ProductiviTree: Cultivating Efficiency, Harvesting Joy

Clarity at 300 km/h - Formula 1 Lessons with Bradley Lord (Mercedes AMG F1) - Ep 26

• Santiago Tacoronte • Season 1 • Episode 26

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In this conversation, Bradley shares insights into the fast-paced world of Formula 1 communications, detailing the blend of planned and spontaneous activities during race weekends. He discusses the importance of agility, clarity of mission, and maintaining focus amidst distractions. Bradley emphasizes the significance of a no blame culture, the hard work behind F1 success, and the traits that define high-performance drivers. He also touches on the balance between short-term and long-term goals, the role of teamwork, and the need for resilience in high-pressure environments.

Takeaways

  • A normal day in F1 is a mix of planned and spontaneous activities.
  • Communications in F1 can feel like whitewater rafting, requiring agility and reactivity.
  • Balancing short-term and long-term goals is crucial for success.
  • Creating clarity of mission helps align the team towards common objectives.
  • Maintaining focus amidst distractions is key to performance.
  • A no blame culture fosters accountability and transparency.
  • Prioritization is guided by objectives and urgent needs.
  • Team culture is about translating internal values to the outside world.
  • Top drivers share a trait of humility and self-criticism.
  • F1 success is built on relentless teamwork and hard work.

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Bradley, welcome to ProductiviTree Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me. You are one of the most visible figures in the F1 paddock, often right beside Toto Wolf. What does a normal day look like for you during a race weekend? During a race weekend, um really a normal day is a combination of sort of planned meetings. So I try and follow the engineering briefings and debriefs that happen before and after the sessions, the strategy meetings to have a full overview and understanding of what's happening on track and how we're running the cars and analyzing their performance afterwards. And then really, I guess, sort of spontaneous pop-ups with um either functional meetings between several teams or multiple teams or conversations with journalists and briefings with members of the media and things like that. So it's a real uh mix of planned and spontaneous and you want to be able to keep a good amount of free time on a race weekend because there's always something that comes around the corner that you weren't expecting and need to to deal with urgently. You've described your role as white water rafting. What are the skills you rely on when the current gets a bit rough? Yeah, I always talk about coms in sort of the modern day as whitewater rafting, i.e. you don't really get to dictate which way the river is flowing or have full control of everything that's going on, particularly in a world like Formula One. The media scrutiny is very intense. The ability for rumours to self-generate or to amplify on the basis of not much fact and quite a lot of speculation, that's also very high. And Ultimately, all of that news flow is running and will continue to move regardless of what you're doing. So the analogy I try to have is whitewater rafting. It can be a little bit bumpy, but the job is that of avoiding the rocks and not getting tipped out of the boat. So I guess the skills that we're looking to have are being sort of agile and reactive when it comes to stories popping up and. um knowing which ones to counter and which not, not being over reactive. So you don't, you can't control everything and you don't need to control everything. You need to be using your time and your effort productively with the points of most influence or with the people of most influence to guide that. And then a little bit. I mean, the other thing I've always found when you're whitewater rafting is, is thrilling, exhilarating, and it's fun. So you've got to make sure you're enjoying the ride as well. And if you're able to do that and, you know, able to work with that sense of fun and, um, being busy and having to field things from all directions is something exhilarating rather than draining, then that really helps a team perform as well. I love the fun part. um F1 is known for extreme speed and structure. How do you stay productive in a role where two hours are never the same? That's a really good question. I often feel personally like there are sort of days and weeks when you're, you know, it's like surfing, you're riding the crest of a wave and you feel like just everything is going perfectly and then you fall off and it becomes a real struggle at other points. And, you you've got to drag yourself through it. So I think from my side, not trying to set yourself unrealistic goals for when you're working trackside, for example, for when you're in an environment where you can't easily plan your time where if people are there face to face, they need to be the priority and you need to be dealing with those things. So juggling the medium and long term and say the, you know, the people management side of a role and everything that's happening back at base with then being able to give full focus to what you're doing at track and to the most urgent priorities that are popping up from a minute to minute or hour by hour basis at track. That's a, um, That's a tricky balance to strike and one that's only in my time in Formula One, I've been in the sport now for nearly 25 years. And I'd say it took me 10 to 15 of those years to