What can businesses learn from Formula One's high-performance culture?

Juliet: Hello and thanks for listening to Achieving More Together. The podcast where we explore what it really takes to build and sustain high-performing teams in today's corporate world. I'm Juliet Mann, and each month we dive into the habits, challenges and breakthroughs that shape team success. Hearing from leaders, experts and high performers across a variety of industries. In this episode, I sat down with Marc Priestley, also known in the Formula One world as Elvis. Mark was an elite F1 mechanic and pit crew member for McLaren, and now he's a top television presenter for Sky Sports F1 and co-host of the Discovery Channel's series Driving World. Most people know the fast-paced nature of F1 on the tracks, but how did the mechanics of F1 operate outside of the races? What's it like working with elite sporting figures like Lewis Hamilton, and how do you maintain high-performing teams across a decade? Keep listening to find out. Marc, welcome. Thank you for joining us.

Marc: Thank you.

Juliet: I want to start with something I'm asking all of our guests. You've worked in one of the most highly pressured sporting environments, Formula One. So who or what would define high performance to you?

Marc: Oh, that's such an interesting question. I think there's I think Formula One in itself as an industry kind of defines that, because, you know, what I've found over the years of being ingrained in this sport is that is the norm, and we operate in our world in that top, you know, a couple of percent within that range. So I think you have to be a certain type of person to operate in that business. There are, of course, wonderful people in the centre that still stand out, but I think the industry as a whole encapsulates high performance better than most others.

Juliet: So let's talk about what kind of person you are. And were you always a bit extra? What were you like growing up?

Marc: I think always curious. And that's a big part of this being being curious about how things worked, how to try and improve things. I think as as a kid, certainly because I got into Formula One on the engineering side, as a kid, I was always interested in taking things apart and understanding how they worked. And, and also being able to put them back together. You know, that was that was a big part of if something could come apart, come back together again. And as you go into Formula One and generally in cars and engineering, which is where I spent most of my life, since that's what I, you know, entails. But I think as I certainly got into motorsport in my journey to Formula One, was climbing through the ranks of motorsport in the same way that drivers do. You start at the bottom and work your way up, and it's an unbelievably good training ground for pushing you into that mindset that I was just talking about, where you get driven to push yourself into areas where for a lot of people, I think that you see it as something that other people get to do or try and do. And I was in, you know, surrounded by high performance people all day, every day. And it changes your belief system. So my belief system, by the time I got to Formula One, was genuinely that you could achieve anything you want by setting your mind to it, by putting enough time and energy into it, being as detailed, focused as you could be. And so the industry, I'm sure, has shaped me, for I know it shaped me changed, which changed my whole life. But it's certainly changed me as a person because you're surrounded by these incredible people all day long.

Juliet: What was it about motorsport that really got under your skin?

Marc: I mean, it's it's everything about the fact that it's exciting, it's dramatic, it's it's noisy, high octane. People talk about it post-race. You know, people are talking about it in the offices and in the pubs and it's that big a thing. Suddenly Formula One, when I was watching it as a kid, it wasn't so much the drivers for me that grabbed my attention. It was the pit stop crews. I remember seeing them burst out of the garage and all of this anonymous gear, you know, fireproof clothing and whatever, doing their thing and then disappearing back into the garage. And, and I always was hooked on that. But at some point, I had a realisation that these are just people, that just people like me, you know, and they would have at some point had to have been in a similar position where maybe I didn't know what they wanted to do and found that as their path. There's no reason why I couldn't do that. And really, that's what then set me on the journey. And I just desperately and relentlessly chased that dream until I got it.

Juliet: Was there a particular moment where you went from enjoying it, watching it, seeing those people scramble into the pit when you thought, hang on, this is something I want to do, and I'm going to make it happen.

Marc: Yeah, there really was, I grew up in a little village in Kent, which is near to the Brands Hatch race circuit, and back in the day that they used to have the British Grand Prix there. So I could hear the sound of Formula One cars reverberating around the village in the background. And I'm almost certain that sound and the sound of Formula One cars back in the 1980s was just crazy, you know, you could hear it for miles. And that's what got me hooked first is what on earth is making that noise? And I was drawn to it and I got to go in, you know, at first it was kind of sneaking through a hole in the fence under the back of my mates garden that backed onto the circuit. Whatever it took to get in there. And as soon as you see these things and hear these things up close, there was no going back. And. And that's the day I remember thinking, this is the thing I want to do. And that's an amazing moment because I think it was only about 16, 15 or 16 at the time. Not many kids at that age know that's what they want to do, but I was adamant I was absolutely sure that age. So I guess that was a lucky break.

