A lot of businesses, a lot of sports teams, talk about great teams. I designed this thing called winning behaviours and we ended up with seven in rugby. And I think the thing to stress is that the winning behaviours in rugby were just based on what happens during the 80 minutes of the game. It’s the same in business - it’s what you actually do in your business.

The first behaviour is defence. We spent half our time coaching defence, because normally in most games 50 per cent of the time you don’t have the ball.

The second behaviour is basics, which is probably not so obvious. You can speak to one business and speak to seven managers all doing the same job and say “What are the basics, what are the absolute fundamentals you’ve got to get right to be successful?” and you’ll get seven different answers. This is a very interesting conversation with any businessman: what are the basics? Most times, what I’ve found is people can’t answer them straight away – because I couldn’t, either. It took us two years to get to this. But once we got to it, it became so obvious what they were.

The third behaviour was what was called contact. The key thing in rugby is keeping the ball. We had to be absolutely world class in what the player does with the ball when he goes into contact.

The fourth one was pressure, and again that’s how you put your opposition under pressure. A lot of people talk about pressure, especially in sport, and this came under three headings – and the first one’s probably the most interesting. You know we said the basics were absolutely fundamental to us winning, i.e. winning our own scrum ball, lineout or restart. If you reverse that, the way you can put a team under massive pressure was completely trying to dominate their lineout, their scrum and their restarts. And I would know 100 per cent if we got our stats right on our basics and we could mess up a certain amount of their lineout ball and win those, we’d win the game.

The fifth one was attack, and again it’s a simple one. When we’ve actually got the ball, because we’ve won the ball from the lineout, the scrum, what do we do with it?

The sixth one, massive in rugby, is self-control. I use an acronym, TCUP, which stands for thinking correctly under pressure. When you’re arriving at every ruck, everything you’re doing, under the pressure of a big game, you make the right decisions, you think correctly, you do the right things, and that is all about self-control. You’ve got to talk about this, you’ve got to coach it, you’ve got to understand it. And to see the way the England players controlled themselves in the World Cup final, when the referee’s decision wasn’t going our way – they knew that they had to try and get this guy back onside and turn the whole thing around. And that self-control was massive. It would have been very easy under that pressure to lose it. But it didn’t come overnight, this was three or four years of coaching and learning.

The seventh behaviour is leadership, which is huge. I’ve seen no winning team really deliver at the top in terms of gold medals, you know, without having an outstanding leader. This is the leadership on the pitch, in the rugby team – which is Martin Johnson. I mean, Jonno was not only a great leader in his own time, he was probably one of the greatest ever captains of England, if not the greatest captain. But it’s also making sure what would happen if he wasn’t there. Do we still win the World Cup if Martin Johnson gets yellow-carded or is ill, have we got back-up leadership? And Jonno was such a good leader. He was fantastic at delegating because he knew he had other great leaders in the team: Dallaglio, Vickery, Dawson, Greenwood. These players not only captained England in the four years, they could step in and make key decisions on all these areas.

So that was it. It’s how I coached the whole team, it’s how all my coaches work within one system. What also happens is the players start using this sort of language – you know, they go on TV and they say we won because we got our basics right. They start to understand that everything is measurable, that’s the key thing. These are not just words, including things like self-control and leadership. They are clearly measurable, and we set ourselves key performance indicators, world-class performance standards, whatever you want to call them. We call them world-class performance standards, and we went into every match trying to overachieve the kind of targets we hit. And after every game, I could look at the stats and I’d know whether we won or lost, without seeing the actual score, based on these winning behaviours.

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