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To appreciate just how big Martin Johnson really is, you have to meet him in person. At 6'7" tall, he dwarfs most people. And even though he stopped playing rugby in 2005, he still looks poised to burst out of his clothes in all directions. When he took to the podium at the bfi London IMAX theatre to address the London Business Forum (LBF), even the massive screen behind him - the height of five double-decker buses - couldn't make him look small.

The screen displayed a scaled-up image of Johnson throughout his speech, alongside video and Powerpoint slides. It revealed he had the cauliflower ears and beefy hands of a Lord of the Rings extra. However, the man himself proved quickly that he was no brute. His eloquent and humble introduction, for example, paid tribute to the leaders who most influenced his career - notably Dean Richards, his former captain at Leicester Tigers, and Will Carling, the former England skipper. It also revealed his fears of leading his country for the first time, when he captained the British Lions team in 1997.

"Leadership is not about making yourself look good but about helping your people to look good," Johnson said repeatedly. In both sport and business, there's a tendency to venerate leaders and to treat the success of a company as "their achievement". But a good leader is not one who takes glory on behalf of his people, he argued. It's one who assembles a team, earns their respect and motivates them to be more than the sum of their parts.

The 1997 Lions tour to South Africa was a great success, with the British underdogs winning the series 2-1, but Johnson knew better than to rest on his laurels. When he took over the captaincy of the England team two years later, he was "blown away," he said, by the standards of the younger players. He felt he had to operate at 110% just to justify his place, let alone his authority, and was forced to analyse his own performance more rigorously than ever. "Great coaching gives you enthusiasm but it also gives you the skills to coach yourself..." he commented. "You're never too good not to learn from someone else."

This piece of advice was a nod to Sir Clive Woodward, the former England coach who earned his knighthood by steering England to World Cup victory. Woodward addressed the LBF in 2005, and it's clear that many aspects of his approach have rubbed off on his erstwhile captain. "Clive's mantra really was attention to detail," Johnson explained. "He said: 'I want to create an elite environment... [and] I will provide everything I can to make that happen...' Every small thing that he changed made a difference."

One of Woodward's initiatives was to agree a detailed code of behaviour with the players called the "teamship rules". It included, for example, a pledge that everyone should arrive for every meeting 10 minutes early. "I was in the England team 6-7 years and that's a heck of a lot of meetings," Johnson commented. "In all those years, over hundreds or maybe thousands of meetings, I can only remember three of four occasions when someone was late." Woodward turned the idea of "teamship" into an honour system. Ultimately, Johnson said, "we weren't doing it because it was in the rule book... It was us saying to the rest of the team: 'You can rely on me.'"

Woodward reinforced the point at the beginning of the World Cup campaign by producing a leather-bound copy of the teamship rules for each player, with their name embossed on the front cover. He also showed the team a video montage of all the work they had done to prepare, set to a tub-thumping piece of music. The LBF audience got to see this video, and Johnson asked us to imagine the confidence boost it gave him and his men, being reminded of how much their skills had improved.

Of course, he added: "When you get to a big tournament you can't fake it. You can't walk into a room with 14 guys and tell them to believe in themselves... they're either living it every day or they're not, they either believe in themselves or they don't."

Trust is the most important factor in the success of any team, Johnson argued. Every member has to be able to trust every other member, or peak performance will not be realised. And if, as a captain, you can feel confident in the leadership skills of your senior players then all the better.

In the World Cup Final, when Australia levelled the scores with 90 seconds to go, Johnson said he and his men didn't panic or lose heart, but simply focused on "controlling the controllables". "When I got back to the huddle, I looked around the core of our team and I knew we were going to win," he said. "There was no big talk, I just looked at their body language: there were no chins on chests... It was the most simple 20 minutes of my rugby life. I didn't have to think about whether guys were doubting themselves or doubting the team. We all trusted each other."

Achieving this state obviously depended on weeding out individuals who had a bad attitude at an early stage. It also depended on the sensitive handling of players who were likely to remain substitutes in most games. It even required the selection of players whose key attribute was one of chemistry rather than raw ability. "You need those character guys," Johnson said, explaining that in the World Cup-winning team, "some of them weren't the most skilful players in the country, without a doubt, but what they were was hard-working; they made the absolute most out of the skills they had."

Of course, he conceded, a lot of the players "picked themselves because they were outstanding in their positions". When a member of the audience questioned him later on how to get the most of someone less talented, he replied it was a matter of getting them to focus on their specific function. During one of his games as captain of Leicester Tigers, he said, a newcomer to the team faced a South African international and, simply by being told to concentrate on one duty, he "achieved parity... which was more than we could have hoped for."

The other crucial factor in the World Cup victory, Johnson added, was communication. "When you talk about communication in sport, people always think about the big team talk, but... we had this saying in the England team: big talk, little talk." He explained that, under Woodward, "big talk" concerned broad issues such as team strategy and tactics, game plans, logistics and so on, while "little talk" concerned individual issues such as positive and critical feedback, encouragement and reassurance.

He recalled a match against the All Blacks in New Zealand about four months before the World Cup tournament where, after about 50 minutes, two England players were sent to the sin bin. The "big talk" from the coaches was simple, "Tackle them," an obvious point that got everyone grinning. "What got us through the next 10 minutes probably wasn't even verbal," Johnson said. "The little talk got us through: looking at the guy next to you, giving him a nod."

He added: "When you're on the field you're constantly talking. We have seven different guys on the field who have responsibilities for the team. My communication with them would be constant throughout the game." He was annoyed at the behaviour of the England football team during the 2006 World Cup, he said, because they clearly "didn't really believe in our tactics; [so] why wasn't that communicated to management? You could almost tell from the body language that they didn't really believe in what they were doing."

Ultimately, Johnson suggested, winning depends on being good enough to make mistakes and still prevail, whether in sport or in business. The big difference, of course, is that in business you never really leave the field of play. "If you stand still... you get overtaken very quickly," he concluded. More than ever, the continuous development of team performance is a vital leadership skill.