Juliet: So the noise captivated you, that the glamour of those fireproof suits, perhaps. But when you first stepped into Formula One, what struck you the most?

Marc: The well, the journey to Formula One, as I said before, sort of trains you if you like it. Yeah. And it also, I guess, weeds out those that are not ready to get there. So by the time you've reached the level below Formula One, it was also full of amazingly good people. So by that point, I'd been promoted up through the ranks fairly quickly. I was quite confident that I was doing a good job and I was on the right path. You get to Formula One and I walked into McLaren and you realize I had an awful lot to learn, because the level of Formula One is something astronomically different to even the category below it, which is which I thought was very, very high performance and high level Formula One was certainly McLaren, the most detail-focused team in the business still, I think today, but certainly back then, under the leadership of Ron Dennis, who was the CEO and team principal at the time, and you look around and nothing was out of place. Everything was done deliberately and intentionally. The amount of focus on even the smallest tasks and the smallest things was just incredible. Ron Dennis is the most detail-focused man I've ever met in my life, and you know that when you first start can be a really difficult place to work. Because he's like that. He lives his life like that. And I mean, I'll give you an example. He has the gravel on his own driveway at home, regularly cleaned, picked up, washed and put back down again. So it's always immaculate. Now many people will listen to that. So that's nuts. And it is. But that's how he lived his life and therefore how he expected the company to operate as well. But because Ron lived those values that he expected everybody else to operate by, you feel much more inclined to deliver that because you can see the guy that's asking you do these things, doing it himself. It's not somebody standing there saying, right, I want you to do this, but he's doing something different. He was living his life very publicly in this intense, detail-focused way, and his message was always that if we can go to greater depth or greater detail than our competition, we will find opportunities by doing that they won't. And it was a message that always stuck with me. And I mean, it's driven the team to great success. I was very fortunate to win world championships with McLaren, and I don't believe that's a coincidence.

Juliet: It's a sloppiness not allowed.

Marc: I mean, absolutely not. Nice night.

Juliet: So Formula One has a reputation for being incredibly competitive and detail-focused, as you've already been talking about. Opportunities can be limited. Everyone's fighting for a piece of the action and some advantage. How do you navigate that? The tension then between collaboration and competition.

Marc: Yeah, it's I mean it's interesting as a we're in a competition of course against external teams. So that's the one level of competition is that as a team we are fighting together against the opposition Ferrari's or Mercedes or whoever. So that level of competition is relatively basic. Is there anyone who's wearing the McLaren uniform? We are one unit with one team and it's us against the world and we really embrace that. So, you know, a little bit you sort of you're bonded together by the fact that everyone outside of the walls of our team is trying to bring you down. So you've got a sense of an enemy or a group of enemies out there that you're fighting against. And the only way you overcome that or overcome the enemies is by bringing this crew, this team, together, but also and this has to be the same inside any company. There's competition inside the walls of your own organisation. So and that's one of the trickiest things that you have to try and overcome, because there are personal competitions where where you're trying to climb your own career ladder, where you're trying to, you know, you're trying to be the best within this group of people. And I think what we put a lot of time and effort into at McLaren was to make sure that dynamic didn't ever exist. And it's about creating the culture where the culture, the people within that culture police it themselves. I always say, when you've got a culture where management no longer really need to step in and say, look, there's no room for this ego stuff going on over here. The people within the team do that themselves. That's when you've nailed it. You know you've got if somebody tries to step out of line or gets a bit big for their boots and the rest of the team pull them back down to earth, that's what you're you're aiming for. And we got that. So it's really about teaching everybody and ingraining in everybody that we can only win if we're doing this together. There is no point in a pit stop, for example, of one person being unbelievably quick and the rest being a little bit slower. That doesn't work. You're always going to be as slow as the slowest person, so you've got to move together as a team to bring your standards up and your pit stop times down. The only way you do that is by bonding people together, chasing the shared dream of whatever it is, whatever target you're aiming at, and knowing that the only way you're going to achieve it is by everybody doing that in conjunction with each other.

Juliet: You mentioned that you were quite humbled when you first started there and you realized, gosh, everyone's really exceptionally capable. Yeah. And you embrace that as a learning opportunity and having that, that, that team spirit that come on. There's a real reputation for Formula One being really cutthroat. Are you saying it's not really like that at McLaren? Really?

