Formula 1 legend Mark Gallagher joined us at NMP Live to talk exclusively about leadership, the importance of teamwork and the value of an external speaker for corporate events.
Watch the full interview or read the transcript below.
In conversation with Mark Gallagher
Can you share an overview of your career in motorsports and key appointments
My career in Formula One started straight from university, I was very lucky. I spent seven years working in the media and cut my teeth in the BBC actually with BBC Radio 2 and then I met this fellow Irishman called Ellie Jordan and we started the Jordan Formula One team in 1990.
That was a very important part of my life; 14 years, we built the team from scratch. I ran marketing and communications; Eddie obviously was the chief executive and that was terrific. It was a start-up company; there were four of us at the beginning and by the end there were 300 of us and we won Grand Prix's and we'd beaten some of the big car manufacturers like Ferrari and Mercedes. So, although we didn't win the championship, we became proper contenders and that was very exciting.
Then I went from there to Red Bull Racing and I describe Red Bull Racing as being like working for Eddie Jordan except we had a budget. It was just a completely different ballgame with Red Bull and that was very interesting because that was quite a different experience in that it wasn't a start-up, it was an existing team that Red Bull bought, and we had to change the culture in the team. So that was quite different and not without its challenges. But the potential in the team was unlocked and of course they went on to win four world championships.
I then took a break from Formula One; I set up my own racing team. And I really did that as a personal challenge to myself because I'd worked in the sport by then for 20 years and the one area, I hadn't worked in was the operational side. So, I started my own team from scratch, and we won a world championship after four years and that was an extremely hard but very rewarding period of time.
Then my final executive role in Formula One came as a result of being headhunted so I was headhunted to run the Cosworth Formula One engine business. And I found myself immersed in technology and delivering technology to teams like Frank Williams’ Formula One team and working with Frank and his team, who I’d known and admired from afar mainly as a competitor and there I was a key supplier and that was again a very rewarding experience.
Then more recently I've spent so much time immersed in working with the media, working with a regulator for Formula One. Also advising teams and I think really as I've gotten older people come to me for advice and I seem to end up doing lots of that kind of thing. So that's really been Mark Gallagher in Formula One.
How important is teamwork within F1?
Teamwork is an extremely important aspect within Formula One, as it is in all sports and I think the sporting analogy of course works very well.
However, what differentiates Formula One is that you will employ around about a thousand full-time staff in a competitive Formula One team and only 10% of our employees travel to the races. 90% of the people who work for us in a Formula One environment are designing and manufacturing and developing a big piece of technology, not just for this year but also for future seasons. We've got short, medium and long-term technology plans which we have to integrate into creating the Formula One car and that's the iceberg that no one sees.
That's where really from a leadership challenge point of view we have so much work to do. It's one thing having the pit crew motivated to service that car in the middle of a Grand Prix, which is a great example of teamwork, It's quite a different thing when you have a thousand people, most of whom don't travel to the races, and we need them to get out of bed every morning and to be just as motivated to come and deliver for us.
That's something that for me is really what defines the successful teams in Formula One compared to the unsuccessful. It's the way that very large group of people are motivated and lead and communicated with and make sure they have the right team culture. That's what unlocks their performance.
How has the attitude to safety changed within the sport?
I think many people will certainly be familiar with Ayrton Senna and maybe even seen the amazing documentary that was made about his career just a few years ago. And we had two fatal accidents that weekend, Ayrton Senna and Roland Ratzenberger, who was a good friend of mine, losing their lives.
In terms of safety, that was the pivotal moment for our entire industry. Safety is a topic I love talking about and I've been involved in a lot of regulatory groups to do with health and safety within Formula One, because I'm very passionate about it and we have seen the downside of getting it wrong.
Between 1950 and 1994 and the death of Senna we had over 40 driver fatalities. We've had one since. And that journey from it being something that happened all the time to something that really very rarely occurs and actually our objective is zero catastrophic incidents.
That's been a huge shift, partly through culture changes and the way leadership manages Formula One and it's about people and what their priorities are.
Also, through the use of technology and it takes me into the area of big data, but essentially, we're taking a data-driven approach to managing risk in a much more effective way, much more efficient way than we did before. Big data has helped us to make sure that we make the right decisions and we get the right outcomes and we don't have anything go catastrophically wrong.
How do you define leadership?
Leadership for me is all about getting the organisation to focus its ambitions on some very simple, but clearly defined targets.
