Why the calmest teams win: Sebastian Sheppard on performance under pressure
Sebastian Sheppard has strong academic ties to Edinburgh, having completed his MBA at the University of Edinburgh Business School, where he studied business with a focus on interpersonal skills and finance.
With a career spanning elite sport, the military, and complex engineering environments, he is recognised as an expert on high-performance culture and leadership under pressure. His experience at the highest levels of Formula 1 has given him rare insight into how world-class teams operate when margins for error are microscopic and expectations are relentless.
Beyond the pit lane, Sheppard has advised global organisations on leadership, culture, and organisational performance, translating lessons from elite environments into practical frameworks for business leaders. As a high-performance speaker, he is known for demonstrating how trust, psychological safety, and disciplined processes underpin sustained success in fast-moving, high-stakes industries.
In this exclusive interview with the Inspirational Leadership Speakers Agency, Sebastian Sheppard shares his insights on performance under pressure, the realities of elite team culture, and what leaders can learn from Formula 1 and the military about building resilient, high-performing organisations.
Question 1: In moments where pressure is at its peak, what leadership principles ensure high-performance teams remain calm, focused, and resilient?
Sebastian Sheppard: “It’s a great question. Basically, it’s about having trust in the process. People will follow a clear process and also calm, stable leaders.
“If you’ve got a clear process and people are used to it, you basically just have to keep telling them that, you know, sometimes there will be bumps along the road, but the process in itself is the result and you will get there.
“This also leads to good resilience. Having a calm atmosphere in the office or in the working environment is also very helpful. Communicating everything, that’s absolutely super important. The more that people are aware of what’s going on, the surroundings, the circumstances, in our case in F1, we communicate a lot.
“Knowingly sort of via the internet, via emails, via things around the factory, but we also communicate after every race. Everything that happened before the race, after the race, the circumstances behind everything, technical, non-technical, and so on.
“So that people not only feel part of the process, but also feel engaged and part of a team. Every single person counts in this case.
“Also, you have to be clear. People have to be very clear as to what we’re trying to achieve. What’s the ultimate goal of this? In our case, it’s very simple. You want to win races, so the stopwatch is your kind of KPI as such.
“But essentially, the message has to always be that we are all one team. We win together. We fail together. But we’re there for the long term.
“Obviously, you tell them that there will be highs and lows, but ultimately, the wins will be a collection of the journey. The journey is part of the whole feeling because, you know, the win is maybe a little bit of champagne and all that, lovely, but when you remember it, you will remember the build-up, the people around you, the emotions that you went through.
“And if you’re in a setting of collective, in a good setting where people are calm and you can trust each other, then that’s the best way to have it.”
Question 2: From inside an elite Formula 1 engineering environment, how does true performance under pressure differ from the public perception of chaos?
Sebastian Sheppard: “Strangely enough, a lot of people think that F1 is completely manic, chaotic, and so on. But if you go into an F1 factory, certainly in ours, it’s like a library. It’s reasonably quiet, except for downstairs when the machines are going.
“Essentially, in the engineering section, it’s very quiet. You go in, no noise, everybody’s just getting on with what they’re doing. Nobody really gets too emotional about things.
“When people run around chaotically, things seem a little bit, well, there’s something not right there. The analogy here is that if you were in an aeroplane and you see the pilot running around really stressed, or you’re about to go into surgery and you see the surgeon having a bit of a wobbly in the corner, you’re going to feel a little bit uncomfortable.
“It’s the same with F1 and elite sports. Everything is calm. Everybody knows exactly what they’re doing. Everybody’s been super well-trained. You’ve hired incredibly good people, so you’re trusting people.
“They trust the leadership, and the leadership is the ones that have to show the calm, the trust, the process, and just keep everything going. You have to be ready and prepared for everything so that eventually you’ll come to get the wins that you want.
“A really good analogy that people see on TV is the pit stop. You have the people on the pit wall with all the information around them, then the car comes in and in two seconds, sometimes under two seconds, a car stops, four new tyres, and it goes off again.
“That is literally everybody having practised and knowing exactly what they do. Nobody’s shouting around, nobody’s losing their temper, everybody just gets on with it.
“If something wrong does happen, you then go back, look at it, and understand what’s gone wrong. Again, there’s no finger-pointing. You just understand this happened, therefore we need to do something different.”
Question 3: When evaluating whether an organisation can genuinely perform at an elite level, what cultural signals do you assess first?
Sebastian Sheppard: “It’s about how they treat their people. It’s about the culture. I’ve got this thing that I do whenever I go to a company. I think, right, is this company a pay and rations company, or is it a hearts and minds company?
“Does this company invest in the development of people? Does it believe in people? Does it empower people? Does it motivate people? Does it look after people?
“It’s very easy to walk around a company and ask two or three people about the culture, the values, but more importantly, is it a nice place to work?
“As a leader, if you can walk the floor of a company and talk to people who are actually doing the business, and get them to talk openly, you’ll find out quicker than any consultancy coming in to tell you what’s wrong.
“They’re the ones suffering it, and they can tell you better than anybody else. It’s all about psychological safety. People have to be able to talk openly about what’s wrong.
“In our world, you can have a meeting with interns all the way up to technical directors. You have to have a culture where even the intern, who’s probably a second or third-year university student, has as much of a voice as the technical director.
“They will probably have a more unvarnished idea of what’s going on around them because they come with fresh ideas and none of the ten or twenty years that people have in a business.
“If I stick my hand up, even if I say something completely silly, there might be a little nugget that changes the way we do things in the future.”
Question 4: What is the most common misunderstanding leaders have about high-performance cultures, and why does that belief hold organisations back?
Sebastian Sheppard: “The biggest misconception is that they’re perfect.
“Good high-performance cultures, any elite team, any elite business, any elite sports person, they know they’re trying to achieve the best. They’re always trying to be at their best.
“You must never think that you’ve reached the best because there’s always marginal gains to be made. Initially, you’ll find lots of problems and you fix them, but eventually you get to a point where you think you’re at a good level. F1 is a really good indicator of this.
“Every single team is within about half to one per cent of each other. Everything they do is tilted towards marginal gains.
“Sometimes it takes somebody from outside, as happened to me, to understand that while they might be very good at making cars go fast, are they good at organising themselves around it? Structuring things, empowering people, motivating people, getting the culture right.
“You must always chase perfection. Good high-performance cultures don’t sit on their laurels. You see that in Formula 1. As soon as they win a championship, there’s lots of celebration, but the following week it’s, right, next year’s car.
“Yes, we have champions, we’ve achieved that, but we’re not going to sit on our laurels for too long because there’s the problem next year.”
This exclusive interview with Sebastian Sheppard was conducted by Chris Tompkins of The Motivational Speakers Agency.