really understand how to balance those things properly and well and not be giving all the energy solely to the short term, what's happening in the moment at a race weekend or to the long term, but actually finding the right balance between the two. What's one behind-the-scenes moment where you had to make a high-stakes decision under real pressure? That's a really good question. think the obvious moments where we have high stakes decisions to take are where we find ourselves in political battles or conflict, or you're in a very intense debate or intense conflict or rivalry with another team. So I think the most obvious very high stakes moment in the comms role that was the real focus of my effort at the time was Abu Dhabi 2021 and deciding in the moment, how did we react and how did we respond to what happened in that race and how events subsequently unfolded afterwards. And our decision was actually quite counterintuitive when it comes to being someone working in communications because our decision was to say nothing and to do nothing and to not move. And I remember in the days that followed, got a whole social media team and PR team sitting there going, right, what do we do now? unfortunately, it's still nothing. We can prepare for these scenarios. But we felt that at the time, silence was both the most dignified and the most powerful way of responding to the events and what had happened as we tried to assess the viability of appeal routes and the options that were available to us legally and within the governance of the sport to see. if it was possible to redress what had happened. And so, yeah, that was uh a spur of the moment decision, one that involved quite consciously breaching some of the minor sporting regulations around obligations after the race and things like that, but doing so very knowingly because we wanted to preserve that power of when we first spoke, we would do so in a way that had maximum impact. You have a dual role. You work in business, but you are also on the race track, on the race side. In Formula One, there is no room for ambiguity. Bradley, how do you create and protect clarity of mission across race and business? Well, they're not two separate things in terms of how we think about it. The mission of the entire business is to win on track. So we have, and we put a lot of time into clarifying what is our mission, what is our vision, and what are our objectives as well. And so we worked over 10 years ago now with... um some experts in military strategy who explained to us the theory of leadership by intent. So one's job as a leader and the job of the leadership is to give a really clear objective and then provide the team with the resources and the frameworks in which to deliver that intent and deliver that mission. So it allows you to empower people a long way down the organization and, you know, multiple levels of hierarchy without needing every decision to come back up to the top. because that's too slow and too inflexible for the environment we find ourselves in. what that puts upon the leadership as a core responsibility is making that mission objective really, really clear. So we have a mission and it is to win more than any other team in the right way. So there's an aspect there of very clear performance target and every piece of effort in the company needs to go towards making us a better racing team that is more capable of winning. And we wish to do so in a way that isn't win at all costs, but is respecting the values, respecting the sport and the integrity of the sport as well, and the values of our team and our culture. And from there every year, there's a process of then setting an intent. What specifically this year is going to be the focus of our effort and what are the priorities that we are setting as a leadership in order to guide the effort of the organization. And so that is an annual process. From that intent for the entire team, a department defines its own and then individuals write their objectives that pay up into the departmental intent and then into the team one. So it means that everybody in the team, regardless of whether they're working in a finance role, whether they're an engineer designing car components, an aerodynamicist in the wind tunnel, uh or a marketing professional working with the sponsors, everyone can trace from their objectives to the intent, what their contribution is to winning. And we have bit of a motto and a phrase that we chase every millisecond. So every small detail is there to be chased and sort of each of the thousand team members own that millisecond that they can contribute to overall improving the performance of the team. And so whether that's an indirect or a direct contribution, we find every single person in the team into that overall objective of winning on track. F1 is hot, trendy, more so after Netflix published the famous documentary. How do you keep your team focused when they have the biggest celebrities in the world walking around them? There is all this noise, sometimes drama you mentioned. How do you keep your people to stay focused? Yeah, think first of all, Formula One is a lot more than you see on Netflix. So Netflix tells the story really of two drivers and a team principal per team. So in our case, that's three people among 1,200 who work to put our cars on track and to make the team successful. it's worth, it's a reality show, but it's a slice of reality rather than the whole picture. After that, even the team track side is say 150 people of 1200. So it really is the tip of the iceberg in terms of what's above the water line and what's below. But then when