Team leadership/Philip Matthews:These days you can book anyone you ever admired on the sports field tol turn up and deliver pretty much any message you want. It may not be particularly original or insightful but, then again, we don't really expect to learn much about business from retired sports stars . . . do we?

So far no one has been able to offer any truly novel insights from sport that haven't already been learned in business.

The best lesson sport can provide is an alternative context to periodically remind us of the fundamentals: like performance, preparation and, I guess the most frequently referenced parallel, leadership.

My first leadership roles came in my rugby career at Irish schools' level and this continued right up to the senior national rugby team, overlapping various management/leadership roles in my business career up to the present day.

Many of the qualities and traits that we like to see in our leaders are "hard wired" personal characteristics such as assertiveness, ambition, intellect, integrity, etc. Others are skills that can be learned, such as decision making, influencing, mentoring, etc.

In sport, leaders tend to be selected primarily for the "hard wired" attributes or personality traits. If I were to highlight one trait over all others it would be the ability to communicate and influence with passion.

If sport has taught me anything about leadership, it is the absolute necessity for leaders to find that passion and to express it if they are to inspire people and keep them engaged. Leadership positions in rugby gave me the opportunity to practice many of the same skills that I needed in business and vice versa.

In essence we are talking about exactly the same skills and attributes for leadership in sport as in business. Leaders need to be able to exert positive influence on their team, to motivate and inspire with passion. Motivation is an often over simplified and clichéd expression, as first the leader needs to hold the respect of his or her team if they are going to be receptive to being motivated. In order to gain that respect they need to demonstrate a number of basic or primary leadership characteristics such as decisiveness, integrity, energy, self-confidence, dependability, tolerance to stress, etc. Once the leader has established that respect then he or she can use many different techniques to motivate and inspire.

Often these techniques are tailored to suit the individual and that's where another important leadership trait - emotional intelligence - comes in. Before a game, my approach to a young player at the start of his rugby career (who required more confidence than motivation) may have been to simply tell him how proud I was to be playing with him.

My approach to a senior player would have invariably involved seeking his opinion on how preparation was going and reiterating some of the things that I needed him to take responsibility for on the day. I've always believed that in order to motivate you need to take the time to engage people on a personal level and I try to adopt the same approach in business leadership.

In return, business has given me an appreciation of the need for situational leadership. I relied heavily on this when conducting negotiations with the IRFU leading up to the 1991 Rugby World Cup.

We had a players committee of three and we were recommending a rather adversarial course of action with the IRFU over some contractual issues. For the younger players this could have been very disconcerting but we were consultative in our approach, we sought and got a clear mandate from them and kept them informed and updated with regular briefings (by mail if we had to), so that they felt included and informed.

As a result they stayed right behind us through some rather tricky negotiations. I'm not sure that without the experience of leadership in business that this approach would have come so intuitively.

However in other situations, players want you to behave in a more autocratic way with a level of assertiveness that gives them confidence.

In the heat of battle, decisions have to be made quickly and confidently; players want you to make those calls and it's the same in business. Sometimes people don't want to be consulted and leaders need to be adept and confident at both.

One thing players want from their leaders is clarity around the game plan, what is expected of them individually and feedback on how they are performing. In business we know these things already, but maybe what we can learn is to make some of these fundamentals more routine in business leadership.