The world of business and certainly the world of Formula One is very complex, and people love talking about the complexity. I think leaders have to focus people on what are the key parameters by which we're going to be measured and setting the tone and the direction for how we're getting there.
I'm a huge believer in adaptive leadership where you set the targets and you empower people and you really only intervene when people need help and hopefully ask for help. But you're there to support and to coach and to intervene and to provide the platform for your organisation to be as successful as they can be.
So for us in Formula One it's not about command and control, it's about empowerment, it's about saying to each individual “do you understand where we're going, do you buy into the plan,” we've got to make sure everyone buys into that plan, “and do you understand the criticality of your role in that?” Each individual has to contribute and when you're employing a thousand people in a Formula One team, it can be quite tempting to think that maybe 10% of the workforce can cruise while 90% deliver. Those days, if they ever existed, those days are gone. We need every single person to be delivering for us.
One of the great attributes of working in Formula One is that the leadership team has to focus the organisation on never missing a deadline. We have 21 Formula One races; we have hardware and software to deliver for every event and we upgrade those race to race. The leadership is not going to do that, the team's going to deliver that and so we have to make sure they're very clear about the targets that have been set, that they feel empowered and fully accountable for getting on with it and they then deliver according to that.
A final thing that I’ll say to you on leadership. I often talk about Michael Schumacher and it's interesting to see the effect that he had in the Formula One industry and it's interesting to see the impact that he had on, for example a driver like Lewis Hamilton. These leading drivers now on a weekly basis will have meetings with the whole team where they talk about how we're doing, what we need to improve until next time.
So, the top drivers are taking leadership roles these days and helping to keep the team focused on where we are where we're going to, making sure that no one is in any doubt about what has to be done.
What are the main topics and themes on which you speak?
The main topics on which I speak tend to be first of all around the sporting analogy around teamwork of course and individual performance and commitment and ambition and getting the best out of yourself or getting the best out of a team of people.
Sporting analogy of course is very important and very popular but where it then usually leads to is talking about how you develop that teamwork in an environment of technology where you have to create a product or a service and bring it to market.
Because Formula One's teamwork is all around creating this amazing technology, which is a Formula One car, so, the technological piece then becomes a very rich area to talk about.
When we're looking at technology, I usually end up being asked to speak about how we innovate, how we differentiate our technology from our competitors, how we developed a winning capability. Then the technologies that we use: connected environment, big data, data analytics, that's been a really popular topic for the last few years. And I think as people's awareness of what data analytics can do for them grows, actually the relevance of Formula One, in terms of what you can take away. We all want to make the right decision and we want to make the right decision sometimes under a lot of pressure. So, we have a lot of experience of how data analytics helps us to do that.
The other topic which is extremely popular for clients, and which I love talking about, is the risk management and safety story. I think for a lot of large organisations, health and safety can somehow get parked in a little bit of a cul-de-sac as something that people kind of have to talk about, but maybe they don't really want to talk about it. I love going into organisations and talking about that subject because I've witnessed and experienced the absolute downside - catastrophic outcomes, people losing their lives.
I've then been very much involved in the journey that we have taken in Formula One over the last 25 years, into a world where the risks are still there but because we make the right decisions we don't end up with the catastrophic outcomes. We still have big accidents in Formula One, it's just that today people walk away from it and it just becomes a thrilling accident to watch on television.
So, that's a really terrific subject which I enjoy talking about because I don't think there can be anything more important than making sure that everyone who works for you or everyone who is a customer of yours goes home to their family safely at the end of the day.
I love talking about creating a one team philosophy. And the teamwork piece where you get a pit crew working together, that's great and people love hearing that story of how we've gone from doing pit stops in 20 seconds to 1.9 seconds. But the magnitude of the task for a Formula One organisation is much larger than the pit crew.
We have a thousand people and getting that one team philosophy where a thousand people get out of bed every morning knowing exactly what's expected of them, that they're not going to miss a deadline, that if they have a problem they put their hand up and they escalate that problem and we do something about it and we just work to get the result that we're looking for.
We avoid blame culture; we don't allow silo mentality to develop. These are the keys to that one team success that we demand in Formula One and that really is something I know organisations would love to harness and so it's certainly an aspect that I can bring a lot of deep insights to.
The other aspect of Formula One that I know businesses really enjoy and want to hear about is how we keep sustaining performance over time, that continuous improvement. And it's something that from a sporting point of view we know only too well; it's one thing to achieve a victory, it's another thing to keep on doing it. And for many organisations, reaching the top is one thing but actually keeping that number one position is difficult. So, ‘what do we do to sustain performance over time to make sure that we do not allow complacency to kick in’ and we see complacency as our biggest enemy in Formula One.
