Toto Wolff wants to empower and micromanage. The contradiction explains his success

Toto Wolff is the CEO of Mercedes' F1 team Design: Dan Goldfarb / The Athletic; Photos: Joe Portlock / Getty Images Share full articleThis story is part of Peak, The Athletic’s desk covering the mental side of sports. Sign up for Peak’s newsletter here. Toto Wolff is one of the most influential leaders in modern Formula 1. He is the CEO of the Mercedes team and the architect of one of the sport’s great dynasties, which included seven straight drivers’ championships from 2014 to 2020.  After going five years without a drivers’ championship, Mercedes is well-positioned to break the drought. After three races of the 2026 season, 19-year-old Kimi Antonelli, Mercedes’ rising prodigy, is at the top of the standings, while George Russell, Mercedes’ established star, is right behind him.  Wolff is rarely shy about sharing his thoughts on leadership, mental health or running a $6 billion business, but I wanted to ask him about one thing: managing and motivating people.  Let’s start here: What’s the best lesson you’ve ever learned about managing people?  It’s to understand that performance is all about people. In our industry, you tend to say F1 is about data and science, but data doesn’t make decisions. Humans do. And humans have emotions, humans have dreams, ambitions, fears, wishes.  A very, very famous football manager said to me — he’s often asked about the strategy on the football pitch, how he chooses his players — if people would know that the only thing I do is just to take players out for dinner when I feel there’s something they want to talk about. That is a lesson I believe is applicable to any company. To not only think about yourself and all of those factors that I just named before, but to say, what is it that my people really think? What do they wish? What do they fear? What are their motivations? What are their ambitions? And I’m thinking, what can I do for them? And the most important thing is to talk and find out what that is.  First of all, hire the right people. What are their values? I hire more based on factors such as humility and integrity, rather than the best nerd in the room. Now, competence clearly is a necessity if you’re working in aerodynamics, vehicle dynamics or engineering. But to come back to your question, it is the human beings that make me look good and that make Mercedes look good. You talk a lot about psychology, understanding human nature, and motivation. Was there a book you read or something earlier in your life that was really formative in exploring the psychology of human nature?  Well, I had a very, very tough upbringing in a financially underprivileged background. My father got ill very early and was not himself anymore. My mother couldn’t cope with it and wasn’t at home. So I had to look after my sister from the age of eight or nine. And they tried to make ends meet, but have us in a private school at the same time. They couldn’t afford the private school, so every day I was confronted with wealthy kids and being taken out of class because our school fees were not paid, and sent home in the afternoon with my sister. I had to explain to her on the tram journey home why we were not in school anymore.  That affected me in two ways. It affected me because it created that drive that I have until today to overcompensate for the humiliation that I had to suffer from as a child and the trauma that was there. So that’s definitely a driver. But on the other hand, for me, it was to understand what I could do to give people a safer environment, and that kind of transcends to every relationship that I have, from my wife and my children and my family, but also to the people that I work with.  It reminds me of the idea of psychological safety — the idea that employees in the workplace are empowered or feel safe to speak up or take risks.  I still tend to call myself a micromanager, and obviously, there is a complete contradiction between being a micromanager and empowering. But for me, micromanagement is not about doing everything. It’s about knowing everything that is happening in the organization.  Empowering and letting mistakes happen. Empowering and looking at the organization, about decision making, about relationships, and how people work with each other. And we have a motto that is, “See it, say it, fix it.” I encourage more junior people to get in touch with me if they feel they need to, if they think they need to speak to me. But at the same time, I absolutely kill — and this is for me a red line — any politics within the organization. Personal ambition and politics — when they’re related, that’s a sudden, sudden death.  So, from a leadership perspective, you feel like you can be empowering and hands-on at the same time?  I can be. I’m empowering. I oblige people to make decisions. And at the same time, I monitor how this goes.  There’s an example: I would call him an entrepreneur that I very, very much admire. The founder of AMG, the car company. He’s a very patriarchal entrepreneur and people feared him, so they struggled to really make decisions. They would come into his office and ask him for advice on what to do and which decisions to take. And he would put his feet on his desk, take a magazine, open it up, look at it, and say, “I have no time. You have to take the decision yourself.”  You oblige people to think entrepreneurially.  I’ve seen management styles of people who act with a baseball bat — hire and fire, ultra-pressure all the time, micromanagement. You’re leaving basically dead bodies on your way, but the company is still a success for whatever reason — either you’re a genius, or people try to please you, striving for this little spotlight or this little moment of acknowledgement.  On the other side of the spectrum, some people are authentic by putting an arm around the shoulder and creating an atmosphere like a family. So, for me, I would see myself right in the middle. F1 is about pressure. When we are doing job advertisements now, we are saying, “It’s a great job. You can have big highs, but don’t expect it to be a no-pressure environment. And I expect all-in commitment and I pressure for results.”  But at the same time, I have a real interest in the people. For me, it is my tribe. I want them to thrive.  