The Leadership Principles Behind a F1 Team Turnaround Plan

A casual observer might think F1 is an individual sport—a high-speed competition between high-profile drivers. But in fact, it is the ultimate team sport. More than 1,000 people, designing the car, monitoring it, servicing it, as well as driving it, in search of advantages worth a fraction of a second.

That’s why we are taking a break from our usual CEO fare this week to talk with James Vowles, team principal of Atlassian Williams F1 Team. He took over the struggling team more than three years ago, and has set on a path to transform it into a winner by 2030.

I asked him how running an F1 team compares to running a company.

One difference:

“Every two weeks you have a pulse check on where you are, and you know whether you’ve improved or not relative to other competitors. …It’s a metronome. You know whether you are going forward or backwards.”

“I have 70 million people telling me on Monday how good or bad a job we are doing.”

But a similarity:

“The work you’ve done typically three years ago is actually what’s driving your results today. And if you lose sight of that and get too drawn into the short term, you are going to end up just going backwards.”

Like most CEOs I talk with, Vowles says his success ultimately depends on the culture he creates. His definition of the right culture:

“Brutal honesty, candidness, no politics. Politics have no place to play with me. I don’t want a single ‘yes’ person around me. You tell me what really is going on. …You will not lose your job for doing the best of your ability and highlighting where we have problems. You may [lose your job], if you apportion blame somewhere else as a result of it, or hide information, because those are the characteristics that will destroy an organization quickly. Take risks and I’ll be by your side when you do it. Fail and I’ll be by your side when you do it.”

By the way, while today’s racing teams ingest massive amounts of data to help make split second decisions, Vowles says even in the age of AI, “the driver is the most powerful sensor you have in the car. We’re logging 55,000 channels of data live, from either car. So there’s a lot of data. [But] the best sensor is the driver. Because fundamentally, they will tell you something that sometimes you can’t even measure in the data. They will come to your factory and 40 of their words will be more powerful than me talking for two hours. They are leaders.”

You can watch the entire interview on WSJ.com, or listen on Apple or Spotify.

Alan MurrayPresident, WSJ Leadership Institute

CEO Brief is written and edited by a team from The WSJ Leadership Institute: Alan Murray, president; Erle Norton, C-Suite Content managing editor; and Lila MacLellan, CEO Brief editor.

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