we're at track, certain points of interaction, things like guest management, celebrity management, they are key, they are responsibilities for parts of the team. And you try and divide that work from them. What's happening in the garage, what's happening in the engineering office in terms of the focus on. putting the cars on track and making sure they're set up to be as performant as possible. when it comes to, you if I look at last weekend in Imola, we've got lovely pictures of Valentino Rossi visiting the garage, taking pictures with the mechanics and things like that. That happens in a window where we know the team is not busy, where the car is already ready and prepared and full of fuel and ready to go for the race start. So you've got windows where we can do that with minimum disruption. If... we're dealing with a technical issue or we're having to rebuild the car, we close the garage and we adapt in order that we can still deliver guest experience, but we're not putting, we're not pulling people away from their core priority and the core work. So performance always comes first. The on track result always comes first. And then we adapt around that. And we're very fortunate that within the team we've got brilliant group of engineers and the team in the garage as well under our chief mechanic who are super flexible and always willing to help out as much as they can. So yeah it's really a question of teamwork and making sure that we have the right priorities that everyone works to the same priorities and then from there we can adapt and make things happen within that framework. Bradley, you speak about no blame culture. How does Mercedes practice radical transparency? So we talk about no blame culture and you know that when you're trying to implement something like a no blame culture, it runs against some pretty deep psychological characteristics that human beings have, which is to. you when you feel yourself under threat or, you know, become defensive, you then look at what are those external threats or what could be the external reasons for it as well. So it's something that one has to learn rather than it being a natural thing. Likewise, it's something that can also be misunderstood. No blame culture doesn't mean something wasn't, you know, an individual's fault or responsibility. it's is a question, it's a behavioral thing where we talk about blaming the problem, not the person, but it has to go hand in hand with individual accountability. Without the accountability, you don't have the clarity of where things have gone wrong and what you need to do to fix them. So the transparency and the sort of radical transparency that we have comes through the form of our debrief process. So after every on track event, after every session on a race weekend, there is a debrief. where we try and define what are the priorities that we need to be working on and what are the issues and problems that we need to resolve. And often in those debriefs, it is the leaders who are asked to start with what either they've got wrong or they could have improved or they could and should have done better. And that then creates permission for others within the organization and others where maybe hierarchy or seniority might get in the way of that candor to be able to speak in a a sort of environment, psychological safety, and without fear of being thought less of or, you know, fear of it impacting their standing within the team because they're pointing out either that they got something wrong and made a mistake or that um something needs to be improved. And so it's by taking accountability, that's what enables them to work without blame. If you see team members shirking that accountability or working in a different way, then that's something that obviously needs addressing. yeah, no blame goes hand in hand with individual accountability. Without it, you don't surface the problems that have taken place in an objective way that allows you to address them and solve them for next time. Have you ever had to take a tough stand internally to protect external trust? In what sense? What sort of example would you think of? thinking about a time where you, to protect the external trust of the team, you have to, you know, take a tough decision internally for the greater good of the team. Yeah, I think there are plenty of times when you need to do that if you're addressing um performance issues or needing to make structural changes to the organization in order to either change direction or strengthen the team and its capability as well. they do have, and I would often say though that as an organization, we try and sort of think from the inside out, not from the outside in. So rather than being driven by say, media coverage, media headlines, or external perspectives. The core thing that we're trying to protect is internal trust and transparency. And we will sometimes allow that to compromise external perception in order to, say, protect IP or to um strengthen the team internally. Because that ultimately is the source of our performance and the source of our uh ability to deliver on track. it is the key. oh The key, Toto, if I sort of use his phraseology and analogy, he talks about a sort of key customer theory in terms of who are your key clients that you're trying to uh perform to and deliver to. And first and foremost, those are the team members inside the organization and then after that, other external stakeholders. So internal will always be the priority. The strength of the team and its integrity will always be the priority. And sometimes we will accept external compromise or brand or