How to lead under pressure: what Formula 1 teaches leaders.

The captain who runs down the aisle

There are very few places that test leadership under pressure like Formula 1. Seb Sheppard has led more than 150 engineers designing cars at Renault and Alpine F1, where milliseconds decide the outcome. Before that he flew Sea King helicopters in the Royal Navy and worked on integrating high-tech companies across Europe, reporting to the CEO.

When I asked him what the cockpit taught him about leadership, he used an analogy I keep coming back to. You get on a plane and see the captain running up and down the aisle, stressed, shouting, out of control. You're not going to feel comfortable on that flight. Plenty of people would get off before it took off.

The person who's leading the team has to always show calm.

That doesn't mean the leader knows everything. Seb was clear that the leader isn't the fountain of all knowledge. They need the team to feed in so that, when necessary, they can make the decision. Calm comes from trust in both directions.

He applies the same test to managers. If you're running around like a headless chicken putting out fires because you think being busy makes you look good, you're not in control. A manager who delegates properly and empowers intelligent people can guide calmly while they solve the problems. There are times when everyone has to move very fast. That's fine, as long as it's controlled, decisive activity and not chaos. The pit stop is the picture of it.

Twenty minutes at a desk

Seb described a pre-season test early in his career. The car went out, something rather bad happened, and it came straight back in. A major problem. He looked around and nothing seemed to be happening. Then two or three senior people walked over, gathered round a desk and talked for twenty minutes. They found the start of the problem, agreed what to do, and arranged to meet again that afternoon. Then they went to lunch.

Nobody ran out of the office shouting. Nobody said, "It's your fault." That, for Seb, is what high-pressure problem-solving looks like.

He doesn't believe in adding conflict to a team that's already under pressure. Tension and pressure, yes. Conflict, no. When a car breaks down and costs points, you get talented, emotional people in a room, lay out the problem, ask for ideas and work back to the root cause, always with respect. If a young engineer's idea is agreed by the room and then fails, the senior people share responsibility, because they should have seen it coming. In F1 you're working at the edge of physics, so some things will fail. The team accepts that.

Hand the problem back

The most practical thing Seb told me is something every new manager should hear. When technical people become managers, they think their job is to absorb everyone's problems. He says it should be the other way round.

When someone brings you a problem, ask them, "What would you do about this?" In his experience there's a very good chance they already have an idea. Even if you know the answer, ask the question.

That one question does several things at once. It tells the person you believe they can solve it. It hands the problem back, so they own it rather than following an instruction. It develops them. And it stops the manager carrying everyone's load, which Seb sees as one of the biggest sources of stress for leaders. Then you can ask, "Have you thought about this? What about that?" and reach the answer together.

It's counterintuitive, especially for young managers who think they have to do everything. Seb's point is that it's exactly the wrong instinct.

High performance without burnout

Seb's definition of a high-performance team is plain: highly motivated, very capable people with an environment where they can do their best work and trust that, together, they'll do as good a job as possible. Seniority doesn't decide who gets heard. Anyone can raise their hand with an idea without being shot down.

He has turned down extremely talented engineers who wanted to be a one-person band. He would rather hire someone who grew up tinkering with a motorbike in the garage or playing team sport, because they solve problems early and rely on others without feeling it hurts their career.

People in F1 are so motivated they'd work 25 hours a day if they could, so Seb's team had to watch for burnout. Here he did something I think most companies get backwards. Instead of the boss chairing a wellbeing committee and telling people what they need, he asked each department for one volunteer, ideally a young engineer, and made them the wellbeing team. Their job was to talk to colleagues and come back with what would make work better. They ran a quarterly mental health survey, spotted early warning signs, and brought them to Seb and the technical director before they became problems. The aim was to pull someone back from the front line for a while instead of losing them for six months.

The open-plan redesign worked the same way. Teams that depended on each other sat across a corridor from each other, and the heads of those teams were told to have coffee together every week. Seb found it took a lot of "they didn't tell me" noise out of the system. His view is that about 80% of meetings involve two or three people, so take them for a walk instead of booking a room.

Don't spend next year's car on this weekend

I asked Seb how he balances the urgency of the next race with longer-term strategy, because I see so many leaders reacting operationally right now, especially to AI, chasing speed and quick wins instead of thinking strategically.

His answer was about resources. In F1 there is always a fight between next week's race, mid-season upgrades, next year's car and regulation changes two years out. If you throw everything at a problem worth a few points in one race, you can find you've robbed next year's car. And you can't ask for the first test to be moved.

So the strategy has to be clear, believable and achievable, and every objective has to connect to it. If an individual's objectives don't link to the strategy at the top, they don't add much. The leader's job is to keep checking that today's decisions serve that strategy, and to filter out the shiny distractions that don't.

What to take into your own team

• Stay visibly calm. Your team reads your behaviour before they hear your words.
• When someone brings you a problem, ask what they would do before you answer.
• Keep blame out of the room and share responsibility when agreed ideas fail.
• Let your people design how wellbeing works, and look for early warning signs.
• Protect next year's resources from this week's emergencies.
• Develop your own replacement. Seb insisted every manager mentor someone who could step into their role, because good people leave when every promotion goes to an outsider.