The Psychology Of Building Team Culture | Eddie Jones

How do great leaders build teams to become who they're capable of becoming, and prepare them to handle their emotions when the pressure is highest?

Eddie Jones is one of the most accomplished coaches in world rugby. He has led Australia, England, and Japan on the international stage, and guided Japan to one of the greatest upsets in rugby history at the 2015 World Cup. He has built a career on turning teams around, creating pressure, and challenging more from the people he leads. There is a fine line in that work. Too little challenge and we never understand who we can become. Too much and we create the wrong conditions to explore. That line has not always been easy to walk. Eddie’s demanding methods have drawn criticism over the years, and his exits from England in 2022 and Australia in 2023 came under intense public scrutiny... a chapter he alludes to here when he describes the mistake of letting the noise come down on top of him.

In this conversation with Dr. Michael Gervais, Eddie walks through how he builds team identity, starting with a picture in his head of how a team could play and then closing the gap between that vision and the group in front of him. He explains why he keeps training about 70% successful, so the 30% of failure becomes the learning, and why training should always be harder than the game. He makes the case that immediate, private feedback beats public humiliation every time, and that the best coaches ask far more questions than they answer.

Eddie also talks about understanding the individual, why coaching has shifted from team-based to one-on-one, and how a single moment of feeling important from a coach 30 years ago still moves him today. He opens up struggles he has faced with his own emotions, the mistakes he has made, the generation that taught him to never show vulnerability, and why he is still learning to make room for joy. 

In this conversation, we explore:

• How great coaches build a team identity and close the gap between vision and reality
• Why training should be about 70% successful, so the failures become the learning
• The value in training harder than the game
• Why the best coaches ask more questions than they answer
• How understanding the individual has become central to modern leadership
• Why you should never assume, and always confirm by knowing the person
• The thinking time every leader needs

By the end of the conversation the two land on a question every leader should ask: would you want to be coached by yourself?

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Eddie Jones' Books: My Life and Rugby: The Autobiography and Leadership: Lessons from My Life in Rugby

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