Standards ain’t standard
Culture is what gets passed on
Five Sydney Swans players will not be considered for selection for the remainder of the 2026 AFL season after the club determined they had seriously breached expected club behaviour and standards. The club has said its sanction is independent of the ongoing Victoria Police investigation. At the time of writing no charges have been laid.
My interest is what happens after the public focus moves on.
Because somewhere at some point another incident will raise the same questions about standards and culture in sport.
There will be consequences.
Attention will eventually move somewhere else.
Then one day we will be back here again.
That is one cycle worth breaking.
As a late baby boomer it is hard to forget the long running Castrol advertising campaign and its famous line:
Oils ain't oils.
This week I found myself thinking:
Standards ain't standards.
Standards are what we write down.
Culture is what gets passed on.
Would we pass?
I heard Wayne Bennett speak at a corporate function in 2016. My recollection is that he questioned the value of sporting organisations displaying their values prominently on walls when the behaviour inside the organisation did not reflect them.
Anyone who has spent enough time inside a large organisation probably knows exactly what he meant.
Integrity. Respect. Courage. Teamwork. Excellence. Most organisations have some version of those words somewhere.
If our club was independently audited against the values we claim, would we pass? Or do we need to start again?
The behavioural standards deserve the same test.
Can every person at our club explain our behavioural standards and what they mean in real situations?
Can they tell you what their teammates expect when nobody from management is in the room?
Can our youngest players give substantially the same answer as the captain?
If not, why not?
Are we investing as deliberately in culture as we are in governance?
Governance can codify and enforce standards.
Culture makes them normal.
The other cycle
Sport has wrestled with versions of this problem for decades.
Rituals, behaviours and social norms get handed from one playing group to the next. A young player arrives and learns what earns acceptance, what carries status, what gets laughed at, what gets challenged and what quietly becomes normal.
They enter a culture they did not design.
Years later some of those players become established leaders. They increasingly help set the norm and pass it on to the next group arriving through the door.
The young player and the senior leader can be different points in the same cultural cycle.
That is why changing coaches, captains, executives or policies does not automatically change what gets passed on.
I have heard some people of my own generation privately dismiss modern behavioural standards as overreach. That view never needs to appear in a policy to have influence. Young people quickly work out the difference between what leaders say and what the group actually accepts.
The written standards may have changed. The inherited norms may not have.
That is where the two cycles meet.
The public cycle keeps returning because the cultural cycle can keep turning underneath it.
Adults own their choices. Culture shapes the environment in which those choices get made.
Breaking the cycle means changing what the group regards as normal.
Someone doesn't drink.
Fine.
Someone leaves early.
Fine.
Someone says they're going home and goes home.
Fine.
Someone steps in when a teammate is heading towards a poor decision.
That's leadership.
The cultural objective is to make good judgement normal and belonging unconditional.
Peer pressure is extraordinarily powerful.
A good culture points it in the right direction.
Belonging
Ben Crowe's work offers a useful lens here. He writes about moving from fitting in to belonging and from “not enough” to “I am enough”. He has also spoken about separating self worth from external approval, accepting our imperfections and having the courage to remain authentic.
Those ideas matter enormously in an environment where belonging carries so much weight.
Good culture builds self worth, acceptance of self and others and an understanding that we are all imperfect and always capable of becoming better.
Belonging that has to be earned by joining in is a toll.
Good culture removes the toll.
Families entrust very young people to elite sporting organisations. Often an 18 year old moves to the other side of the country and very quickly the club can become almost their whole world. Their workplace, friendship group, support network and strongest source of belonging can all sit inside the same organisation.
That carries a significant responsibility.
A sporting organisation should aspire to have every young person leave it a better human being than the one who arrived.
More grounded, more confident and more self aware. Better at making decisions, accepting themselves and others and looking after the people around them.
Culture also travels beyond the front door. Women, families and people working around a sporting organisation may never have agreed to the playing group's norms and should never be expected to carry their consequences.
That responsibility applies across men's sport, women's sport, recreational sporting clubs and workplaces everywhere.
Elite sporting organisations already invest heavily in developing their people.
The opportunity is to make the transmission of culture as deliberate as the development of performance.
The negotiation opportunity
Good negotiation gets underneath positions and identifies the underlying interests.
Positions are easy to recognise. Clubs have standards, players have rights, governing bodies have rules and players associations have obligations to their members.
The opportunity sits underneath those positions.
What does each party actually need the system to achieve?
Players want belonging, autonomy and sustainable careers. Clubs and coaches want performance, trust and people who make good decisions. Families, managers and players associations want people to thrive in strong environments. Governing bodies, supporters and sponsors want confidence in the sport. People who encounter the sport have an interest in those standards travelling with its people.
Those interests are different.
The common ground is substantial.
Everyone benefits when people thrive and teams perform. Everyone has something to lose when culture fails.
Find the common interests then build the system around them.
Bring the relevant people together while the need for change is visible. Understand what each needs, identify the genuine differences and agree the reciprocal commitments.
Here is what we expect from you.
Here is what you can expect from us.
Here is what teammates owe one another.
Here is what leadership looks like when the easy decision and the right decision point in different directions.
Then document the agreement and build a shared system strong enough to make the current one obsolete.
Make the reset live
The window created by moments like this does not stay open forever.
This is an opportunity to agree what we want the next generation to inherit and build the system around that agreement.
Then make the first 90 days deliberate.
Every new player is learning two things at once.
How to perform.
And how to belong.
They are watching who carries influence, what behaviour carries status, what senior people model, what gets challenged and what becomes normal.
Bring senior players into that process. Bring coaches, player development staff, managers and the players association into it. Use real situations and talk about the choices people will actually face.
Then keep looping back.
Throughout the season.
Throughout the career.
And especially when today's new player becomes tomorrow's leader.
The same cycle exists in workplaces everywhere. New employees quickly discover whether the values on the wall are also the values in the room.
Standards are what we write down. Culture is what gets passed on.
Change what gets passed on and you change the cycle.