F1 Legend Toto Wolff on Winning, Losing, and Leading Through Both

0:00This episode is brought to you by Accenture. When your advertising operations fall out of sync, everything else follows. Spotify and Accenture are working together to reinvent the rhythm of ad sales, using automation, analytics, and smarter workflows to simplify campaign delivery and access better data across the business. The result? Less time spent on operations, more time connecting brands with the moments and fandoms that matter most. Learn more at Accenture.com slash Spotify. This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome? That's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks.

0:45Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required, compatibility and availability varies 18+. I'm Anita Albersi. I'm a professor at the Harvard Business School, and I'm here with Toto Wolff, the team principal behind the Mercedes team, the team behind arguably one of the greatest winning streaks in all of sports with eight consecutive team-based championships, the Constructor Championship. And we're going to be talking about what it takes to build a winning culture. You've shown that you can do that. But I actually want to start by looking at this season because this season the winning streak came to an end.

1:23How did you experience this season? Yeah, Ernette, good to be back. Actually, remember, we talked about it last February when it was, we were here, about eight consecutive World Championships. And I said to you, let's hope this is not the start of us losing. And here we go, end of the year, and we've lost that championship. Have you changed your approach? Were there areas where you said, now, what we've been doing all this time, we can no longer do? Or has it been still the same kind of leadership approach? Over all these years, we really tried to work on our values, the culture and philosophies, how to cope with the day when it comes.

2:02We knew there is no sports team in the world that has won every single championship that they entered forever. So that day has come. Yeah, because you've talked about this fear of losing all along and now losing is actually happening. How do you cope with that emotionally? It comes in quite an interesting pattern because at the beginning you are in disbelief. This can't possibly be happening. And then comes the phase where you think, okay, this is just a blip. We got things wrong. This is an organization that has been successful in the past. And then you realize we got this really wrong. and the real risk is that you change your expectations and this is where it becomes so fundamental to not change your own expectations and not say well okay we've lost that one anyway already or you get used to a podium and you say well that wasn't so bad we finished second and third and in a way losing doesn't become as painful anymore as it was before and that's real risky and we live through this emotion with the team that finishing fifth and sixth or fourth and fifth and suddenly you end up on the podium and you think it's a success and it's not.

3:15You need to remind yourself how painful it is. If we would have had a fourth and fifth or third and fourth last year that would have been seen as a defeat so it's it's still seen as a defeat but you have to remind yourself. To remind yourself that you can't get used to this not finishing first. Yeah I think is how our mind works it's almost protecting ourselves from feeling the own mediocrity. And if you're not good enough, suddenly you score a result that is better than expected, you're quite happy about that. But when you scroll back and say, how would we have failed six months ago about such a result?

3:54You come to the realization, this is not. This episode is brought to you by Accenture. When your advertising operations fall out of sync, everything else follows. Spotify and Accenture are working together to reinvent the rhythm of ad sales, using automation, analytics, and smarter workflows to simplify campaign delivery and access better data across the business. The result? Less time spent on operations, more time connecting brands with the moments and fandoms that matter most. Learn more at Accenture.com slash Spotify. This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser.

4:31But Gemini and Chrome? That's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required, compatibility and availability varies 18+. Where we expect ourselves to be. Right. Do you have an explanation by now for what has gone wrong? Formula One is physics, not mystics. And we can almost trace back to the day we made a decision that sent us on the wrong development path.

5:10In simple terms, it's we continue to develop the car at very low ride heights, that means on the floor. And we soon realized when the car got going that we weren't able to run it there. It's the famous bouncing or purposing that everybody was talking to. So our development direction was simply wrong. And to unwind that, undo, you first have to realize what is it that we got wrong because our tools clearly didn't show us that that was a problem. Why didn't our highly sophisticated instruments not show us that bouncing was a problem? And then you start to scientifically undo this and it's almost like you're peeling layers of an onion off.

5:49There's one problem you think is the essential one and then there's another layer and another layer. And Formula One is so complex that it takes a while to actually come down to the ground and say, this is what we believe has gone wrong. And then it takes a while to recover. Do you feel everything is in balance again for next season and your chance to win is as great as, say, Red Bull's chance to win? I believe that we have the important pillars in place. we have the right financial structure the right kit the right organization the good drivers the right engine hopefully the management is in a good place so there is no reason why this team that has won eight consecutive championships suddenly took an idiot pill so that's certainly not the case but we can't really predict when we are able to come back because if another team has gotten it right straight from the get-go, and Ferrari and Red Bull have done that pretty well, it can take time to literally catch back up and fight with these guys in the front.

