Leadership Lessons from Cars: What a Toddler's Favorite Movie Taught Me About Leading Engineering Teams

My almost-two-year-old is, to put it mildly, obsessed with the Cars movies. We’re talking daily rewatches. Multiple per day on weekends. The soundtrack lives rent-free in my head. I can quote Mater in my sleep.

But somewhere around the fiftieth viewing, something interesting started happening. I stopped just hearing the engine sounds and started hearing the lessons. The themes baked into these movies are surprisingly sharp, and a lot of them map almost perfectly onto the realities of leading engineering teams in a high-stakes environment.

I lead engineering teams in fintech, and I’ve found myself referencing these movies in my head more often than I’d like to admit. So I figured I’d write it down. Here are the leadership lessons I’ve pulled from the Cars trilogy, one movie at a time.

Cars (2006): The Cost of the One-Man Show

Lightning McQueen enters the first movie as a hotshot rookie fast, talented, and absolutely insufferable. He thinks he doesn’t need a pit crew. He burns through them so fast they start quitting on him mid-season. He dismisses The King, a literal racing legend, as someone he doesn’t need to listen to. He’s the star, and that’s all that matters.

And then it costs him. His arrogance and misjudgment lead to a three-way tie at the season finale, forcing a tiebreaker race in California. On the way there, he runs his transport rig (Mack) into the ground from sheer impatience, gets lost, and ends up stranded in a forgotten little town called Radiator Springs where, after wrecking the main road, he’s sentenced to repave it.

That’s where the actual growth happens.

The leadership takeaways from movie one:

Talent without humility is a ceiling, not a floor. I’ve seen this play out so many times in engineering. The brilliant individual contributor who refuses to collaborate, who treats code review as personal attacks, who burns through teammates, they hit a wall. Always. Talent gets you the seat. Humility is what lets you keep it and grow into something bigger.
Your team isn’t a luxury. It’s the actual job. McQueen’s pit crews kept quitting because he treated them like accessories instead of partners. In engineering leadership, the moment you start thinking your team is there to execute your vision instead of build something together, you’ve already lost them. Your engineers, your PMs, your designers, they’re not in service of you. You’re all in service of the win.
The best mentors don’t always look the part. Doc Hudson turns out to be a racing legend himself, hiding in plain sight. McQueen almost misses the most valuable mentor of his career because he was too full of himself to recognize wisdom when it didn’t show up with a flashy title. Pay attention to the quiet ones in your career. They usually know the most.

Cars 2 (2011): Don’t Underestimate Anyone

Movie two takes a sharp turn by promoting Tow Mater, the goofy, rusty tow truck into a co-lead. He gets mistaken for a top American spy, ends up entangled in an international espionage plot, and (despite all odds) helps crack a major investigation alongside British intelligence.

Side note: the introduction scene where Finn McMissile (British intelligence) is being introduced to Tow Mater “average intelligence” gets me every single time. Comedy gold.

But underneath the humor, there’s a real lesson here.

The leadership takeaways from movie two:

Never underestimate anyone on your team. Mater is the last person anyone would peg as a hero. He doesn’t fit the mold. He’s not polished. He’s not credentialed. And yet he’s the one who sees what everyone else misses. I’ve seen this in engineering teams too, the quiet engineer in the corner who turns out to have the deepest understanding of the legacy system. The junior dev whose “naive” question reframes the entire problem. Listen to everyone. The signal often comes from where you’re not looking.
Diverse perspectives solve problems that homogeneous teams can’t. The reason Mater is effective isn’t despite his difference from everyone else, it’s because of it. He thinks differently. He notices different things. Strong teams have a mix of backgrounds, experiences, and ways of thinking. Leaders who optimize for “culture fit” too aggressively end up with teams that all see the same blind spots.
Step outside your comfort zone, together. By the end of the movie, McQueen and his crew agree to race in international tournaments on totally unfamiliar courses. That’s a big deal. As a leader, you’re going to have to repeatedly ask your team to take on things they haven’t done before, new tech, new domains, new scale. The way you do it matters. McQueen doesn’t push his team off a cliff. He goes with them.

Cars 3 (2017): When Your Job Becomes Lifting Others Up

This is the movie that hit me hardest as a manager.

McQueen, now a veteran, is being outpaced by a new generation of faster, tech-driven race cars. He struggles. He fails. He realizes slowly, painfully that his own racing days are winding down. The story isn’t about him making one more comeback. It’s about him recognizing that his next chapter isn’t about his talent at all. It’s about Cruz Ramirez.

Cruz is a trainer with raw racing potential nobody including Cruz herself believes in. McQueen almost misses it. He treats her dismissively at first. But eventually, he sees what she’s capable of, and in the climactic race, he makes a decision that genuinely moved me: he pulls out and puts Cruz in. He becomes her crew chief.

He stops being the racer. He becomes the leader.

The leadership takeaways from movie three:

Personal talent will only take you so far. This one is humbling. Whatever made you successful as an individual contributor your coding chops, your domain expertise, your ability to grind through hard problems eventually stops being enough. Leadership is a different game with different rules. The sooner you accept that, the sooner you actually grow into it.
Your job is to build the next generation. I think about this constantly. The most important work I do as an engineering manager isn’t shipping features, it’s developing the engineers on my team into the leaders, architects, and senior ICs they’re going to become. If, five years from now, the people I worked with aren’t dramatically more capable than they were when I met them, I failed. McQueen gets this in the end. The win isn’t his win anymore. It’s Cruz’s.
Coaching means seeing potential people don’t see in themselves. Cruz didn’t believe she could race. McQueen had to convince her, through small wins, through patience, through showing up. That’s most of coaching, honestly. Believing in someone visibly and persistently until they start to believe in themselves.
Letting go is the final test of leadership. McQueen literally hands over the wheel. He could have insisted on running the race himself. He could have made it about his own legacy. Instead, he stepped aside. The hardest part of leading is recognizing the moments when not leading, when stepping back, handing it off, getting out of the way, is the real leadership move.

A Few More Lessons Hiding in the Background

A handful of smaller themes worth mentioning:

Radiator Springs is a culture lesson. The town has its own identity, its own characters, its own warmth. McQueen doesn’t try to remake it. He invests in it. Great leaders don’t import a culture from somewhere else, they understand and amplify what’s already there.
Sally’s role is underrated. She’s the voice of perspective throughout the franchise, calling McQueen on his blind spots, advocating for the town, pushing him to be better. Every leader needs a Sally. Someone who tells you the truth, kindly but firmly, when no one else will.

What I Took Away (Beyond the Soundtrack)

Watching these movies on a loop with my toddler, I expected to lose brain cells. Instead, I found myself nodding along to leadership themes I’ve spent the last decade trying to internalize: humility, team, mentorship, empathy, succession planning.

It’s a good reminder that wisdom shows up in unexpected places. Sometimes it’s a Harvard Business Review article. Sometimes it’s a Pixar movie about anthropomorphic race cars that your two-year-old won’t stop watching.

I’m curious!! Am I missing any? If you’ve watched these movies (and let’s be honest, most parents have, multiple times over), drop a comment with the leadership lesson that stuck with you.

And if you haven’t watched them yet: do. Preferably with a toddler on your lap. Highly recommend.

Ka-chow. 🏎️