Inside F1’s secrets to building winning teams

Nicole Bearne is a renowned inspirational leadership speaker, celebrated for her rare blend of motorsport precision and people-first leadership.

With a distinguished career in Formula 1 - including pivotal internal communications roles at Mercedes-AMG Petronas - she understands how to spark performance under extreme pressure.

As the founder of The Comms Exchange and a recognised expert in organisational behaviour, she now translates the high-stakes lessons of the racetrack into strategies for modern businesses. Her work spans leadership, diversity & inclusion, team culture, and employee experience.

In this exclusive interview with The Inspirational Leadership Speakers Agency, Nicole shares how F1 leadership principles can transform boardrooms, how communication builds trust in high-performing teams, and why adaptability and candour are non-negotiables in the race for business success.

Q: Formula 1 teams are renowned for their precision and unity under pressure. From your experience, what leadership principles from F1 can business leaders adopt to build high-performing teams?

Nicole Bearne: “That growth mindset is really a key element of F1 team culture. So, I always say Formula One teams are quite unique, I think, in the world of sport because behind the athlete - or the race drivers in our case - you have, effectively, a high-precision engineering company with all the same departments and functions that you would expect to see in any other company.

“So, you have R&D, manufacturing, design, operations, comms, marketing, finance, all of those - HR, you name it - and the leadership team are pretty much facing the same challenges and situations as any other organisation outside the sport.

“As in any other company, their goal is really very much to establish that clear mission and vision for the team and then build a culture, and build the facilities that the team is going to need to achieve those goals. The big difference with a Formula 1 team is that underpinning all of that engineering and corporate culture, there’s a race team.

“We very much apply a sporting approach to managing the challenges that we’re going to face as an organisation, and we have to build a team where everyone is working together to achieve our goals.

“In terms of our leadership principles, I always say - and I’m probably biased because of my role - but communication is the key. Every single person in the team needs to be pulling in the same direction. They need to know what’s happening around the organisation; they need to know what’s expected of them.

“Within Mercedes, the approach was very much to lead through intent, which is to set a very clear set of goals at the start of every year and then create a very clearly articulated strategic intent that sets out how the team is going to work together to achieve those goals.

“That intent is distilled down into a really simple statement of intent - effectively a couple of paragraphs in written text - that explains what the team is aiming to achieve in the coming year. That gets communicated to every single team member. It’s woven through all company communications across the year and forms a really compelling call to action to everybody.

“Each department head can look at the team intent and work out what their department needs to do to achieve it. Every single individual can look at the team intent and see what they personally need to do to achieve it.

“It just creates that really clear line of sight for every team member across the organisation and builds that sense of ownership and responsibility so that they can all work together.”

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Q: In an environment where milliseconds define success or failure, what’s the real secret behind sustaining a high-performance culture within an F1 team?

Nicole Bearne: “The secret is there’s no secret. I mean, as I say, there’s no silver bullet or special sauce. Everyone knows it’s a huge challenge - it’s one of the most difficult sports to succeed in.

“The margins between success and failure on the track are tiny; it’s thousandths of a second sometimes, which can be less than a metre in distance on the racetrack after a 5km lap.

“The teams have to be incredibly resilient to maintain peak performance right across the season - across 24 races worldwide in a period spanning from March through to December. They have to design and build a brand-new race car every year; they work literally around the clock in a factory that very rarely stops operating.

“They have to constantly adapt and innovate; they have to work around new regulations, changes within the sport itself, competitor developments, racetrack changes, weather conditions - everything in Formula 1 that can possibly change will change, and you have to be prepared for that.

“So again, it comes back down to building that really strong, cohesive team culture that can sustain people, keep them going, and enable them to respond rapidly to those changes.

“One of the key things that we do in F1 to achieve that is to use the challenges to make the team stronger. It’s learning from failure and building a growth mindset - and that growth mindset is really a key element of F1 team culture.

“Our late chairman from Mercedes, Niki Lauda, always used to say that each day we fail is a day for our rivals to regret because that’s when we come back stronger to beat them again. That’s enshrined in the ethos of the Mercedes team. You need to look really closely at everything you do and work out how you can do it 1% better next time.

“You need to be able to admit when you’ve made a mistake or you don’t know something and hold your hand up. You need to be able to bring your ideas for improvements and feel comfortable to challenge when you see something that isn’t being done well.

“For that to happen, you have to build a culture of candour within the team - a culture where people feel empowered to speak up, to raise inconvenient truths if needed, and to trust that there won’t be negative repercussions when they do.

“If you don’t have that, if you’re not hearing those employee voices, you can miss vital opportunities to improve your performance. As humans, it’s not in our nature necessarily to speak up - we’ve been conditioned over thousands of years of evolution not to rock the boat or disrupt the status quo.

“We’re brought up to respect those in authority, to try not to get ourselves kicked out of the tribe as it were for being a troublemaker. So, we often don’t speak up; we sit back and wait to see if someone else does, or we just keep quiet - and in those situations, problems go unsolved and innovations don’t get heard.

“We really need to create that situation where people are comfortable with speaking up, and again, trust and good communication are at the very core of that.”

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Q: Communication often makes or breaks an organisation. From your experience in Formula 1, what practical lessons can business leaders apply to strengthen communication within their teams?

Nicole Bearne: “Good communication starts at the top, and leaders need to lead by example. There are some really key elements that can be put in place for communication to be effective.

“Going back to what I mentioned earlier - having that strategic narrative that aligns with the company’s mission, vision and values. Companies often go to quite a lot of effort to define what their purpose is, who they are, what their mission is, what they stand for, and how they should be operating - and then fail to communicate that to staff very well.

“Employees see a set of values written up on a wall somewhere, or maybe they’re given a list of behaviours in their annual development review, and that’s about it. Having a strategic narrative is a way to bring all of those elements to life and weave them through all of your internal communication to ensure everything is embedded across all communication touchpoints.

“That’s how you create that clear line of sight for everyone to your organisation’s goals. You need to remind people every so often what it is that they need to be focusing on.

“The other thing I always say is that it’s important for communication to be what I call HOT - honest, open and timely. Your employees are your number one stakeholders, and their levels of engagement will affect everything from your productivity and products to your customer satisfaction - effectively, your bottom line.

“Employees also need to be your number one audience for communication. They should know everything that’s going on within your company; they should know the news before it goes out anywhere externally. They should trust that what they’re being told by leadership is true, and they should be comfortable that nothing’s being hidden from them or covered up.

“Leaders also need to make that time to listen to employees - having regular opportunities for feedback, for people to ask questions or share their ideas. Enable people to feel like they’re participating in the direction of the organisation.

“Finally, I would say the best leaders I’ve ever worked with are really visible. They walk the floor; they connect informally with employees whenever possible.

“James Allison, for example, the Technical Director at Mercedes, always makes a point of sitting with different team members for lunch every day. He goes down to the staff restaurant, finds somebody he’s never met before, and sits to have lunch with them - gets to know them, and they get to know him.

“Leaders who use personal stories - who talk about themselves - are also able to take people on the journey with them.

“Toto Wolff, I think, is a master at that, and he often talks about lessons he’s learned in life or personal situations that he’s been in. It really enables him to come across as a relatable human being and helps people connect better with him.”

This exclusive interview with Nicole Bearne was conducted by Chris Tompkins of The Motivational Speakers Agency.

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