Toto Wolff explains how a difficult childhood molded his Mercedes management style

GrandPrix247 Editor in Chief Paul Velasco recently penned a great read about Wolff and how he has become who he is right now, starting from a tough childhood, going through the ranks as a racing driver, then investor, eventually becoming the boss and a shareholder of one of the most successful teams in F1, and also playing a pivotal role in that success.

Wolff's achievements with Mercedes are well documented, but in a recent interview with The Athletic, the Austrian was asked about lessons he learned from managing people, a crucial skill when running an F1 team, let alone any establishment.

Wolff said: "It’s to understand that performance is all about people. In our industry, you tend to say F1 is about data and science, but data doesn’t make decisions. Humans do. And humans have emotions. Humans have dreams, ambitions, fears, wishes.

"A very famous football manager said to me—he's often asked about the strategy on the football pitch, how he chooses his players—if people would know that the only thing I do is just to take players out for dinner when I feel there’s something they want to talk about.

"That is a lesson I believe is applicable to any company," the Mercedes boss claimed. "To not only think about yourself and all of those factors that I just named before, but to say, 'What is it that my people really think? What do they wish? What do they fear? What are their motivations? What are their ambitions?' And I think, 'What can I do for them?' And the most important thing is to talk and find out what that is.

"First of all, hire the right people," he went on. "What are their values? I hire more based on factors such as humility and integrity, rather than the best nerd in the room.

"Now, competence clearly is a necessity if you’re working in aerodynamics, vehicle dynamics, or engineering. But it is the human beings that make me look good and that make Mercedes look good," Wolff maintained.

But how did he get to know so much about human psychology? Wolff explained it goes back to his childhood. 

He reflected: "Well, I had a very tough upbringing in a financially underprivileged background. My father got ill very early and was not himself anymore. My mother couldn’t cope with it and wasn’t at home.

"So I had to look after my sister from the age of eight or nine. They tried to make ends meet and have us in a private school at the same time. But they couldn’t afford the private school.

"So every day I was confronted with wealthy kids and being taken out of class because our school fees were not paid and sent home in the afternoon with my sister. I had to explain to her on the tram journey home why we were not in school anymore.

"That affected me in two ways," Wolff pointed out. "It affected me because it created that drive that I still have today to overcompensate for the humiliation that I had to suffer from as a child and the trauma that was there. So that’s definitely a driver.

"But on the other hand, for me, it was to understand what I could do to give people a safer environment, and that kind of transcends to every relationship that I have, from my wife and my children and my family, but also to the people that I work with," the 54-year-old concluded.