reputational downside in order to protect the integrity of the team. So a great example of that was when a few years ago in Baku in the Azerbaijan Grand Prix, Lewis had the headrest come loose after it was installed following a red flag. Then it came loose. He had to pit and pitted out the lead in order to solve that problem. And immediately after the race, the question came from someone in the media. Whose fault was that? Which mechanic was it? And Toto very consciously and very deliberately gave a very, very tough response and was almost angry with the journalist, potentially at cost of perception of him or the team in some way. But the point he was making wasn't one for the outside world. It was one for the team within. And that is that we don't point fingers. We don't um say it was person X or person Y. It was actually what happened there. It was... Yes, it was installed um in a way that meant it came loose, but also because the design itself wasn't robust enough. So that led to changes in the design of the headrest and how it fixes into the car to ensure the problem couldn't be repeated rather than a change of the person because they, you know, because the conclusion was it was the person who'd done something wrong. So that was a really clear example of it. And as I say, Toto went very, very hard in the media. and at the journalist in order to make a very important point to the team within the organisation rather than worrying about smoothing out the external perception or the downside that Lewis had suffered as a result. Let's talk a little bit about uh prioritization, which goes hands in hands with productivity. What is your framework for deciding what's get attention right now? And when you say, well, this can't wait. Yeah, I think um really it comes down to those objectives again. What are the core deliverables that you've been given for a season, for a month, for a week? What are those high priority items in order to be delivering to those objectives that are the way that you deliver into the prioritization of the team? So sometimes things are just urgent and they need resolving or you're firefighting or you're in a crisis situation. If we think about communications, certainly when I... If I think back to the start of last year, when I came into work on the 31st of January, 2024, I wasn't expecting to spend my day writing a press release announcing that Lewis was leaving the team and heading to a rival. So sometimes things just come out of nowhere and you need to, you know, they're the obvious and urgent priority. Otherwise, in terms of how do you prioritize among, um you know, an endless list of possible work that you could be doing, that really then is prioritizing what is helping you deliver to your objectives and prioritizing what is as a leader helping your team deliver to those objectives as well. So prioritizing time with your direct reports, able to be the sounding board that they need and the time in things like team meetings to give clear in-person direction to your wider team. Those are certainly where I try and put priority rather than getting too lost in emails and sort of answering lots of the either cold calls or possible additional things that you could be doing. So yeah, I think certainly for people in a comms role, for example, there's an never ending list of things you could be doing or of areas you could be working in or ideas you could be having. And you want to keep some of that space for creativity. And it's important to have that as well, not just be stacked with meetings from sort of 8.30 in the morning till 7 at night. But likewise, giving the right amount of time to people and prioritizing what are actually the objectives that are going to help us hopefully become a better and more winning team. That has to be the sort of guiding criteria for what gets done most urgently and at the top of the list rather than things that maybe sit a little further down. What is something Mercedes has gotten better at either in comms or in culture than other teams? Oh wait, I don't wanna put you in the spot. What is something that makes you feel really proud about Mercedes culture or communications? I think the target we've had for a long time, um people, when they hear Mercedes, they have a set of preconceptions about what the team is like. They think of us as very professional, very efficient, lots of words that are quite positive characteristics, but they're not very warm or human or emotional. They're quite um objective and factual. And that's part of the great strength of the Mercedes-Benz brand. It's seen as uh hugely prestigious and reliable. And it's an immense privilege to be able to translate that and represent that towards the outside world. I think what gives me particular satisfaction when I look at the work that the group I'm fortunate enough to lead produces is that we're getting increasingly good at translating the very, very human um empathetic internal culture of the team towards the outside world. And so we're a much, we're a very different place to that preconception of sort of efficiency and precision and professionalism. All of those characteristics are true, but there's also a humanity and a supportiveness and a team ship among the members of the team that it's not always easy to translate or that can come across as a bit. cheesy or schmaltzy or um not really as hard edged as you need it to be in Formula One. As we grow as a group and find ways to translate that and bring that to life, that's something that gives me particular satisfaction because ultimately really good communication has to be authentic and the most