What Formula One Can Teach Leaders About Sustainable Performance

For nearly three decades, Hintsa Performance has helped some of the world's top Formula One drivers perform at their best. Under the leadership of CEO Annastiina Hintsa, the organization has expanded those lessons beyond the racetrack, working with leaders around the world to redefine what high performance really means.

In this interview, Hintsa explains why sustainable performance begins with identity and purpose, why knowledge rarely translates into action, and what leaders risk when they try to navigate AI transformation from a state of chronic exhaustion.

I am a second-generation entrepreneur. Hintsa Performance was founded by my father, who began working with Formula One driver Mika Häkkinen in 1996. Today, we're approaching our 30-year anniversary, which is really cool.

Performance has been part of my life for as long as I can remember. I worked with my father early in my career, then went on to do my own thing. I did everything from micro entrepreneurs in Latin America to McKinsey for four years. I rejoined the business in 2016 when my father was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. After he passed away, I had the privilege of continuing his mission.

The biggest difference in how we think about performance is that we don't see it as maximizing output at all costs. We define performance through the lens of sustainability. So, our driving concern is: How do we make human performance sustainable over time? This often starts with living a better life, which leads to better performance, and that is a hard-learned lesson for many of us.

There are a surprising number of things that transcend, and there are a few key parts. The first one is your core beliefs and how you define success for yourself. What does a good life, and good performance mean to you? If you don't start with that definition, the whole thing falls flat.

For a Formula One driver, it's pretty simple. You want to be a world champion, and then you break it down from there: what does it mean for me this year in terms of points or race performance on a particular track? What are the areas of confidence that I need to improve? In business, it's sometimes a bit more complex because the equation that you're optimizing for is not necessarily as clear cut, even though you might be pretty good at defining your KPIs and OKRs for any given quarter. A leader is always balancing professional ambitions with family, relationships, health, and personal fulfillment—all of this needs to be considered individually to sustain high performance over the long term.

He always started with the same three questions.

1. Do you know who you really are? For drivers, he would ask, "Who are you when you're no longer a Formula One driver?" So, he was really focusing on identity. The same questions apply to leaders. Who are you when titles and roles are stripped away? What are your values? Your strengths? Who are the people that matter most to you?
2. Do you know what you want? This is fundamentally a question about purpose. How do you define success for yourself rather than accepting someone else's definition?
3. Are you in control of your life? This is a very challenging question since we live in such uncertain times. But it urges them to think: What are the things that you still can control and influence? And what are the things you need to let go of?

This is one of my favorite topics. We see the knowledge to action gap everywhere. We have almost too much information, and some of it is conflicting. It’s exhausting. Also holding us back are a few tenacious myths that we tend to maintain around behavior change. One of them is that people lack motivation. The reality is that data shows clearly that people are exceptionally motivated to live a better life, holistically speaking. I'll give you an example of an executive. He wanted to start strength training, so he made the goal to add two sessions a week. But just setting goals outside of one’s interests is often futile, so we link it to their identity. In this case, the executive loves sailing, so we said, ‘You still want to be able to sail, be able to manage and maneuver the boat, and be able to lift the sails yourself, and that's what you need to strengthen.” People do not lack motivation if you tie the goal to something that is meaningful to them personally.

The second myth is that change comes down to willpower. You see that colleague who always gets up at 6 a.m., goes for a run, and takes the kids to school before you've had your first coffee, and you think it must be something about their self-control. But it’s really about modifying your environment, creating a system that makes those good habits easy and bad habits a bit harder.

Then the third myth is that habits form quickly. Many people believe it takes 21 days, but research suggests it’s more like 66 days, and it depends on how often a behavior is repeated, how complex it is, where it is additive, or if it takes a level of reconfiguring. Often people think, “I'm just going to do this for 21 days,” and then they face a setback and are disheartened by it. What we need to do is recognize that it takes a longer time to establish something that will last, and you need to be merciful with yourself, give yourself a little bit of slack and grace. Setbacks are a part of that journey. 

High performers live with intense external pressure—they feel as though they are in a constant performance evaluation with shareholders, stakeholders, customers, teams, and media. But often the harshest criticism comes from within. The starting point is returning to those foundational questions about identity and purpose. When your entire sense of self is tied to performance outcomes, every setback feels existential. But when you have a broader understanding of who you are and what matters most, you create more space for perspective and self-compassion.

Leaders have a cascading impact on their organizations and on the people around them (we all have a cascading impact on the people around us). Emotions are contagious and so are behaviors. When leaders role model behaviors, the effects manifest exponentially among their followers. We've seen this repeatedly in many large organizations: When change is not just posited but actually demonstrated from the top, it has a tangible, multiplying effect. 

I'm looking at AI both optimistically and with a little bit of caution. The reason for that is there is this incredible promise of automating all the mundane work to focus on the complex work—on the relationships and the unique human capabilities. At the same time, there is this underbelly to consider where if you only focus on the hard things, it's quite cognitively taxing, and if you're only using AI, you’re accumulating cognitive debt. You're basically outsourcing cognitive energy, and we can start seeing some “use it or lose it” phenomena happening in your brain. 

If you think of the challenge from a leadership point of view, many leaders are trying to navigate AI transformation from this backdrop of chronic stress and fatigue. They're emerging from years of crisis, uncertainty, and disruption. They're being asked to master new technologies while already running on depleted reserves.

Being aware of this is key. This is the time when it's even more important to be looking at what sustainable performance means for you. How do you create a little bit more headspace or capacity or buffer for yourself, so that you can start adapting?

If you take Formula One as an example, we talk a lot about periodization: the alternation between periods of high-intensity work and deliberate recovery. Formula One drivers have adopted this sustainable performance cycle. They have a preseason, which is testing, gearing up, and training. Then they have race weekends, which are peak performance moments, when the driver and the entire team are fully on. Afterwards, they have days and weeks of deliberate recovery.

Drivers have institutionalized this cycle to the point that during the summer shutdown, if you walk into the factory, your team gets fined. They realized they can’t just have a “make time for recovery” mantra. Recovery has to be part of the system. Otherwise, the system breaks. In our workshops with leaders, we often see the opposite: they are in constant execution mode. We can’t clearly carve out the moments of peak performance (our race weekends or race days) and protect and prepare for them. Instead, we all get stuck in the middle gear: not really recovering and not performing at our peak. That’s a systemic issue, not just an individual one. Change needs to be embedded in the system.

At some point, we have to stop treating crisis as temporary. Many leaders have spent years moving from one disruption to the next—the pandemic, economic uncertainty, geopolitical instability, and technological transformation. We need to create an operating model for ourselves and our businesses that can sustain this new normal and be resilient. 

Part of that requires reframing stress. Stress isn’t always negative. In many situations, it enhances performance. The challenge emerges when stress becomes chronic and recovery disappears. Performance requires both. Helping leaders recognize this up front and to rebuild or stay true to who they are and what they want to be is the development path that mitigates burnout and disappointment.