F1 Legend Toto Wolff on Winning, Losing, and Leading Through Both

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I'm Anita Elberse. I'm a professor at the Harvard Business School, and I'm here with Toto Wolff, the team principal behind the Mercedes team, the team behind arguably one of the greatest winning streaks in all of sports, with eight consecutive team-based championships, the Constructor Championship. Uh, and we're gonna be talking about what it takes to build a winning culture. You've shown that you can do that. But I actually want to start by looking at this season, because this season, the winning streak came to an end. How did you experience this season?

Yeah, Anita, good to, good to be back. Um, actually, remember we talked about it last, uh, February when it was we were here, uh, about eight consecutive world championships. And I said to you, "Let's hope this is not the start, uh, of us losing." And here we go, end of the year, and we've, we've lost that championship.

Um, have you changed your approach? Were there, were there areas where you said, "Now what we've been doing all this time we can no longer do," or has it been still the same kind of leadership approach?

Over all these years, we really tried to work on our values, the culture, and, um, philosophies how to cope with the day when it comes. We knew there is no, there's no sports team in the world that has won every single championship that they entered forever. So that day has come.

Yeah, because you've talked about this fear of losing all along, and then, and now losing is actually happening. How do you cope with that emotionally?

It comes in, in quite an interesting pattern because at the, at the beginning, you are in disbelief. "This can't possibly hap- be happening." And then comes the phase where you think, "Okay, this is just, you know, this is just a blip. We got things wrong. This is an organization that has been successful in the past." And then you realize we got this really wrong, and the real risk is that you change your expectations. And this is where it becomes so fundamental to not change your own expectations and not say, "Well, okay, we've lost that one anyway already." Or you get used to a podium, and you say, "Well, that wasn't