How McLaren Racing Uses Marginal Gains to Stay On the Leaderboard

In the world of motorsport, even a small advantage can be all that separates a winning team from its competitors. The pursuit of minor, continuous improvements is core to the principle of marginal gains. It’s a philosophy ingrained into the DNA of the McLaren Formula 1 Racing Team. What outsiders might see as seemingly insignificant advances, are actually critical milliseconds saved in a race that could make the difference between securing a Championship.  

Marginal gains are a concept applicable to all companies — whether work is done in an office or on a track. For non-motorsport companies, marginal gains can boost productivity, reduce spend, and find opportunities for change that will influence the bottom line. In the new course, Accelerating Excellence: Unleashing High-Performance Culture with McLaren Racing, McLaren leaders take on the instructor role and share their experience building marginal gains into the McLaren culture. Featured as course instructors are: 

• Daniel Gallo – Chief People & Sustainability Officer, McLaren Racing
• Ian James – Managing Director NEOM McLaren Electric Racing, and Team Principal of the NEOM McLaren Formula E and Extreme E Teams
• Piers Thynne – Chief Operating Officer, McLaren F1

Below, we take a sneak peek into the course, focusing on marginal gains, just one of the high-performance strategies Daniel, Ian, and Piers cover throughout the course. They offer examples of how McLaren leaders engage employees to achieve marginal gains, and the leadership skills necessary to help teams reach new levels. These skills include collaboration, process and operations, data analysis, growth mindset, communication, and empathy, among others. Keep reading for insights into how the McLaren team leverages these skills to provide clear direction as to what the team needs to refine while allowing them the freedom to explore and innovate. 

Two pillars of marginal gains

The idea behind marginal gains is simple: continuous improvement across all aspects of an operation, no matter how small. One of the most critical ways McLaren’s leaders implement marginal gains on their teams is by tracking data. “Data is everything in motorsport,” Ian James explained in a recent webinar. “That’s how we learn, that’s how we drive things forward. It’s what the engineers and the whole team feed off. So the more data we have, the better and the more accurately we can then process and understand that data, the better we’ll do as well.”

While data serves as an important foundation, marginal gains are more than just numbers. A culture that embraces change and is rooted in psychological safety is essential for employees to feel empowered to take calculated risks. Encouraging employees to ask questions and explore new ways of doing things allows them to achieve small breakthroughs that result in big wins in the long term. Integral to ensuring employees feel safe to experiment is McLaren’s no blame culture, where no specific person or team is blamed if a mistake is made. Instead, mistakes are seen as learning opportunities for continuous improvement. The course provides learners with a workshop guide on how to embed a no blame culture into their own companies. 

Collaboration as the key to improvement

“We are constantly looking at making our car go faster, increasing our logistical performance, increasing our ability to perform under the constraints of the cost gap,” McLaren F1’s Chief Operating Officer Piers Thynne explains in the course. While careful data measurement and a growth mindset culture are the cornerstones for marginal gains, collaboration drives the incremental wins Piers describes. Great ideas rarely emerge in isolation. Leaders must foster collaboration in order to unlock the potential of their teams. 

Create workspaces that cater to both individual focus time, open communication, and group collaboration. As Daniel Gallo explains in the course, sometimes a leader might need to force moments of collaboration (whether hybrid or in-person) in pursuit of marginal gains. “It’s okay to create situations where people have to collaborate,” Daniel says. “And sometimes creating these artificial opportunities can reinforce the genuine power of coming together and working on problems, which then becomes self-generative in the future.” 

For McLaren Racing, these purposeful moments of collaboration go far beyond the initial project to unlock new partnerships and different ways of working. After structured collaboration, leaders find that cross-functional teams are more comfortable reaching out to one another, creating momentum that allows teams to innovate faster and achieve new gains.   

Achieving high-performance teams 

The principle of marginal gains is just one strategy the leaders of McLaren Racing use to grow their employees into high-performance teams. Enroll in the new course, Accelerating Excellence: Unleashing High-Performance Culture with McLaren Racing, for more business tips and guidance from Daniel, Ian, and Piers on how to make better decisions, prioritize your employees’ well-being, and embrace diversity to achieve peak team performance. 

For more leadership lessons from McLaren, tune into Udemy’s Leading Up podcast for a conversation with Ian James on how to play to your team’s strengths.