my own podcast. I know how hard it is to get views and to get, I think, 11,000 listens a month. I don't think people realize that to be in the top 50% of podcasts worldwide, top 50% of all podcasts, you need 30 downloads per episode in the first seven days. 30 in the top 50%. To be in the top 25%, I think you need something like 100. To be in the top 10%, you need, I think, something like 400, and then top 1% is something it's like 3,000 downloads, puts you in the top 1%. Um, so just so people understand how hard it is to build a podcast in the modern world, unbelievably blown away by how well you've done and you've clearly managed to hit a chord with people. So yeah, massive well done and great, great job bringing such amazing lessons. Not I'm not counting mine in here, hopefully people use it, but from all the great people you've had on, bringing that to people to actually be able to listen to to your everyday coach is such a brilliant thing. So so appreciate it, mate.
SPEAKER_00We have a wonderful community behind us and uh people that are passionate about getting better at what they do. And chats like this, mate, are certainly uh the reason why people keep tuning in. So thank you, mate.