authentic communication we can create is one that translates the team's culture one-to-one to the outside world. that that becomes how we sort of supercharge the brand and therefore generate value for our owners and for the teams, the organizations that partner with us as well. Raleigh, have worked with some of the best drivers in history. To be a Formula One driver, you need to be hyper productive. They are productive every weekend during three or four sessions at the highest speed. What is one trait that they all share? What are the patterns for all these amazing drivers of Formula One? I think the biggest trait they share is humility. And I mean that in the sense of being incredibly self-critical and giving themselves no room for under-delivery or um being off their game. So when you hear, and I'm thinking um in a previous life at a different team, working with Fernando, working with Robert Kubica, one of the sort of great lost lost stars of Formula One, or um Michael, when um in my early years with Mercedes, watching him work, Lewis, obviously, and now George and even Kimmy as well, even at this early stage of his career, you see a really searing self criticism and they won't, they won't blame the car before they've really assessed which part of a lack of performance was them and which is, you know, the tool at their disposal. And that ability to continue being self-critical even when you're at the top of your game, to be driven enough to go, I'm going to make bigger sacrifices and bigger compromises to things that might be more fun so that I can keep on improving as an athlete and as a member of the team. That is the thing they have in common. Obviously, they've got in common incredible reflexes and unbelievable sort of biomechanical connection between their eyes, their brain, and their sort of motion and balance receptors be that in the seat of their pants or in their inner ear. They've got, you know, physical characteristics like that. um But then they've just got this absolute commitment to self improvement that is quite impressive to see when you see it up close. And that comes obviously with lots of shadow characteristics or flip sides as well. They need, you know, there's a lot of reassurance that a driver needs to stay in that sort of point, that zone of confidence and uh a lot of trust that they need to be able to put in a very small inner circle of people and then see that um rewarded and not betrayed or not compromised in any way. So it brings compromises. Racing drivers are not always super brilliantly well-adjusted human beings in other contexts in life, but that's because we're asking them to be utterly exceptional among the very best in the world and indeed of all time. look at some of the names I've been fortunate enough to work alongside in my career. And you don't get that level of exceptional without getting some sort of quirks of character as well along the way. What is something people misunderstand about the business side of F1 success? I think what generally doesn't get seen is just how much constant, intense, relentless hard work it is to get two cars into the garage and onto the track each weekend, and how intense that effort is. This... is an industry that moves at a pace where everyone in it, no matter whether you're, as I said earlier, frontline engineer or working in one of the business support functions, you have to give it your absolute all. It's a lifestyle choice, not a job. You are committing to it in a way that you don't commit to a nine to five office role and you need to be all in. The level of teamwork involved in Formula One, you know, from the outside, it looks like quite an individual sport. There's a car, there's a driver. Okay, there's a team talking to him or her and doing all of that. But fundamentally, it looks like quite nice, you know, an individual sport and in the cockpit it obviously is. But the teamwork that's behind it, it is the ultimate team sport when you look at the number of people contributing to success or potentially able to compromise that success if they're not. completely aligned and working with the same objectives. yeah, that's the bit that people miss is the team ship and the extent and the intensity of that team effort. And when you see how the sport is sometimes described or written about, there's a lot of talk about the genius individual making the difference to all of these things. In general, the truth behind it is it's incredible teamwork and communication and collaboration that are making the difference, not one or two genius individuals in the wider organization who are having amazing ideas and therefore that's making a team faster. It's a process, it's a performance machine that you need to build. And building that machine, it has to be perfectly calibrated, it needs to be working perfectly in sync at exactly the right speed. in order to be able to win on track. Let's do five rapid fire questions, answering 30 seconds or less. Number one, the one trait every high performance team must have. Resilience. Number two, data or instinct? What wins under pressure? data-driven instinct. Care to explain? if you're just going on gut feel that you might get the odd lucky punch that won't win out over time. The answer is in our world, always in the data, but you also need to have that gut feel for what's going to be the right thing. What could be the wrong thing? Cause the trouble with the data is you only get it afterwards. You can't predict, um, you know, it's hard to be predictive with it. So if you're totally data driven, you need to get it wrong to get it right. And sometimes you just need