England head coach Stuart Lancaster believes the next step for his team is to make them 'genuinely feared' "It's not something I try to cultivate, it's just who I am," he explains. If you're too understated, then you might find that you haven't got the strength of leadership. Equally if you're too egotistical, too full of your own self-importance, then you lose people. It's about hitting the balance between the two. This delicate balance can manifest itself in unexpected ways. After a harmless enough broadcast interview here at Millwall Rugby Club launching a community rugby project for NatWest Rugby Force, he admonishes the producer sternly for talking too loudly in his earpiece. While Lancaster soft-pedals for the cameras, vestiges of the disciplinarian pedagogue, drilling his pupils through another gym class back in West Yorkshire, are seldom far from the surface. One story holds that during his three years in charge of the Saxons, he would castigate senior internationals dispirited by demotion for their negative demeanour, telling Mike Tindall and company: "If some of us don't change our body language, we ain't going to get on very well." So in the aftermath of England's shambolic World Cup campaign - where, in his words, "a lot of people were frustrated about the behaviour" - has he needed to exhibit this forceful streak with the first XV? Not so much. Players like Brad Barritt and Phil Dowson came up with me, from our Churchill Cups together. They had waited a long time for their chance and wanted to take it. Lancaster's rhetoric takes flight in a discourse about the art of leadership. He describes his philosophy thus: "Let the scoreline take care of itself." It is a neat line, and one more than validated by last month's 38-21 vanuqishing of the All Blacks, although if it is not technically his. It is the title of a memoir by Bill Walsh, venerated former coach of the San Francisco 49ers, which he has come to regard as almost a sacred text. The book enshrines his conviction about holding fast to one's principles, given that Walsh famously lost 14 of 16 games in his first season, only to win three Super Bowls through the laser arm of quarterback Joe Montana. "The reason I like it so much is that it supports a theory I was already pursuing," says Lancaster, who turned to Walsh's words amid the stress of mobilising for his maiden Six Nations. "When I started reading this, I thought, "Wow, there are an awful lot of similarities between this and what I'm trying to achieve." It gave me confidence. Walsh knew, fundamentally, that if you established a culture higher than that of your opposition, you would win. So rather than obsessing about the results, you focus on the team. Lancaster reads voraciously, interspersing his sporting tomes with such cornerstones of business-speak as Jim Collins's The Leadership Challenge, assembling an eclectic composite view of his vocation. I draw from as many sources as I can. I will read autobiographies by coaches in most sports, and I have also just read Richie McCaw's The Real McCaw, because I want to understand from a player's perspective what international rugby feels like. That gives you a precious insight. It's not about trying to copy, but about taking many pieces and moulding them into my own personal philosophy. While his elevation with England might have come as a wonderful surprise, Lancaster's notions of how he would succeed have been long in gestation. Fleshing out his view of what constitutes a great coach, he claims: "Credibility is the foundation of leadership. How do you develop it? You need to be honest, inspiring, forward-thinking, technically competent. Those are the four qualities I would aim to model myself on. The Lancaster method does not always ensure he is uniformly popular. Recently he drew stinging criticism from Nick Easter, England's out-of-favour No 8, that he was predisposed to select players from abroad above homegrown talent. Despite his decision to shift Wasps" Tongan-born Billy Vunipola into Easter's berth, he gives the suggestion short shrift. "I haven't got any policy of spotting players from overseas and then recruiting them into England," he insists, citing his work with Tom Youngs and Joe Launchbury as proof. I wouldn't spend all my time developing an academy programme to do the exact opposite. Nick's clearly keen on playing for England again, but I have to keep an eye on the future. His model player is one forged in his own image: loyal, un-starry, eschewing the faintest trappings of celebrity out of respect for the collective quest. Alluding to the quantum cultural shift he has engineered in the England camp, transforming them from a motley band tearing it up in a Queenstown nightclub to All Blacks conquerors who are scrupulous in never betraying a note of complacency, he says: "When you have a critical mass who want to go in a certain direction, any players not buying into the team ethic have a choice to make: either change your conduct or pay the price by not being selected. You go with the players who will be right for the culture. That is a prerequisite for me: select on character, not just talent. Despite the management mantras that punctuate Lancaster's speech, he harbours a fine-grained appreciation of what his England team need to fulfil expectations at the next World Cup and beyond. Already, with the same exactitude that so persuaded his interview panel at the Rugby Football Union, he has calculated that his players need a combined 663 caps by the time of their first pool game in September 2015. Reminded of this remarkably precise statistic, he smiles. I guess my vision for the team extends over a longer period. I don't tend to position it at the end of the Six Nations, or even the World Cup. The next level for us is to achieve consistency. You have your culture, you have your discipline, you have your understanding of how you are trying to play the game. Now we want to deliver the type of performances where we can be genuinely feared as opponents, whoever we play. First in Lancaster's crosshairs at the Six Nations are Scotland, and one senses he has already had the calculator out in readiness. "There are no guarantees," he cautions, eager to temper the feverish anticipation that has followed the All Blacks result. The average points difference between England and Scotland over the past five years is four points. Whichever team wins, it is not going to be by much. He draws faith from England's riposte at the autumn internationals, where the furore over Chris Robshaw's decision to kick for goal rather than the corner in the dying seconds against South Africa was replaced by glorious vindication with the toppling of New Zealand. "A lot of forces can pull away at team spirit," Lancaster reflects. But what was most encouraging was how, for all the comments about our decision-making, we came together in the 48 hours afterwards. That showed to me that we had a strength inside us. Stuart Lancaster was launching NatWest RugbyForce. For more information and to register your club visit:www.natwest.com/ rugbyforce.