So that's again another really interesting field for me because I've experienced the highs and lows and keeping it high is a much better outcome.
What’s the value in booking and external speaker for a conference?
From my perspective the value of booking an external speaker is that we can bring a rich external view on a particular topic and make people think about it in ways that perhaps are quite unexpected. And I can honestly say that the vast majority of audiences that I speak to are not full of Formula One fans. Actually, quite the opposite.
In Europe usually it's about 20%, in North America and Asia probably less than 10 percent of audiences are into Formula One. But the point is they'll be aware of the sport and then I will bring the topic and the topic will be tailored to what it is that the client wants their audience to be thinking about. And I will bring that topic to life and I will make a presentation that will be entertaining, that will be insightful, that will be engaging and will be tailored.
I'm not famous and I know the world of public speaking is full of famous people who can come in and talk about their careers or whatever. So, I'm not there to do anything but to deliver the content and so for me it's all about a content rich experience that makes audiences think about that topic and to hear something hopefully exciting and motivating from the world of Formula One. They may not remember, in five years’ time, my name but hopefully they'll remember the content and that’s certainly been my experience of doing this for 20 years, people love the content.
Of course, the other thing is that Formula One is a very photogenic sport, so we've got lots of nice imagery and videos and content and of course on the big stage that really helps to bring an event to life.
So, I think there's a lot of benefits to having an external speaker bringing a fresh approach to your topic. And the thing that I really enjoy is having that all-important briefing call with the client.
I'm surprised how many clients say to me in a ‘bring your speech’. I don't have a fixed speech; I want the client to tell me what it is that they want to know about, and I will then develop content to suit them. So that briefing call for me is critical because that enables me to drill quite far into what are the touch points and then to go away and think about a presentation that's really going to put a smile on the client’s face and deliver content for that audience.
Tell us about the F1 drivers you work with for corporate events
After I’d been doing public speaking for about ten or twelve years, I realised how often clients or agencies would call me and ask me ‘could I get hold of a Formula One driver?’ And of course, having worked with Formula One drivers I know that the vast majority of them actually are not very good in front of an audience. They're extremely good at driving a Formula One car at 200 miles an hour but why would they be a good keynote speaker?
However, there are some Formula One drivers who are exceptional in terms of their willingness, and that's of course another important thing, their willingness to engage with corporate clients and with audiences. I didn't have to think about it too long before I called David Coulthard because David as a 13 times Formula One winner, I happen to know that he really enjoyed the corporate landscape.
He drove for the McLaren Formula One team for nine years and they were supported by many very well-known multinational companies, so David had spent nine years working with a lot of these organisations. So, I said to him ‘why don't we do this outside of Formula One?’
So, he started doing events with me and then was very closely followed by Jacques Villeneuve, which for the North American market was great because he is an Indy 500 winner and an IndyCar champion as well as a Formula One champion. Also, Jacques’ father was killed in Formula One, driving for Ferrari. So, when you get Jacques on stage beside me talking about the risk management and the safety aspect, he can bring a lot to that.
Then, I jokingly said to David Coulthard one day, ‘you didn't actually win the world championship, so I need to get a multiple world champion to work with me,’ and so David said, ‘why don't we start working Mika?’ So, Mika Häkkinen, who I've known for 30 years, started working with me and of course he was a two times world champion.
There's a couple of aspects to Mika; first of all, he won the championship twice, so he sustained performance, his arch-rival was Michael Schumacher and in the world of business around the globe the number one driver I'm asked about by so many audiences is Michael Schumacher. And of course, as we all know he's not available to talk about his career, but Mika can as his archrival. They had some very famous duels and so we have some nice video footage to support that and Mika is great about talking about the winning mindset, about his own career, his own brush with death. So, when it comes to risk management and safety, he had a very serious accident in 1995, he nearly lost his life. He was also teammate to Ayrton Senna.
So, Mika for me covers a very important era in our industry's history and he's very willing to engage with audiences. So, bringing drivers into events for me fixes the celebrity element but it's much more than that. They bring authentic, credible content. I only work with drivers who really enjoy engaging with audiences, both on stage but also afterwards in terms of meeting and greeting people, doing selfies, signing autographs. David's written a great book for example, David Coulthard wrote a good book last year and so all of these elements really add to it.
So, I like working with drivers who will immerse themselves in an event and give the client a lot more value than simply their participation on stage.
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