Running a Formula 1 racing team may sound like the ultimate dream job.
Yet there was little evidence of the glamorous lifestyle—for which this elite motorsport is so famous—when Zak Brown took over McLaren Racing in 2016.
The former professional driver said he inherited a highly resistant workforce, whose morale had hit rock bottom. On top of that, years of mismanagement under Brown’s various predecessors had taught them to view leadership changes with extreme skepticism.
“I had to rebuild trust. There was a lot of ‘guilty until proven innocent’ type of mindset on the shop floor,” Brown said at the Fortune Global Forum in Abu Dhabi on Monday.
McLaren Racing is an icon of the motorsports scene, boasting the second oldest active team in F1 racing, behind only Ferrari.
Parent company McLaren Group separately operates a boutique manufacturing business called McLaren Automotive that specializes in street-legal performance cars such as the 750S that can retail for hundreds of thousands of dollars.
A rare American in a traditionally European motorsport, Brown said the 1,200 employees of the F1 team had cycled through four or five different leaders over the span of six or seven years.
“Whatever company you’re running, if you have that much change at the top then the team below don’t know who to follow, what they’re following, and how long they’re going to be following them for,” he said.
Brown knew such a demoralized group of people would not immediately believe in him or his strategy given their previous experiences. Instead, he needed to earn their buy-in before they would start collectively rowing in the same direction.
Getting McLaren Racing back on track meant spending the better part of three years proving—in particular to those that were hardest to reach—that he could finally bring stability to the organization.
“Those [resistant] employees are the ones that you need to focus on. And then if you can kind of shift everyone up through the belief chain, then you can really start building a lot of momentum,” he explained.
From back of the pack to fourth place this year
Brown credited his entire management team for quickly responding to their poor start at the beginning of the year when their cars were anything but competitive. The first race in Bahrain saw lead driver Lando Norris finish the Bahrain Grand Prix in 17th place.
Brown’s team sprang into action in a high-pressure environment to find a solution by the middle of the calendar, when Norris ended up placing just shy of the podium at the Red Bull Ring in Austria’s Grand Prix.
McLaren as a team overall ultimately finished fourth this season, which concluded in Abu Dhabi this past weekend. Norris meanwhile was personally ranked the sixth-best F1 pilot of the year.
“The momentum we have going into the off-season—the belief, the energy everyone has—I think is going to carry us forward to a more productive 2024,” Brown continued.
Brown described his leadership style as not only accepting of different opinion, but actively seeking out and demanding it. He is prone to going into a meeting with conviction only to emerge having changed his mind following a robust debate with his team.
“We encourage challenging each other,” he said at the Fortune Global Forum. “I think, in any good organization, there’s no point in having 10 people around the table all agreeing with me.”