Marc: It is cutthroat. But I also do genuinely believe and I think I went through a transition at McLaren where it was a little bit more like what you've just described. When I first joined, during my ten years at McLaren, went through this transition where we realized that actually real high performance includes everything, and that includes how your people within the team feel, how they, you know, they operate based on how they feel to some extent, how we look after them, how we treat them. And all of those things can have an impact on your performance level. So there was a huge sway into putting energy and time into creating the right culture, making sure that people felt valued, and all of those things that used to be fluffy, kind of, soft skills, you know, we no longer call them soft skills because they are an important element of what creates your end output. So if you're not going to focus on them in the same way, you might focus on designing the car and shaving a tenth of a second of lap time. You're not going to maximise everything, and if you don't, your competition will. And very quickly you tumble down the order.

Juliet: So that's the trick. Not having it as a nice-to-have being is essential. And that's the way to build trust in a potentially volatile environment.

Marc: Yeah. And in Formula One that is now the case. It's a it's not it's not a nice-to-have. It's absolutely a must. I mean a lot of what I do today is I travel around the world working with big organisations to help them think like a Formula One team. And that's one of the biggest things that I always come across is that people, organisations in, you know, the real world, as I call it, organisations outside of Formula One often see it as a nice-to-have is something they're trying to aim for, maybe for a particular project or because they they've got a big running competition coming. They're trying to get there because of something specific in Formula One. As I said right at the start, it's the everyday non-negotiable baseline has to be that we tick every single box. We never stop and we're always looking for, you know, even sometimes the smallest opportunity, no matter how tiny that might be.

Juliet: So let's talk about how that has worked in action, because your first race weekend, with McLaren was the Australian Grand Prix in 2002. So take us back there. What do you remember most vividly?

Marc: I remember being terrified because what came with that was, being in the pit stop crew. So although I was on the race team, I also got put in the pit stop crew. And, you know, that was something, as I said earlier, that's what I dreamt of for years. I've been watching it on TV for years. I was in awe of the people that did it.

Juliet: It's a pinch me moment 100%.

Marc: And what happens is you get thrown in. And as I said before, weren't looking in the level of detail at the various things in our organisation like we do now. It's still very high performance. But if I compare now to then, there are a bunch of things that we didn't quite maximise. So for example, we used to train once a week back then on a Wednesday. So I got one opportunity to practice before going into the race and I was not ready. I had to find I got to race on Sunday, and I hadn't slept a wink on Saturday night, because all I could imagine was this impending disaster that I was going to be responsible for playing out in front of hundreds of millions of people. And I, you know, got to Sunday and I actually got through that pit stop it. My bit went fine, but that was kind of luck. And so when you fast forward a few years and you realize we're starting to look now for more and more detail opportunities, clearly some of that stuff we'd missed a trick training once a week was far too hit-and-miss, so I wasn't ready for that massive moment. Not the process of going through a pit stop. I could do that. That was relatively straightforward. It was more the psychological element dealing with the pressure. It was all of that stuff that nearly buckled me. And so now we put an awful lot of effort into preparing people psychologically, mentally as well as physically.

Juliet: It's interesting, isn't it? Because when you think of Formula One, it's it's glamourous, it's slick, and you're making it seem that there was a lot of the things that go on behind the scenes might not feel as smooth. Now, what is harder than than people realize about sustaining that performance through a long season?

Marc: Yeah, it's it is very difficult. It's relentless. Now we've got 24 races in the season. It's very global. So you're always on the road, different time zones and sometimes they can be just a week apart so there's no time to acclimatize it often. So all of that you can and we used to kind of leave that to chance. So you'd fly into one of the races. Now we go from the UK to somewhere like Las Vegas to you know, the Middle East and it's a few days apart in that race. And so the time difference is huge. The climate is very different. We used to just sort of tell people to get on with it and stop moaning, get on with it. You know, we've got to get through this race now. We don't do that now. We take that very seriously. So we will try whatever we can, whatever we can bring within our control to minimise the negative impact of those things. Preparing for, you know, doing jet lag programs, choosing specifically which flights we take, even which planes we take, where you sit on those planes can have an impact. All tiny little details. When you get to a hotel in Singapore, we race at night and so we have a whole floor of the hotel booked out where they switch the time zone for us, so they will do breakfast at 2 p.m. and they will not have the cleaners, you know, running around bashing a hoover against the door at 10 a.m. because we're sleeping at that point. Yeah. And they just they cater for us because we, we need that tiny little set of details to try and minimise any negative impacts on, on how we feel, because all of those things are said, all of the things about how you feel physically and mentally impact your own performance. So the more of those we can bring into our control, we now do.

