Claim OwnershipCoaching Culture with Ben Herring
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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.
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What’s the fastest way for a coach to lose a room full of talented athletes? Make them feel smaller. We sit down with Dave Hadfield, one of New Zealand rugby’s most influential coach developers, to get brutally clear on the difference between demanding high standards and quietly eroding a person’s self-worth with the wrong words, the wrong tone, or the wrong moment. We unpack why great coaching is not just tactics and technique, but human psychology and leadership behavior happening all day ...
You can feel a company’s culture in minutes, even if nobody explains it. Walk into the first meeting, listen to how people disagree, notice who gets included, and you already know what kind of place it is. We take that idea seriously and ask a challenging question: if a complete outsider spent a few hours with your team, what would they say your workplace culture really is? Not the culture you want. The culture they experienced. Drawing on years inside elite rugby environments, we unpa...
Some leaders earn trust with speeches. Nili Latu earned it by taking hits, taking responsibility, and taking care of people when nobody else would. From captaining Tonga through chaotic tours and unpaid campaigns to coaching a new generation back home, Nili’s story is a masterclass in coaching culture, Pacific Island leadership, and what “service” really means in high-performance sport. We talk about leaving Tonga at 10, learning rugby and English in New Zealand, and carrying the press...
The best coaching stories aren’t about the whiteboard, they’re about what happens years later when an old player stops traffic just to give you a hug. That’s where this conversation with John Plumtree goes fast: past trophies and into the parts of rugby coaching and leadership that actually last. Plum has coached at the highest levels with the Sharks, the Hurricanes, Ireland, and the All Blacks, and he brings a grounded view of culture that cuts through the usual slogans. We talk about the h...
A school with 2,100 students shouldn’t feel like a family, yet that’s exactly what we found at Grange School in Santiago, Chile. I’m joined by Francesco “Pancho” Pinha, former Chile captain, lifelong teacher, and the proud tradition keeper who helps explain why this program keeps producing an extraordinary share of Chile’s national team players and leaders. We talk about what “culture” looks like when it’s lived for decades: consistency over many years, coaches who care, and fundamentals don...
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