There are some people whose name becomes almost synonymous with success.
In Formula One, Adrian Newey is one of them.
Williams. McLaren. Red Bull. Championship winning cars and a reputation as one of the greatest designers the sport has ever seen.
So, when Aston Martin recruited him, expectations were understandably enormous.
Surely, you hire someone with that track record and success follows?
Except it hasn’t. At least, not yet.
Aston Martin’s 2026 season started badly, and Newey has spoken openly about some of the challenges he found within the organisation, including tools, processes and different parts of the business not yet working as one cohesive unit.
Newey hasn’t suddenly forgotten how to design racing cars.
Which got me thinking about something I have seen many times during more than 30 years in recruitment.
Is performance portable?
We’ve probably all met them.
Their CV is excellent. Their interview is even better. They’ve transformed a site, built a high performing team, improved efficiency or led major change.
Everyone leaves the interview thinking:
“We need to get this person.”
They join.
Three months pass. Then six.
And somehow, it isn’t quite happening.
“They’re not having the impact we expected.”
“Maybe they’re not the right fit.”
“Did we get this one wrong?”
Sometimes, of course, we did. Recruitment isn’t an exact science.
But before reaching that conclusion, perhaps we need to ask a different question:
What made that person brilliant in the first place?
When someone changes organisation, their experience comes with them.
But their team doesn’t. Neither does the environment in which they previously succeeded.
Imagine recruiting a Manufacturing Director who has transformed their current site.
Productivity improved. Absence reduced. OTIF increased. Engagement improved.
Fantastic.
But what sat behind those results?
What team did they inherit? How much investment was available? What authority did they have? What systems were already in place? How long did the transformation take?
Move that same person into a completely different environment and we can’t automatically expect the same performance.
We can recruit someone’s capability. We can’t import the conditions that helped them succeed.
Manufacturing businesses should understand this better than most.
Take a high performing component from one system and put it into another and you wouldn’t automatically assume it will perform identically.
You’d consider how it integrates and what surrounds it.
Yet sometimes we recruit people as though they are plug and play.
Particularly senior people.
We’ve paid a good salary. We’ve hired someone with an impressive track record.
Now perform.
But relationships, credibility and understanding the unwritten culture of a business take time.
Newey himself said in 2025 that getting Aston Martin’s organisation and tools where they needed to be was probably a two year project.
How does that compare with the time we give our own hires before deciding whether they’re working?
I don’t think there is a magic number, and giving someone more time shouldn’t become an excuse for poor performance.
But if a good person appears to be struggling, I think we need to separate four things:
Capability: Can they actually do the job?
Culture: Can they work effectively with the people, behaviours and values of this organisation?
Environment: Do they have the team, tools, authority and support they need?
Time: Have they genuinely had enough opportunity to understand the business and make an impact?
Because these are very different problems.
And sometimes the answer will be that we hired the wrong person.
Sometimes it won’t.
Can we know whether someone’s performance will travel before they join us?
Never completely. But I think we can get much better at assessing it.
Understand the environment they succeeded in
Test adaptability, not just experience
Be honest about your own business
That’s not putting candidates off. It’s giving both sides the opportunity to decide whether this is an environment in which they can succeed.
Behavioural profiling, meeting future colleagues and involving different people in the recruitment process can all help us understand that fit. None should make the decision for us, but they can help us ask better questions.
Understand where someone has succeeded. Understand whether they can adapt. And be honest about where you’re asking them to succeed next.
Because the aim isn’t to recruit someone who has been brilliant somewhere else, it’s to understand whether they can be brilliant in your organisation.