Juliet: I think a lot of people listening will want to know which particular aircraft, you know, what are the differences here and about also where you said, you know, well, is it Airbus, Boeing Comac?

Marc: It's you have to what we do is we have people that their job is jet lag planning. So they look through this stuff. And so first of all there's about there's the idea of when you fly. So if you've got time and you're going to massive time zone change, you want to get there early so that you can acclimatize. You can start changing your time zone at home before you leave. So we start adjusting in the days before we go to Australia, for example, so that when we land, we're already sort of halfway there in terms of our own adjustment. But the planes, our modern planes, now, some of the big new planes have far better, facilities for things like cleaning the air within the aircraft. And that can make a big difference. It's just thinking to that level in the planning phase just might make the smallest difference when you get there. And then you have to start switching on to high performance immediately.

Juliet: So who would have thought that jet lag planning came into high performance? Formula One? Can you think of a moment that really captures the importance of relationships inside a Formula One team? You've talked a little bit about influences and the importance of working as a team, rather than having the ego and working as an individual. I'm just trying to think about what maybe separates that really great teammate from someone you could do without.

Marc: The relationship piece is where when we have a group of people say, the pit stop crew as an example, there's going to be people that times over a 24-race season. When you're travelling the world, you've left your family at home, sometimes for long periods. Sometimes people just feel down it. Homesickness happens. You know, these are real problems that people have. Someone might have woken up one morning and had a row with their other half. All of those things affect everybody. They affect someone going into an office at work here, but they'll affect us too. So the best teammates, the best relationships are the ones where you have those conversations. You're aware of how your teammates are feeling and when someone else needs to step up to have your back, they've got it. You don't have to ask for it. We're so in tune with each other that we have it and the way we built that and we put a lot of energy into that now is we do very specific team building exercises, particularly around things like the pit stop crew to bond us together. And I always say that the more the tighter you can get the bonds between the group that the crew, the better you're always going to be, because what's going to happen at some point is stuff's going to go wrong. No matter how well you plan and well-drilled stuff will happen that goes wrong or someone's going to, like I said, get a moment on a personal life that affects how they show up. The tight bonds you have will be the ones that rescue that situation. And so now we go on to sometimes extreme team building exercise. I remember one well, went out to, northern Finland up in Lapland it was a military exercise. But they dropped the training, the pit stop crew kind of in the middle of nowhere, and it was -28 degrees in Lapland. And we had a challenge to get from point A to point B over that period of a few days. In those temperatures, you find out who you've got around you, because the ones who maybe the big characters in the garage when you're working at a racetrack, the ones who are a little bit sort of showy, full of confidence, maybe some of those are not so full of confidence when they're freezing cold, struggling. You've not slept, haven't eaten very much that suddenly you get a glimpse into their real character. And it might be also that the ones that are quiet, at the racetrack suddenly step up and you know, and that as good leaders. So we found out an awful lot about who we're working with. And I think those moments bond you together in a way that not much else can. I'm always hesitant to do this, but I think it's a little bit like a military group, right? I don't know, it's very different what we're doing, but the idea that there are not many people in the world who go through what we go through travelling the world, the emotional roller coaster of the competition, of what we're in, working crazy, you know, hours and some of the things we do sometimes is amazing and very, very difficult. So we have that and we deliberately create that because that's what makes the relationships as strong as we need them to be.

Juliet: So that's what you do. So that when there is a problem, you've you've got things at your fingertips to be able to spot the holes in the team, all the things you need to do before it becomes an unmanageable issue.

Marc: Exactly. So that you're not just looking at your own performance, you're trying to look around you at the performance of others, not to pick holes or to point fingers, but to say, who needs some extra help here? Who can I support or who can support me? And when you've got those real tight bonds, that works really, really well. When you don't have them, you're looking around as an individual. We're thinking, oh my God, I'm letting the team down here. You collapse into yourself. It doesn't feel like there's anyone around that's going to help pick you up, and the whole thing can collapse quite quickly. So it's a really important element of this high performance world is creating great bonds and relationships amongst your team.

Juliet: So you're talking about training so that you're ready for anything, not just physically but mentally, emotionally too. But what about when things do happen? And you and you have to deal with it. And so I'm thinking about when McLaren went through, well, a highly turbulent period. Right. Yeah. 2007 events on and off the track creating enormous pressure on your teams. You were under a lot of scrutiny. What was that time like for them from the inside, and how did it affect people's mindset and that team spirit and the culture you are talking about.

Marc: Yeah, it was really difficult. You know, anyone who's not familiar with 2007 should Google it because it's a great story. It's almost movie worthy, I think.

Juliet: Give us some highlights, some headlines.

Marc: The headlines were that we had probably had the best car that year. We had two great drivers in a double world champion, Fernando Alonso, and a new kid on the block that you might have heard of, Lewis Hamilton, who just, you know, it's his first year, We had a great team, with all the right pieces of the puzzle and we should really have won the championship. And yet we didn't. We didn't win either championship. And part of the reasons for that are well documented. But there was a big scandal, a sort of controversial scandal called Spygate at the time, where there was a person high up in our organisation that took some documents from Ferrari. That became a massive story. We got fined $100 million. It's still, to this day, the biggest sporting fine in history. We got thrown out of the constructors' world championship as a result of that. And that I was. I'm still bitter today because those championship opportunities come around rarely. And for me, it was one person or a couple of people, nothing to do with me or my colleagues on the ground that had influence that decision and effectively let us down. And so we missed out on the championship, which we should have absolutely won the final day of the season, with Lewis and Fernando both with a chance of winning the drivers' championship. We had all sorts of mistakes. Things went wrong and Kimi Räikkönen in a Ferrari came through as an unlikely winner and won the world title by a single point. It was a heartbreaking end to the year. After all of the effort and sacrifice that goes in from a from a lot of people. We lost out by a point and you know, that tested the team to its extreme because to get to the end of that long season and there's a huge amount that goes into it. As I said, this emotional roller coaster of ups and downs, and to get that close to winning a championship is an indescribably difficult thing to accomplish, right? And to get that close and not win. Devastating. But what happens in that moment is you basically have two options, and you can either sweep it under the carpet and say, and this is what most people do when something goes wrong, you don't really want to talk about it. It's like, let's forget about that and let's get on with next year. We chose not to do that in that year. And I think it was a really defining moment for us in that we chose to analyse it in the level of detail that I was talking about earlier on, because that means everybody in the team laying out their mistakes on the table for people to pick apart your colleagues to have a look at, to relive all the things we got wrong. We went so deep that you, in our post-season debrief process and, you know, to cut the story a little bit short, one year after losing the world title by that single point in Brazil, we go to Brazil, the last race of the following year with Lewis Hamilton, and we won the world title by one single point. And there was this amazing turnaround from losing by a point to winning by a point, which seems like such a small shift in performance. But the reality behind the scenes was there was so much that went on between those two moments. The outcome was very different and the emotion was hugely different. But the reality was that it pushed us to look deeper than we'd ever gone before in our own performance, and we found all sorts of areas of improvement.

Juliet: A forensic deep dive. I expect the team felt different the year after.

Marc: It was the best championship win. I mean, it's obviously an amazing feeling to win any championship, but I think the reality was we didn't win that championship by just throwing money at the problem or throwing resource at it. We were thinking differently to the competition, and that's probably the biggest thing that came out of it, which was why were so proud of it. It was an amazing feeling because we knew going through that really difficult journey was what got us there.

Juliet: And you had Lewis Hamilton and.

Marc: What what helps what.

Juliet: Was it like working with him?

Marc: And I said earlier on, Ron Dennis was probably the person that has influenced my life in the biggest way. Lewis is the other one. And it's a similar story. He is one of the most detail-focused drivers I've ever met. He's one of the hardest working. And, you know, still today, he's now, you know, into his 40s. He's seven-time world champion. It would be quite easy to think that he's easing off a little bit, but he's definitely not. He's still one of the last to leave the paddock on many occasions. He's always looking for opportunities to improve and that's inspirational when you see that up close and personal every day and you're working with somebody like that, particularly when I first started working with him, he was a rookie. He was this new kid that no one had really heard of at the time. And he had that mindset, you know, back then.

Juliet: And so what did he do? Because he wasn't rinsing his gravel in his driveway, like almost.

Marc: You know, but he was always there till late into the night working with engineers, looking through through data for tiny opportunities. And, you know, I've worked with a lot of drivers over the years. Some do that occasionally. Lewis does it every time. Every single time he'll go away and it'll be in his hotel room still looking at data. He's relentless, you know, that's how the best way to describe him. He's relentless and to be relentless for twenty years in this sport. I think he's pretty inspirational. When you know we're in 2026, he's having a bit of a resurgence at Ferrari and he's achieving some good results. He's got his mojo back, but I think it's not a coincidence that he's still operating at the highest level. It's because he has that way of thinking and he pushes himself all of the time.

Juliet: So it's not enough to have the talent or the luck. You have to really work hard.

