Stuart Lancaster joined Ger Gilroy for the first episode of Leaders' Questions with Stuart Lancaster as the Leinster Senior Coach talked about his career to date and what motivates him to continue in his career.
The former England Head Coach endured a difficult World Cup in 2015 as the hosts lost to both Wales and Australia on home soil and were eliminated in the pool stages.
Lancaster spent some time in the southern hemisphere in the immediate aftermath of the tournament and returned to Europe to join Leinster in September 2016.
Asked about how he reflected on the failure with England, he said: "What I did, I took myself away, on my own and I wrote down the order of events and my reflections on that. So I've now got this document, let's call it, a review of my own personal feelings about what happened - that's actually never been shared.
"Although, what I've actually found quite, therapeutic is the wrong word, but helped a little bit is when I have talked about the World Cup - as painful as it is to talk about - I found it quite useful to share what I have learned with other organisations, to help them get better.
"So you feel like something good has come out of it. And, I think what motivates me is trying to improve other leaders.
"Since the World Cup, it's happened both with other sports and with people in business as well because the parallels are very similar," he added.
Lancaster admits he rarely opens up about the experience, telling Ger: "It's a reasonably painful experience - I probably open the door for them to say 'Listen, I'm happy to talk about it but as long as it's, not confidential, but there's respect for confidentiality - so we could open an honest [discussion]. I would never call people out or anything - I'd more broadly look at it from leadership perspective.
"So I took the job in 2011 and there was no CEO, there was no Chairman at the RFU, we'd been knocked out of the World Cup etc. so 'This is how I tried to build the team from a leadership perspective, this is what happened in the World Cup and this is what I learned from the World Cup from a leadership perspective'.
"Like I say, sharing that learning with other coaches or people in business - I don't do it often because it's too painful to do, to be honest, that often, but coming to Leinster it was one of the first things I did."
Cisco Systems and Exertis Ireland, providing a secure, intelligent platform for digital business. Visit intelligentit.ie for further information.
Listen back to the first episode here:
