From Five People to a Podium: The Greenfield Talent Profile

What Red Bull Powertrains' first F1 podium tells us about hiring for Battery Belt manufacturing.

Sunday afternoon at the Canadian Grand Prix, Max Verstappen crossed the finish line in third place. He'd been overtaken by Lewis Hamilton six laps from the end, in a final-lap duel that pulled the cameras' attention away from the front of the race. What didn't make most of the highlight reels: that P3 was Red Bull Ford Powertrains' first-ever Formula 1 podium.

Red Bull Powertrains began operations in early 2021 with five people in a small office. No factory, no engine, no race-proven IP. Honda was leaving the sport. Red Bull's choice was to either find another power unit supplier or build their own from scratch, and Christian Horner chose to build.

Four years later, on Sunday, that decision produced a podium.

What happened in between is the part most leadership teams overlook. Ben Hodgkinson, the engine project's Technical Director recruited from Mercedes HPP in early 2021, described the daily reality to Motorsport.com: "Starting from scratch is a very short sentence but the gravity of what that meant took a while to really sink in." Every month, twenty more people started. Roles and responsibilities changed from week to week. One person was designing, ordering, and building parts, until the next week, when another specialist arrived and the design responsibility moved.

Among the first wave of senior recruits Red Bull pulled from Mercedes was Dr. Omid Mostaghimi, who left his role on Mercedes' F1 electronics team to become Head of Powertrains Electronics and ERS. He posted on LinkedIn: "For a startup organisation developing Red Bull's first ever Formula 1 power unit, this is a significant milestone." His framing matters. Even now, at 700 people and a podium on the resume, he calls it a startup.

By 2025, the headcount was over 400. By 2026, it's around 700. Most of them were recruited from rival F1 operations, Mercedes, Honda, AVL, Ford, and others. Toto Wolff acknowledged in 2021 that Red Bull approached about 100 of his Mercedes HPP staff and got roughly 15 in the first wave. A 2024 push brought another 220 specialists across in a single year.

The parallel to what's happening across the Battery Belt right now is structural, not metaphorical.

The Battery Belt Is Running the Same Play, at a Much Larger Scale, Across a Dozen Plants at Once

Drive Interstate 77 between Charlotte and Columbia and you pass the future site of Scout Motors' 1,100-acre, $2 billion electric vehicle production facility in Blythewood, South Carolina. Mechanical completion is closing in on five million square feet of buildings. Equipment installation is underway. As of April 21, Scout Motors Inc. had hired roughly 600 employees in South Carolina and 1,400 company-wide, with another 200 to 300 expected to be hired this year. The plan calls for 4,000 direct manufacturing jobs at Blythewood at full ramp, plus 1,200 at the Charlotte headquarters, plus a 1,000-person on-site supplier park. Approximately 17,000 people have expressed interest in the production jobs through Scout's website. Production is targeted for 2027.

Drive a little further north and you reach Liberty, North Carolina, where Toyota Battery Manufacturing NC was confirmed earlier this year as the largest Toyota battery production site globally, $13.9 billion in committed investment.

Drive east and you find AESC US in Columbia (Mercedes, BMW, and Renault customers), Vulcan Elements in Benson, North Carolina ($918 million rare earth magnet facility), Redwood Materials' newly operational closed-loop battery recycling plant in South Carolina ($3.5 billion), and Wolfspeed's Siler City silicon carbide gigafactory ramping into full production.

The pattern Red Bull Powertrains navigated is the same shape, just bigger and across more sites simultaneously. The International Energy Agency's 2026 Global EV Outlook noted that "new entrants typically need more time to ramp up than established manufacturers... and even experienced firms face slower ramp-up in regions with less mature battery industries, notably because of the lower availability of specialized workforce." The Center for Automotive Research has documented for years that 80 to 82 percent of EV-related employers report shortages of skilled local candidates. Imperial College London's Billy Wu has projected that between 300,000 and 1.4 million battery jobs will need to be filled globally by 2030.

What the headlines miss is that the talent challenge isn't only about volume. It's about whether the people being hired into greenfield plants have the specific talent profile that thrives in the conditions a greenfield actually creates.

From the talent acquisition seat in Battery Belt manufacturing, that's the question driving every senior search right now.

What the Greenfield Talent Profile Actually Looks Like

Greenfield isn't the same problem as running a mature plant.

The systems don't exist yet. The processes are being invented. Decisions get made daily with incomplete information. The org chart changes monthly. The person designing the production line is also the person interviewing the next hire to staff it. Roles overlap, authority is undefined, and the team being built today is partially staffed by people who will be peers tomorrow and subordinates the month after, once enough specialists arrive that the structure begins to settle.

That environment rewards a specific cognitive and behavioral profile. It punishes another.

Research from project management literature has been consistent on the underlying dimension that predicts success in this kind of environment. A 2025 longitudinal study by Peter O'Connor and colleagues, published in the Project Management Journal, tracked tolerance of ambiguity in 275 project managers across four weeks and found that fluctuations in ambiguity tolerance were significantly associated with positive mood, adaptive performance, and project progress. Earlier work from the same group established that tolerance of ambiguity at work predicts leadership effectiveness, job performance, and creativity. The dimension is measurable. It's stable enough to assess at the hiring stage. And it predicts outcomes specifically in environments where the work itself is undefined when the leader walks in.

From the search seat, the four traits that consistently distinguish successful greenfield leaders from leaders who quietly disengage by month four are these:

Ambiguity as Energy, Not Stress

The leaders who thrive in greenfield don't merely tolerate the ambiguity, they're energized by it. They find the absence of established process to be the interesting part of the work, not the painful part. Validated behavioral assessment data on flexibility and decision-making style is one of the more reliable predictors of this trait at the executive level, sitting underneath the "experience" markers that traditional searches default to.

Org-Builder Mindset, Not Org-Inheritor Mindset

Greenfield leaders want to design the organization, not inherit one. They see "the team I'm building" as part of the product, not as a prerequisite to doing the work. Hodgkinson's framing at Red Bull Powertrains was exactly this: he wasn't just building an engine, he was building the organization that would build the engine.

Comfort with Undefined Authority and Role Fluidity

Job descriptions in greenfield environments are aspirational, not operational. The Plant Manager who joins on Monday may be running an organization of 50 people; by month six, the organization is 200 people and the reporting lines have rewritten themselves twice. The leaders who succeed treat the role as something to be co-defined with the work, not something to be claimed and defended.

Self-Selection Toward Bold Projects

Hodgkinson's most quoted line, "if you create a really bold and audacious project, it only attracts bold and audacious people. The cautious ones stay put," is the talent acquisition reality of every greenfield build I'm watching. The Battery Belt is currently the most talent-magnetic manufacturing region in the United States for exactly that reason. Senior operators who would never have considered relocation are taking calls for plants that didn't exist 18 months ago. The audacious ones come because the project is audacious. The cautious ones stay where the org chart is already drawn.

Vistaprint Australia's greenfield manufacturing launch in 2010, which went on to become the youngest enterprise ever to win Shingo Bronze recognition in 2014, was built on this same principle. Their first lesson learned was titled, simply, "Recruit for Mindset." They looked for open minds, self-criticism, and humility. They explicitly de-emphasized the surface markers of "experience" in favor of underlying disposition.

These traits are not exotic. They're measurable. They're assessable in a structured behavioral interview combined with a validated psychometric. And they are systematically under-weighted in most search processes for greenfield leadership roles.

The Failure Mode Most Companies Repeat

Most companies hiring for greenfield default to looking for experienced operators from established plants. The instinct is reasonable. The risk feels lower. The candidate's resume reads like a confidence-builder for the board.

Then the candidate joins the greenfield, and the failure pattern shows up in the first 180 days.

The iFactory greenfield consulting framework names this directly: "Workforce readiness, not availability, is what makes or breaks ramp-up. Most greenfield projects struggle because hiring happens too late, role clarity is weak, and productivity assumptions are unrealistic." The "post go-live churn" — new hires leaving within 90 days — is a documented failure mode with measurable cost.

What's happening underneath is a mismatch between the senior leader's operating model and the environment they walked into. The leader who built their career running a mature plant has internalized assumptions about role boundaries, decision rights, process maturity, and team stability that don't yet exist in greenfield. Their first instinct is often to impose those structures, and the team that's already there resists, because the structures aren't ready to support the work.

By month six, two things have happened. The leader has either reshaped themselves around the reality (rare, because the underlying disposition is hard to change quickly) or has begun to disengage. The technical staff who can see the mismatch start to look for other roles. Productivity targets slip. The ramp curve flattens.

By month twelve, the search has been reopened. The bad-hire cost at the senior leadership level in advanced manufacturing, including search costs, lost productivity, team turnover, and ramp delay, runs comfortably into seven figures. In a greenfield environment where speed-to-production is itself a competitive variable, the cost is usually higher than that number captures.

The failure mode is preventable. It requires the search process to assess for greenfield-specific traits explicitly, not assume them. That's a different methodology than most internal HR teams are set up to run.

The Plants That Get This Right Will Separate Visibly from the Plants That Don't

Red Bull Powertrains' first F1 podium on Sunday is proof that the greenfield model works when the talent strategy matches the build shape. Scout Motors Blythewood, Toyota Battery NC Liberty, AESC Columbia, Vulcan Elements Benson, Redwood Materials in South Carolina, and Wolfspeed Siler City are running variations of the same play. Some will get the talent strategy right. Some won't. The difference will be visible by mid-2027, when the production curves of the plants that hired well start to separate from the curves of the plants that didn't.

The thesis from the search seat is straightforward. The greenfield talent profile is a distinct, measurable competency set. It overlaps with the mature-plant leadership profile, but it isn't identical. The leaders who thrive in greenfield self-select toward bold projects, treat ambiguity as energy, want to design the org rather than inherit it, and accept that authority will be undefined for the first eighteen months of the work. Most companies hiring for greenfield default to looking for the wrong profile. The plants that succeed don't.

Until next time, watch what's being built. The Southeast has never looked like this before.