Marc: Yeah. And, you know, luck. So I wrote a chapter on luck in my book. And it's it's really interesting when you dig into luck, because it's very easy to look at luck and say, well, you know, you had a lucky break. So of course he won. Or of course he got a good result because he, you know, that the rain came down at just the right moment for him or whatever. I'm a big, big believer that, you know, luck is this thing that happens all of the time, and the people who are ready for it or prepared for it are the ones that make the most of it. And so, you know, if you're as prepared as you can be and the rain comes down at the right moment and you've got your strategy on point, and you know, the driver is prepared for dealing with those conditions. That's how you turn that lucky moment into an opportunity. There could be plenty of occasions when the lucky moment comes and it's not met with the right level of preparation, and you don't maximise it, then it doesn't feel like a lucky moment. There's a really good study that I read about, which this is a phenomenon in sort of popular psychology called the red car theory, where they say, you know, if I ask you how many red cars did you see on the way into the studio this morning, you probably got absolutely no idea. But if I ask you again tomorrow, you'll have seen red cars everywhere because it's in your mind, and your mind is open to seeing red cars all over the place. And I think that's how luck works. The moment you're you're sort of open to these things coming along. The moment you're open to luck happening to you, you start to notice it everywhere and you feel lucky. I think the reality is we all have lucky moments that are coming all of the time. It's just not everybody's open to seeing them as lucky moments. Lewis is that guy.

Juliet: And this comes back to the mindset you were talking about, being curious. Yeah. Wanting to be part of a team and help that team grow, putting your ego aside. But when things aren't going your way or the team's way, what have you seen the best leaders do to get the best out of that maybe demoralized team?

Marc: Yeah. Another thing that Ron used to say to us was that, if we had a terrible race, for some reason, he would always say we actually we laugh at him at the time because it was kind of funny. But he used to say on a Sunday night after race, obviously we delve into the data, we do a debrief, and we sort of do as much analysis, learn what we can about what went wrong, he said. But on a Monday morning, he said, I always allow myself from the moment my alarm goes off, just swinging my legs out of the bed and dropping them into my slippers to dwell on yesterday. And after that, it's all about moving forward. So we laughed at that. But actually it does make sense in that you have to at some point, like you mentioned earlier on, you have to draw a line where you can't allow the disappointment to keep dragging you down. Absolutely. Learn what you can, and there's a lot to learn from disappointment. But the reality is at some point you've got to you've got to move forward. And I think the best leaders create those moments, switching over moments. You know, you can do it at home. You can. If you have something terrible happen, you can set yourself a point. And it might be a regular habit, like brushing your teeth. If you brush teeth in the morning, that's the moment that you switch over to just all steam ahead to the next opportunity. And I think that's what we learned to do. And it doesn't mean you stop learning. It just means that the focus now moves to the next thing. But unless you intentionally do that, these things are in your mind and they're always going to keep dragging you backwards. So you've got to have the intention to do it, set that intention and then act upon it. So linking it to something that's already scheduled or a habit that you already have is a good way to make that happen.

Juliet: You're talking not about the team. What for you personally, what lessons from Formula One has this stayed with you that you've taken on into your next phase?

Marc: I mean, so many, I think it's changed everything about my life. You know, if I think to what I do today and I do all sorts of things, I as I said, I work with corporates, I am a keynote speaker. I host a TV show, I've written books. All of these things have happened in reality because of my Formula One journey. So that decision when I was like 16. Yeah, if you really think back to some sliding doors moment has changed everything else about my life. But I think the biggest lessons that I've learned from Formula One specifically are this idea that focus on detail is the thing that's going to create you an opportunity over some competition, you know, and really so there's two things. There's the focus on detail and there's a belief that we can accomplish anything if we really focus on enough detail on that thing. So the idea of having belief in what you want to accomplish is probably one of the biggest things that holds people back in life or in business, because it's it's almost all up here in your mind about where you pitch, where you set your sights moving forward. I'm big, you know, because even if you don't quite reach the biggest thing that you're targeting for, if you're aiming big, you're still going to go quite a long way with that. And don't let the world or anyone else tell you can't do something if you genuinely want to do it.

Juliet: How hard is it to find that good collection of people to have around you? We keep hearing about skills shortages and.

