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Lawrence Dallaglio looks like he belongs in another era. He has a huge frame, a long nose and a neck that is wider than his head. One could easily imagine him going into battle for Sparta, summoning up the blood of his men by literally pulling the heads of his enemies from their shoulders. If he’d issued any orders to the London Business Forum (LBF) during this event at the BFI IMAX Cinema, there’s no doubt we would have obeyed. Yet it was the “softer” aspects of leadership that he was here to promote.

“If you want to unlock your potential as a person and as an individual… You have to look at yourself, understand who you are, and where you’ve come from,” he said early on. What he meant by this wouldn’t become clear until the end of the speech, but it nevertheless gave him a good reason to recount the essentials of his past: born in Shepherd’s Bush to an Italian-immigrant father and an English mother from a big East End family; joined London Wasps as a teenager and stayed there for his entire 18-year career in professional rugby; captained England and served in the side that won the 2003 World Cup.

Dallaglio wasn’t particularly good at rugby at school, he claimed. But he nevertheless set himself set himself the goal of playing for Wasps . Why? Because, at the time, it was the top Premier League rugby team in England. “I called this ‘getting the edge’,” Dallaglio explained. “I wanted to position myself in the best place. I wasn't prepared to settle for second best.” Like another recent LBF speaker, Sir Steve Redgrave, he was motivated not so much by the desire to win as by a hatred of losing.

The reason he stayed at the club for so long, he said, was that it never stopped offering him the opportunity to be the best – a salutary lesson for any business chief worried about retaining their most talented staff. “If I felt I wasn’t getting what I wanted out of my career, I would have moved on,” he insisted. “You have to be ruthless enough to look at what you're getting out of your career and say, ‘Am I positioning myself in the right place? Am I happy?’ And if not, ‘I must move on’.”

Loyalty is obviously a virtue, he argued, but it can end up letting down the people it’s meant to serve if it makes you unhappy. For example, he said, Jonny Wilkinson, the England fly-half whose famous last-minute drop-goal won England the World Cup in 2003, has been “incredibly loyal” to the fans of his club Newcastle Falcons. “I guess he feels that the fans deserve his loyalty for having the patience to put up with his many, many injuries,” Dallaglio suggested. “But has it cost him the number of injuries he’s had? Could he have been playing for a slightly better team? And, ultimately, will it cost him his place in England team?”

Finding the balance between personal, professional and family obligations is something that was impressed upon Dallaglio by another English rugby hero, Martin Johnson. “He looks at life as a kind of a three-lane highway,” Dallaglio said. “You have yourself in the inside lane, you have your family and friends in the middle lane, and you have you career in the outside lane.” Men tend to avoid spending time in the inside lane because it involves self-assessment, he suggested. But it’s a very interesting exercise to examine how much time we spend in each lane. “When I played rugby, I spent the majority of my time [in the outside lane],” he said. “A huge sacrifice was being made by the people in the middle. And I wasn’t really looking at myself – professionally, but perhaps not emotionally or spiritually.”

All this becomes especially important when you’re forced to deal with disaster, Dallaglio said. It’s a lesson he learned from a series of bad experiences beginning with his sister’s death (age 19) in the Marchioness ferry disaster, through numerous injuries and a press scandal that saw him stripped of the England captaincy in 1999. On the playing field, as in business, it’s important to to keep in mind that “you can engineer victory from setbacks”, he argued. For example, after Wasps were given a league thrashing by Leicester in 2007, they gained revenge two weeks later by winning the Heineken European Cup.

A massive defeat is always a learning opportunity, Dallaglio emphasised. If you do your analysis carefully and learn from your mistakes then you can strengthen yourself rapidly.

Of course, you also need a great team around you, he added – one that combines a powerful collective vision with clearly delineated individual responsibilities. “It’s no good you being good at your job if you don't trust the guy next to you to do his job,” he commented. “Because you’ll start doing something for him that you’re not supposed to do.”

The creation of a powerful collective vision was perhaps the most valuable contribution made by Sir Clive Woodward to the England team, when he coached them to victory in 2003, Dallaglio said. Woodward, another recent LBF speaker, looked for sources of advantage everywhere, and persuaded the players that they needed to be only “one per cent better” than their opponents in order to win. “We looked at all these areas in the rugby team, and we just thought about improving each little area, whether it was nutrition, whether it was fitness, by one or two per cent,” Dallaglio said. It was a principle that every player bought into, and therefore gave them a sense of ownership over the development of the team as a whole. Previously, England’s training strategy had been to copy the techniques of its Southern hemisphere models. Now, Dallaglio said, “as a team, we decided to start pioneering ideas.”

Another necessary break from British convention is “using success to bolster confidence,” Dallaglio argued. Before the Beijing Olympics, he pointed out, the cyclist Bradley Wiggins gave an interview in which he predicted he would win two gold medals and would be “very disappointed” if the cycling team didn’t win seven golds overall. By historical standards, this was a very “un-British” attitude, but it was also the truth. “So what’s wrong if you know you are the best team in using that success to reinforce confidence within the team?” Dallaglio asked.

The harder challenge, arguably, is to stay at the top. To achieve this, Dallaglio said, you need to sustain your senses of desire and belief over a long period. And that means getting stimulation from your trusted team. “You need to surround yourself with people that you can feed off, that you’re enthusiastic about and that can keep that desire fuelled in you to stay at the top.” Additionally, he said, you need to continually refocus your personal goals. “It’s a very easy thing, once you get successful, just to be content with that, because it’s all you ever wanted to achieve. [But] you need to move those targets on, because you can bet your bottom dollar that the people who are trying to catch you up are doing everything they can to try and catch you up.”

Ultimately, you have to ask yourself: “How do you want to be remembered?” It’s a question the players in the England team would ask themselves repeatedly, Dallaglio revealed. “How do you, as an individual, want to be remembered by your friends, by your family, by your opponents, by everyone in the world, I guess, in sport. Ultimately you want to be respected by your friends, by your peers, by your opposition, by your teammates. I think that was quite a powerful message that we used. Are you doing enough? How do you want to be remembered?”

Dallaglio concluded by quoting Warren Gatlin, coach to the national sides of both Ireland and Wales, who said recently that finding “exceptional” leaders in rugby was becoming a problem. Successful sides require leaders with “life experience”, Gatlin argued, but “people with genuine life experience are becoming rarer. An ever growing percentage of players lead what I call the ‘secluded life,’ having gone from school rugby to academy rugby and from there straight into the First XV teams.” To be an exceptional leader these days, Dallaglio concluded, you have to live a balanced life in which you embrace your roots and draw strength from the adversity you’ve faced. You can’t just be a warrior-hero if you want to achieve longlasting glory.