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How cleaning toilets demonstrates leadership in Formula One racing – Mary T. O’Sullivan
By Mary T. O’Sullivan, MSOL
“It all starts with an attention to detail.” Toto Wolff, Team Principal, Mercedes Formula 1 Team
The year 2021 saw Team Mercedes win its 8th consecutive F1 race. How did that happen? What made this team the champions they are today? It all stems from the leadership of Toto Wolff, who took over the team in 2013. It’s interesting to note that an F1 racing team is more than the car and the driver. Each racing car is manufactured from scratch, and it takes a team of almost 1800 people to design, engineer manufacture and test the car before it’s ready for competition. The rigors of winning F1 races start with the basics. Excellence in every aspect of team functioning is demanded by its leader, and Wolff starts with the essentials.
During his first visit to the Mercedes team offices, as he waited in the lobby, he notices disarray. Crumpled up papers and empty coffee cups carelessly left in the waiting room made a bad first impression. It didn’t set the right tone for excellence or his famous finnicky attention to what may seem to some like unimportant minutiae. In a conversation with the departing team principal, Wolff disagreed that engineering alone guaranteed victory. “No”, he said, “it all starts with attention to detail.”
Thus began the evolution of Wolff’s six principles of leadership: set high standards, put people first analyze mistakes—even when winning, foster an open, no-blame culture, trust superstars but maintain authority, relentlessly battle complacency. Today, I’ll talk about #1 and #2.
- Set the Highest Standards—for Everyone
Once the leadership torch was passed, he started with the simple things. Wolff noticed that the team’s hospitality area was unkempt. The lavatory area didn’t meet his expectations of class and elegance. It was dirty. Cleanliness needed to be kept up to a very high standard as the team’s sponsors and their families used that area during races. It had to look like the fine hotels and resorts his guests were used to. In response, he hired a full time “hygiene manager” who travels with the team to every race. Wolff himself gave explicit instructions on how he wanted the toilets cleaned, the placement of the soap dispensers, and the sanitization of the fixtures. He’s done the same thing with the garage. As in any typical Mercedes dealership, the garage is immaculate. No tire tread marks mar the floor, no tools are out of place, “everything is spotless and organized.”
What has all this to do with winning races? Wolff sets a high standard with clear goals: No job is too small for any team member and that every team member, down to the “hygiene manager” bears responsibility to enhance overall team excellence in their performance. With these efforts, he set the tone for a mindset of excellence that still reflects throughout his organization today.
2. Put People Front and Center
“I don’t run racing cars,” Wolff is fond of saying. “I run people that run racing cars.” (From Harvard Business Review). An interesting concept that, post pandemic, impacts every organization who wants to deter turnover and improve retention.
As an F1 team principal, he works with a variety of people with different skills, personalities, hopes, dreams, and fears, over 1800 of them. In the F1 business, engineers dominate, however, Wolff is not an engineer. How does he gain their respect? By spending time with them and working to understand what the Mercedes team engineers want and need. He works to build rapport, to establish the best course of action in any given tough situation.
In his second season with Mercedes, he initiated an offsite retreat with key members of his leadership team to focus on the “human side” of the organization. That’s where they discussed their vision, values, and goals for the team. Every year, every member of the Mercedes F1 team is asked to rate themselves against these key performance indicators. This exercise is all part of the team’s process of the all important follow through, which research has shown to be essential if the organization’s culture is to be reinforced. Without follow up, and follow through the mission, vision, values, and goals are easily forgotten and fall to the wayside. And the leaders are asked every year to summarize and clarify their individual and team goals ahead of each new season. The summary serves as guidance for the entire team for that season and beyond.
Establishing excellence and putting people first empower leaders to expect great performance at every level, from the guy who cleans the lavatories to the most sophisticated engineer. It engenders a powerful, successful organization with loyal team members.
“For a team to win even a single Formula One championship…every part of the organization has to do superb work all season long and come together with an extraordinary sense of focus and purpose” – Harvard Business Review
Connect with Mary:
www.encoreexeecutivecoaching.com
https://www.linkedin.com/in/marytosullivan/
401-742-1965
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Read all Mary’s columns here: https://rinewstoday.com/mary-t-osullivan-msol-pcc-shrm-scp/
Mary T. O’Sullivan, Master of Science, Organizational Leadership, International Coaching Federation Professional Certified Coach, Society of Human Resource Management, “Senior Certified Professional. Graduate Certificate in Executive and Professional Career Coaching, University of Texas at Dallas. Member, Beta Gamma Sigma, the International Honor Society. Advanced Studies in Education from Montclair University, SUNY Oswego and Syracuse University. Mary is also a certified Six Sigma Specialist, Contract Specialist, IPT Leader and holds a Certificate in Essentials of Human Resource Management from SHRM.