6:55I do want to talk a lot more about what we uncovered when it comes to that winning streak, right, and the winning culture that you build at Mercedes. There was the case, which was discussed in the classroom here at Harvard. There's now also the Harvard Business Review article that describes some key lessons that are emerging. When you look at what we've produced and then also the discussions that you've had with the students, were there lessons that emerged stronger for you? I think the opportunity to sit here with you and you visiting us and the exchange with the students is always a two-way street.

7:32And it's because it makes you reflect. Sometimes you think you have the answers, but challenged by the right questions, actually, you come to conclusions that you wouldn't have otherwise had. And that student, I remember exactly well, he wasn't very friendly with his question. He said, let's see how he reacts, whether he sticks to his values and all the things that you wrote on the page. This episode is brought to you by Accenture. When your advertising operations fall out of sync, everything else follows. Spotify and Accenture are working together to reinvent the rhythm of ad sales. using automation, analytics, and smarter workflows to simplify campaign delivery and access better data across the business.

8:12The result? Less time spent on operations, more time connecting brands with the moments and fandoms that matter most. Learn more at Accenture.com slash Spotify. This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome, that's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required, compatibility and availability varies 18+.

8:48Blackboard, when it goes wrong, and I think that has stayed in my mind until today. Yeah, there was also some talk about being a micromanager and this attention for detail. That's all fine when we're winning, But the moment the team starts to lose, then maybe that leadership style is not well received. Has there anything like that happened this season or was it still well received? Definitely, yes. And this is the learning on the job. I think because I'm a control freak in a way, in the past, knowing for me was enough. As long as I know what's going on, mistakes happen and that's okay for me because I see things coming and I like the exchange.

9:30and sometimes the argument within the group to come to the right solutions. But this time around, at a certain stage, I wanted to take control back. And obviously that is not always great received by engineers and scientists that have been working on singular topics for a long time. But we've talked about it. At certain stages they were like, okay, back off a bit. We'll sort this. And then things struggled and they continued to be a problem. at a certain stage I said do you give me the benefit of the doubt that I have reason to question yes so okay this is me questioning here this is not meaning that I'm suddenly micromanaging every detail of the let's say the development of the car or the engine it's just about understanding where and when did we got the junction wrong for me to comprehend intellectually of how to avoid that in the future.

10:24That makes sense. Do you feel this last season, has it made you a different leader? Are your employees, the people on your team, are they experiencing you as differently as a leader? Definitely. I think that I've changed personally through the process. I think not always to the better at the beginning, but you need to realize and look at yourself and say, actually got that wrong. And self-reflection and introspection is something that I've always done. And this year, I got it wrong on several occasions and probably to an effect where my control freakishness and trying to sort it myself annoyed some of the people that were actually in charge of the science.

11:06So I will try to, in a way, take the things out of this learning that I think were good. But definitely I will be a different person next year, different manager. But still a bit of a control freak. The control freak is still within me a lot. The force is big. But there are certain areas where I have to just dial myself back a little bit and trust. Great. When you look back at this season and the way it has unfolded, obviously the article describes six leadership lessons that are emerging from it. But is there now another lesson, like one key lesson when you look back at this last season where you say, well, this is now becoming part of the arsenal of approaches that I have?

11:56Remember, we have talked about the sentence, the days we lose are the days that our competitors will regret the most because these are the days we learn. And in the past, in the last 10 years, we were talking about that phenomenon about a race weekend or a spell of races where it gone wrong and suddenly everything made sense and we learned and the car was fast again. Now we are talking season almost finished and we haven't won a single race. So it's been making us tougher all year long because you need to cope not only with a blip of a race, but you need to cope with a season that has actually gone wrong.

12:35And I'm sure that this will give us extra power for the years to come. The learnings that we will have, how we've undone the various layers of development that have gone wrong, the support within the team that we have. There is no risk of a job being made redundant. We have demonstrated that there is a safety in our organization, contrary to many other teams that have done that in the past. And from there, we will rise again. And this will make us overall much stronger. Great. Wonderful. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me. Thank you.

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