Be Obsessed With The Detail

“It’s the engineering that makes a car quick.”

That was Ross Brawn’s response when Toto Wolff asked why there was a week-old Daily Mail and used coffee cups sitting in the reception area of the team’s headquarters.

“I disagree,” Wolff responded. “It’s the attention-to-detail that’s important. If the reception of a Formula 1 team isn’t the standard, then what is?”

I can imagine Brawn was taken aback. At the time, he was the standard. Brawn was the engineering mastermind behind Michael Schumacher’s seven world titles, and in one season as a team owner he’d led Jenson Button to a world title as well.

Wolff, at the time, had been part of just one race win in Formula 1.

But when Mercedes (with Wolff at the helm) assumed control of Brawn’s team, a new era of dominance was about to begin. Brawn had accounted for eight world championships across 35 years in F1; a quite remarkable run of success in such a competitive sport. Mercedes, however, were about to win eight championships in a row!

“I’ve rarely seen a cutting-edge businesses without the founder, CEO, or someone in top management being obsessed with the detail,” Wolff explains. And for him, those details weren’t just aerodynamics and race strategy, they included the people and culture of the entire organization.

“I don’t run racing cars, I run the people that run racing cars,” is a Toto-ism that has become his calling card.

Pairing Mercedes’ precision engineering with Wolff’s cultural ideas, the team set all-new standards in Formula 1.

Your culture is your immune system

“Culture is the immune system of any organization,” Wolff says.

He means it literally and figuratively.

Wolff had sanitizer dispensers drilled to the walls in the Mercedes garage at every track around the world. He hired a Hygiene Manager to travel with the team and ensure that the bathrooms were spotless, and the staff were kept healthy from stomach bugs and infections. (You want your pit crew running to change tires, not running to change their underpants).

“We are in the reputation business, and when you have sponsors and CEOs and husbands and wives visiting our grand prix, and issuing big cheques, they are expecting these standards. You can’t have a dirty bathroom,” he says.

A strong immune system doesn’t guarantee you won’t get infected. Rather, it increases your defenses and boosts your ability to heal faster.

Wolff believes living your culture every day is the organizational equivalent of sanitizing your hands after using the bathroom.

“Your culture keeps people aligned beyond the core objectives because when you fail those objectives become difficult to reach, and you still need something to guide behaviour,” he riffs. “For us, attitudes like loyalty, humility, integrity, are not just words, they are the basic principles upon which we act.”

A strong cultural hygiene doesn’t guarantee you won’t get infected. Rather, it increases your defenses and boosts your ability to heal faster.

The difference is that while we don’t want viruses to spread through the office, we do want our culture to spread across the entire organization.

The people become the standard

It’s not engineering that makes a car fast. It’s people who are engineers.

Sanitizer in the bathroom is useless unless you have a collection of people who clean their hands after taking a shit.

Standards unto themselves are worth nothing without people who subscribe to them.

It’s the people who become the standard.

As a leader, the magic happens when your people take your standards and find other applications for them.

“When I walked into the garage ten years ago, it was messy,” Wolff recalls. “Now we’re cleaning the floor every time the car has been in there. You’ll see no tire marks, no tool out of place. Everything is spotless and organized. I think that affects how we look after the cars too. We’re meticulous.”

What Wolff is describing is the definition of culture: people like us do things like this. First, they kept the toilets clean. Then, it expanded to keeping the garage clean. Both demonstrations of who they were as a collective.

As a leader, the standard must start with you, but it must end with them.