“Why coaching needs to stop obsessing over leaders and start learning from rugby and Formula 1.”
On a recent watch of Netflix’s Drive to Survive – a documentary series that takes us behind the scenes of Formula 1 racing – I couldn’t help but notice we were being shown two dramatically different leadership styles. One ego-driven and domineering, the other inclusive and encouraging. The contrast is striking -and it perfectly illustrates a broader shift unfolding across performance environments. The shift from “hero leaders” to high-level teamship: a model focused on shared responsibility, mutual accountability, and collective elevation.
At The Preston Associates, we’ve seen this shift first‑hand: coaching impact accelerates dramatically when teams – not just leaders – become the unit of performance. For decades, leadership development in general – and executive coaching in particular – has focused almost entirely on the individual: the charismatic CEO, the visionary founder, the leader positioned at the centre of everything. But today’s operating environment has revealed what elite sport understood long ago: individual excellence often doesn’t scale. Teamship does.
Rugby teams, Formula 1 teams, and high‑performance sports programmes aren’t winning because of a single personality. They’re winning because of integrated, distributed, systemic excellence where everyone leads and everyone raises the standard.
The next competitive advantage is coaching teams like elite sports environments – not just coaching individuals to be heroes.
Rugby’s Lesson: Standards Are Contagious, Not Directed
Every great rugby organisation – from the All Blacks to Ireland to South Africa – operates on the same truth: high standards are collective, peer‑driven, and non‑negotiable.
• Players call out lapses immediately.
• Leaders emerge through behaviour, not hierarchy.
• Accountability is lateral, not vertical.
This is exactly how TPA works with teams: by creating environments where peer accountability – not hierarchy – drives performance uplift. It’s not “nice culture”; it’s relentless, performance critical teamship. A single rugby player shaving 1% off their effort costs the team metres, territory, and momentum. Teams don’t rise or fall because of a coach’s speech. They rise or fall based on the collective discipline and, frankly, peer pressure of shared behaviour.
Formula 1: The End of the ‘Personality Team Principal’
Formula 1 may be the clearest example of performance shifting from personality to system. Over the past two decades, Team Principals have evolved from former drivers and charismatic founders into professional managers and senior engineers operating inside complex manufacturer structures. Today, success is built on:
• Multidisciplinary coordination
• Data driven decision loops
• Distributed leadership
• Hyper-synchronised teams connecting trackside and factory
• An organisational culture where no single individual determines success.
This systems-based approach is also central to how TPA helps executive teams operate – ensuring leadership groups function as integrated, high alignment performance systems.
The dominant teams of the past decade didn’t win because of charismatic principals. They won through the fusion of engineering, strategy, operations, aerodynamics, pit crews, simulation teams and driver feedback – functioning as a single, integrated organism.
The marginal gains revolution in F1didn’t emerge because someone gave a great speech. It emerged because teams created a culture where every micro‑team took ownership for raising standards.
In many top teams, the team principal has become a conductor, not a hero – a facilitator of system performance, not the centre of it.
Elite Teamship: The Missing Arm of Leadership Coaching
Traditional coaching asks:
How do I help this leader be better?
Elite team coaching asks:
How do we help this team raise each other up?
Much of TPA’s work over the last decade has focused on this exact evolution – moving organisations beyond leader-only development and into full-team performance coaching.
This is the shift:
Old model: Leader-centric
The leader inspires, motivates, holds people accountable and is the standard-setter.
New model: Team-centric
The team inspires through behaviour, drives execution, holds each other accountable and creates and maintains the standard.
Rugby calls this a leadership group. F1 calls this cross-functional integration. Business should call this the future.
“In rugby you learn quickly that talent wins moments, but standards win championships. The teams that dominate aren’t waiting for a leader to tell them what good looks like – they hold each other to it every single day.” – Lee Mears, English former professional rugby union player & Executive Coach
Leading by Example Isn’t Noble – It’s the Operating System
In elite sport, “leading by example” isn’t a slogan – it’s the operating system. Athletes and race engineers don’t respond to speeches; they respond to behaviours.
• If one player cuts a corner, the whole squad sees it
• If one mechanic slows their reflex by 0.1 seconds, the pit crew knows it
• If one analyst skimps on simulation review, the race strategy suffers
• Standards are enforced not by bosses, but by peers watching peers
This is what makes elite teamship so powerful: Behaviour spreads faster than direction. TPA’s methodology similarly emphasises behaviour over rhetoric – helping teams identify and hard-wire the critical behaviours that define their collective standard.
The Provocative Truth: Investing in Leaders Without Investing in Teams No Longer Works
• The organisations that win the next decade won’t be those with the strongest leaders – they’ll be those with the strongest teamship.
• Leadership coaching alone can’t produce speed, resilience, innovation or cohesion. Only teamship can.
• The era of the personality leader – like the F1 Team Principal who once dominated headlines – is ending.
• The era of the integrated team, the collective standard, and the distributed leader has begun.
If businesses want to operate like elite sports teams, they need to stop just polishing leaders and start engineering teamship.
Because no single leader – no matter how inspirational – can outperform a rugby squad united around shared behaviour or an F1 team synchronised across hundreds of interdependent decisions.
This is why TPA invests so heavily in teamship – because no single leader can generate the speed, cohesion, or resilience that a well coached team can. The future belongs to organisations who build systems of excellence, not figureheads of excellence.
This is precisely the frontier TPA is helping clients cross: building teams who behave like champions long before the results land.
Christian Cullinane is an Executive Coach at TPA, working with senior leaders and leadership teams navigating strategy, performance, and growth in complex environments. He brings over 30 years of international commercial leadership experience across FTSE-listed, AIM, and private equity–backed technology companies, spanning sectors including financial services, SaaS, telecommunications, energy, aerospace, and manufacturing.
To receive more expert articles from our coaches on a monthly basis you can register to TPA’s Leadership Digest here