I was curious about what you’ve learned about managing or motivating drivers. Is there an example of something you faced early in your career? Well, I was a driver myself, so I understand the pressures that these kids are exposed to. And they’re multi-dimensional pressures. When we see an upcoming driver, we obviously judge on talent, raw speed, development ability, but also the management of pressure. Because in F1, it is all about pressure and handling that while being able to perform.  When you look at the policy of other junior teams, they fire drivers if they’re not doing well after three races. We’ve done the opposite with Kimi.  We basically drafted an 18-year-old into the team that had the best track record of any junior driver in karting and smaller formulas, but he made many mistakes in year one. People were very critical of us doing it. They said he was too young, he makes too many mistakes, and we are burning him. And that was an absolutely calculated risk. We knew that this would happen in year one.  For new F1 fans, to understand that drivers on the same team are teammates but also competitors is an intriguing idea. But I think people can relate. When you work in a newsroom, you have teammates with whom you work. But you’re also your own person — you’re doing your own work and you’re kind of competing with your colleagues at the same time. I think about that a lot. Do you want to foster that competition between drivers? Do you think that’s healthy?  I think it’s the reality. To my knowledge, there is no sports team where, within the same structure, two drivers who call themselves teammates are, at the same time, the biggest competitors, because you’re working and racing with equivalent material. So your career depends on beating your teammate. I see drivers that are extremely happy, even if they’re not finishing on the podium, by the sheer fact that they’ve beaten their teammate. Because that is the only way of measuring their ability or their performance. And we all realize that drivers in a way are like traumatized little kids, because at the age of six, you’re being put in a go-kart that goes 100 kilometers an hour. It’s raining. You have 20 other go-carts around you. You’re on your own, and you need to overcome that fear, and you need to overcome being out there alone.  And suddenly, they make it through the ranks and then they come into an F1 team. You’re representing the Mercedes brand, and you just have to accept that it’s not all about you. So, fact: they are competitors. We accept the competition. We accept them racing against each other as long as they respect certain red lines. And that is very simple: don’t crash into each other. And I have never had any fear of making that very clear. In 2016, (Nico) Rosberg and (Lewis) Hamilton crashed, and then they crashed again. So I fired them. I called my chief executive officer, Dieter Zetsche, in Mercedes, and said, “Listen, you need to sign something.” And he called me back and said, “You’re making both drivers redundant.” And I said, “Yeah, because otherwise they won’t understand how important it is to the interest of the brand and the team above their own.” It was their personal rivalry that took over. And from a healthy competition, it went to a rivalry and it became animosity. And that’s just not something I would allow in the organization, and based on these factors, we sent them an email and said, “At the moment, you’re not part of the team.”  And on Wednesday, we called them and said, “Come in tomorrow,” and I said, “My problem is that I don’t know whose fault it was.” Because it’s nuanced. Like everything in life, it’s never 100 percent wrong. It may be 50-50. It might be 51-49. It’d be 70-30. And I can’t judge. And so what I said to them is that, if it happens again, one has to go, and I may make a mistake. I may send the wrong one away.  People who need to repay their mortgages who work in the factories, what do they think? That you two crash into each other because you don’t like each other? And it directly affects the lives of two and a half thousand people. Who do you think you are? And that’s an important understanding that you need to have with your drivers. Is there a simple piece of advice that you give young drivers on how to embrace that competition without going too far? I let you race. I completely understand that you’re a competitor. You need to beat your teammate. You need to beat all of them out there. And I can’t expect a puppy outside of the car and a lion in the car. That’s completely clear. We accept you racing out there and racing each other out there as long as you respect our values and don’t crash into each other. Do you have any daily habits or routines that really keep you going? It’s something that I learned from Lewis Hamilton, who is, for me, one of the greatest athletes in the world and certainly the gold (standard) in our sport. He taught me that even as adults, we change and we are able to develop. And what was a routine yesterday may not be a routine anymore tomorrow because I found out that it doesn’t work, or that it’s maybe obsolete because I found a new way around it. I came across something where you were quoting somebody else, but you mentioned the importance of having purpose. You said: everybody needs somebody to love, something to do, and something to dream about. Why did that stick with you? It summarizes happiness in life. Those three factors are key to a fulfilled life, in my opinion. You’re running out of dreams. That’s terrible. You see many people who have been very successful, who have built up companies, have sold them, have lots of money, and are still very depressed.  You see that with athletes that have achieved an Olympic medal or a great championship, and suddenly they wake up and say, well, they have no dreams anymore because they’ve done that. That is a phenomenon we know from athletes who stop. Something to do — that means having an activity, whatever that is that makes you happy. Being bored is not good because it ultimately leads to a negative state of mind. And somebody to love, isn’t it all about that?  Spot the pattern. Connect the terms Find the hidden link between sports terms Rustin Dodd is a senior writer for Peak, The Athletic's new vertical covering sports leadership, personal development and success. He joined The Athletic in 2018 after nine years at The Kansas City Star. Follow Rustin on Twitter @rustindodd