Marc: It can be difficult. I think you've got to be pretty intentional about who you choose to move forward in life with, because having somebody around you, that might be great fun. But if you really think about it, it's holding you back. It's not, you know, it's not going to get you to where you want to get it. And this isn't for everybody, by the way, because some people don't have aspirations to go and build a business or to achieve incredible things. Some people having fun is a great part of a phase of their life. Might be all about having fun. So you want a different group of people around you. But I think if you if you want to go and aspire to do something amazing, you've got to be pretty careful about who you create in your group. And I think, you know, there's a lot of trial and error in doing that with friends. You're going to learn a lot about your friends as you go through different moments in life when you need help, and if they're not there, they may not be the right people for for you. And also on the flip side, it works when you find out who you do need. Sometimes that's a bit cutthroat. Sometimes you might have to let some people go that you've been around for a while, but if they're not going to come on the same journey that you want to go to, maybe they're not the people that you want in your close circle.

Juliet: You talk about some people just wanting to have fun, but isn't the the goal to be able to do something, that business, that ambition, that's also fun?

Marc: I think if you're doing the thing you set out to achieve, you're going to have fun doing it. I mean, I have been so lucky that, as I said, that moment as a 16 year old to set my sights on Formula One, I didn't think about having fun doing that. I thought about, you know, racing, the competition, the travel, all those things. But I had an enormous amount of fun along the way because I was doing the thing that I wanted to do. So I know it's cliche, but doing the thing that for your career that you love doing because it's a passion is not only going to give you fun along the way, you're probably going to have a great time doing it and then be very good at it, because you're driven through that passion to go the extra mile.

Juliet: You talk about going the extra mile and having this laser focused attention to detail. What's your switch off moment? Is it is it brushing your teeth? What is it when you lace up your shoes? What is it when you think, okay, right now I'm on or.

Marc: Off today it's much more about family. So it's my family. My children are the switch between work and family. There are two very different sides of my life. When I'm with my family, I barely look at my phone. I, you know, I have a moment. I get up really early in the morning to go through messages and emails and things like that before anyone else in the family is woken up, but once they're up, I try and be really focused on the on that, on them, because it it's the complete disconnect from the busyness of business and work and, you know, broadcasting and all the other things that I do. So that's my switch, my, my it's the environment that I put myself in, changes everything about the way I think. And once I get into work mode, I am all on. I'm all in, detail-focused again. All those things that we talked about from the lessons from Formula One, they are all there in my life all of the time when I'm working, when I'm at home, it's very, very different.

Juliet: I'd like to do a quick fire round with, you know, okay, so that it doesn't have to be yes or no, but but really, just to focus the mind for for our audience. Is talent overrated?

Marc: It's not overrated, but it has to be combined with real dedication and hard work. If you've got talent but not the other bit, you're not going to win. If you've got the other bit, but not talent, you're not going away. You have to have both.

Juliet: So you can't just work really, really hard and create the luck that you were talking about before. You can nurture.

Marc: You can do that, you can do that, and you can have an amazing life or amazing career doing that. I'm talking about being at the very top a couple of percent. So relate it to Formula One, where everybody's an exceptional talent and exceptional group. If you want to be the best in that, where everybody's operating at a very high level, you need it all you need and you need to maximise everything to get to the top. And that's often the way I try and look at these things.

Juliet: Can a great culture beat a great strategy?

Marc: Yeah, I 100% believe that because I think I think actually a great culture will create a great strategy. And a great strategy without a good culture might be fine until something goes wrong. It's often the culture is the thing that saves you. When something goes wrong and something will go wrong. Nobody's perfect. No strategy is perfect. The great culture is the thing that will get you out of trouble when you need it.

Juliet: You talk about things going wrong. Do the best teams need a bit of friction?

Marc: I think, yes. Healthy competition is good. You've got to be pushing each other at the top end of anything. Because complacency is literally your worst enemy. Yes. Your outside competition pushes you, of course, in Formula One that's happening every week. But internally we've got to be pushing each other because, as I said, were aiming for the top couple of percent of what's possible. The only way that happens is bit of internal friction by everybody pushing that healthy competition. I think that's a healthy part of what makes a company or a business or a team operate at the highest level.

Juliet: When I asked you about how you get that great circle of people around you, you talk quite a lot about friendship, but do you think that leaders should keep their distance, or do you think friendship can be a strength?

Marc: I think it's an individual thing. So I think, it depends a lot on the size of the company. It depends on the person involved and the people involved in the group. I think, you know, if I think about Ron Dennis, I think he was an amazing leader on lots of levels. He wasn't, a friendly person. I think it wasn't the sort of character that if I had a problem, I could knock on his door and go and see. I'd have to make an appointment a week or so in advance and, you know, hope. And when I did go make those appointments, I was terribly nervous.

Juliet: So he was terrifying.