to get it right. Number 3. Most underrated productivity habit you have developed in F1 Ooh, this is gonna sound really, really banal, but getting ahead of my diary and just knowing where I'm gonna be and when, and getting a week or three ahead of myself in planning my life, that is a huge game changer for me in terms of being effective with the time I have available. Number four, worst productivity myth in corporate culture. That's a very good question. I'm not sure. Yeah. ever heard. that I think you can spend a lot of time trying to, it's gonna sound really bad, but you're gonna spend a lot of time listening to every single opinion without necessarily hearing the ones that are of most value or of most expertise. So everyone in our team has a duty to speak up, but that doesn't mean everyone has to have an opinion on everything or everyone needs to be involved in everything. So I think um there's power in the collective, but also knowing which are the... important and relevant bits of that collective. Not every opinion is equally valid. Fair point. Accountability principles. Number five. If the comms team had a pit stop during a race weekend, what would you use it for? Oh. we had a pit stop during a race weekend, we would. I think we just use it to zoom out. We'd use it to take two and a half seconds to deconnect, get out of the bubble and just see, to draw inspiration from outside. think it's very easy to get into the hamster wheel and we would, yeah, just change the fuel, change the perspective to be able to bring something fresh to each race weekend. Bradley, as we wrap up, one last question. What's your non-negotiable, your compass for staying productive under such a high pressure stakes that you live? It is two things, work really hard. there isn't a point, know, obviously everyone needs downtime and um on time as well, but you've to stay on top of the bit that is your responsibility. You never get to a point, certainly in our world, where you're a leader who isn't engaged, you know, down on the dance floor as well as up on the balcony. We talk about these sort of two states and down on the dance floor, you're getting involved, you're rolling your sleeves up, you're doing, as well as sort of observing, leading, sort of passing work to others. So you always have to be on the dance floor as well as having that balcony perspective. And if you lose that, you just fall further and further behind and it feels like everything's mounting up on you. So you've got to take your part of responsibility and accountability. And then the other thing for me has been trusting your team and, giving them more space and more opportunity to grow and take things on than you maybe sometimes think is quite the right thing to do. I think there's always a lag between what someone feels ready for and what leaders sometimes are prepared to give them as opportunity and scope to operate in and actually be bold, trust your people, load them up and then see if there's anything that needs sorting out from there. But yeah, be. Be radical in empowering the team around you, because that always yields great results, frees you up as well to be on the balcony a bit more and on the dance floor a little bit less. Bradley, for listeners who want to know or see how the Mercedes-AMG Petronas F1 team operates behind the scene, all the teamwork that you mentioned, the thousands, more than a thousand people that work on this in and out, off and on the track, where should they follow, where they should tune in? Yeah, mean, great places to start to understand the team and kind of guessing the audience for this podcast. So Toto did a case study with the Harvard Business School. That's worth seeking out with Professor Anita Elbers. She is an incredible professor at HBS. And we work with her every year delivering courses and speaking to her students. So that's a fantastic insight into what makes our team tick. Any of the big podcasts that you can find that Toto's been on, he brings to life the culture of the team really well. If you want to understand a little bit more on the technical side, find the em F1 podcast with Tom Clarkson. These are long form interviews and speaking to either James Allison, Simone Oresta, and the sort of senior uh technical leaders of our organization, that will bring it to life. And then after that, if you want to sort of get inside behind the scenes, our social media channels try and bring the inside of the team to life for fans and for those who are interested across all the usual places that you would expect, Instagram, TikTok, et cetera. We are also the biggest team on LinkedIn. So we try and work a lot there with thought leadership and bringing some of the other aspects of what the team does away from the track to a slightly different audience too. So yeah, we're very active across all those networks. Equally for people interested in opportunities, we've got a great careers section on the team website that explains what we're all about and is live with the latest opportunities. So yeah, plenty of places that you can keep in touch. Bradley, thank you so much for spending this 30 minutes stint with us. It's been super intense and thank you for sharing your insights. If I'll take one thing away from this conversation and similar to other leaders we have interviewed in this podcast across different industries is that success, it's never the work of one person. It's teamwork and it's alignment and trusting the people around you. Bradley, thank you so much for being with us and good luck next weekend in Monaco. Thank you very much, Santi. It's great to be with you. Thank you.