Marc: I always imagined him like, a bond villain, you know? Yeah. That's right. Striking and what kind of character? But he was very, very good at lots of other parts. So that idea of leading through example created this incredible inspirational leadership. So I think it's individual. I don't look at Ron and say, well, I wish he'd been more personable because actually I look at Ron to go. He was an unbelievable inspiration. That's changed my life forever. Moreover, he was so impersonal that to see so much emotion when he left, in that people had so much respect for him. Maybe there was a slight, you know, dichotomy there that wasn't sure he was going to get that, but I'm pleased he did. So the idea of the perfect leader has no simple model that one size fits all. It's got to be tailored to your group, tailored to the organisation, and tailored to the individual.

Juliet: What's more important? Avoiding mistakes or learning quickly from them?

Marc: Oh, you can't avoid mistakes. I think one of the things is that we've learned is that mistakes will happen. They happen inevitably. You know, if I think about Formula One, we've got 24 race season, pit stops again, as an example. We do hundreds of pit stops every single year. There's no way, even with the most meticulous preparation, that every one of those is going to go perfectly. Just can't happen. Something beyond your control will happen. So it all comes back to this idea of preparation. We prepare for the mistakes so we will prepare not just for the perfect pit stop, but we'll prepare for the pit stops that we know could go wrong. All the most common failure modes, like a front jack failing or a wheel gun failing. We've got a plan for all of that, and we practice it relentlessly like we do the perfect pit stop. So when the mistake happens and it will, we're going to be better prepared, we think, than our competition. Because those mistakes, while they're going to hit us, they're also going to hit your competitors at some point, too. If you can be less affected in a negative way, that's still an opportunity for you.

Juliet: Can pressure bring out the best in people?

Marc: 100%? Yeah, it definitely does for me. I believe that pressurized situations are where I perform at my highest and again, going back to pit stops, they are some of the most pressurized situations I've ever been in. But by the end of my career, I love that it brought me alive. It brought me to, you know, often talk about flow state in high performance. I 100% got that through the pressurized moments. And same thing when I'm standing backstage when I am about to go and do a keynote. You know, I used to be really terrified. Nervous. Now I absolutely love it because the pressure I know is going to bring out the best in me. And it only happens because I know I'm well prepared. You know that pressure buckles you when you don't feel confident about what you're about to go into. If you're prepared, then it's fine. The pressure helps.

Juliet: One word that captures high performance.

Marc: So, relentlessness. Yeah. I think if you can be relentless about what you're chasing, you've got a very good chance of outperforming your competition. Because if you can be more relentless than they are, even if it's not a straight line to that success, you're just going to keep going. And eventually if you keep being relentless, you'll get there.

Juliet: Before I let you go, just one final question. So when you think about everything that you've seen in Formula One the highs, the lows, the setbacks, the successes, what's the one lesson about leadership that leaders in completely different industries could borrow?

Marc: I think if you are a leader, the biggest thing you can do is get your team driving in the same direction but the right direction. And so the biggest role for me as a leader is to find out how you can change the thinking of all of those people and get them to believe in what you're trying to achieve. And that's sometimes not an easy thing. I always say the best way to do that is the better you can get to know your team or the people you're leading, the more granular in the detail you can go in understanding who you've got in your team, the better you can tailor your leadership to them, because sometimes people need different styles of leadership depending on who they are, even if you're all aiming at the same thing. Like I said before, some people need an arm around their shoulder, others need to be just told what to do. Others need to be given some freedom to lead themselves. If you can understand who you've got, you can give a little bit of each of that to the people that need it. And I think that's probably the biggest thing that Formula One teams have learned to do very, very well.

Juliet: Marc, if people want more leadership lessons from you, I think there's a book they need to read. Isn't there.

Marc: There is. As you mentioned, it was released recently. It is called Pitlane Lessons. And it is exactly that. It's all the things that I have learned through Formula One, a lot of research going in there as well, but it's tailored to how people can use those lessons in their life and in their work. So it's a lot of the areas that we've covered. But going into a lot more detail, I think it's really useful. I hope it's really useful. But yes, if people want to search for Pitlane Lessons, they can find that anywhere.

Juliet: Marc, it's been a pleasure. Thanks so.

Marc: Much. Thank you.

Juliet: Thanks again to Marc Priestley for sharing his thoughts, experiences, and perspectives on high performance leadership and overcoming adversity in the sporting world. Thank you for listening. I hope you've enjoyed this episode and will join us again as we continue to explore what it really takes to achieve more together. Don't forget to subscribe and share this podcast with your colleagues, your networks and friends. See you next time!