Dean Leak

What are the key elements of a high-performance culture?

Culture is a silent tax on performance unless organisations get intentional about understanding what ‘great’ looks like, specific to their DNA. What I’m noticing in many companies at the moment is that they are trapped between two dilemmas: a "Win at all costs" culture driving burnout, fear, and silent disengagement, or "Happy family" cultures prioritising harmony over honesty, breeding complacency and apathy.

Both of these are unhealthy, and we’re interested in helping companies figure out what a healthy, sustainable high-performance culture looks like.

Healthy, high-performance me is about excellence. Human have always craved mastery. Our equation for performance is quite simple:

Performance = Ambition x Clarity – Distraction.

→ Excellence means embracing tension... not avoiding them

→ It means doing the right thing... even if uncomfortable.

→ It means high challenge and unwavering standards.

But exceptional cultures have a shared understanding that seemingly opposite things can co-exist at once:

• Challenge people without breaking them
• Support people without coddling them
• Prioritise a learning mindset while driving performance
• Providing direction while fostering agency
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How can leaders foster effective communication within teams?

One of my favourite quotes is “the biggest illusion in communication is the illusion that communication has taken place”.  

When there’s a void in communication, people fill the void with uncertainty. And uncertainty spreads contagiously between people. There’s a real power, during times of change and uncertainty, in over-communicating to your team. And one of the greatest antidotes to unknowns and uncertainties is transparency. And transparency is a partnership between empathy and knowledge sharing. It can be the bridge between despair and hope. Even if it’s communicating things like:

• We don’t have further updates at this stage and I know that’s frustrating. Here’s a reminder of what we know
• I recognise this is not easy and we’re facing a number of unknowns. Here’s the things we’re trying to figure out… and we’ll update you when we know more
• These are the priorities right now, this is what we’re deprioritising. Please get in touch if you have any questions, we’re open to ideas.

I always say that Clear is kind. Unclear is unkind.

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What role does mental fitness play in leadership?

It plays a huge role. The deepest form of disconnection is the disconnection from ourselves, not others. To lead others, we must first lead ourselves. Change truly starts within.

For me, ‘mental fitness’ is developing the muscle to deal with the challenges we face daily, and turn doubt into fuel for momentum. There’s so much advice out there about ‘stopping negative thoughts’, ‘removing self-doubt’, and ‘killing your imposter syndrome’. But this is what makes us human. These doubts are normal and healthy. And by the way, when has ‘stopping’ negative thoughts ever worked?!

Instead, how can we learn to acknowledge, accept, and, most importantly, choose how we want to be in life (not reacting to our feelings or what people say)?

Often, a little bit of preparation can go a long way in building mental fitness. Perhaps it’s preparation ahead of a 1-2-1, pitch or team discussion:

Here’s a two-minute ‘mental priming’ exercise to prepare for a given situation. Ask yourself:

Who do I want to be in this given situation?

How do I want to respond when things feel uncertain/uneasy?

How do I want to make people feel?

It’s a simple technique for priming your brain rather than being primed by the environment. I’ve used this mindset tool with elite athletes and business leaders.

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Can you share strategies for building resilient teams?

This is a complex one to navigate because I’m unsure there’s a black-and-white answer. However, one thing I look at in teams is the extent to which it’s ‘safe to challenge’.

Resilient teams can respond and recover quickly from setbacks. They are comfortable with challenges and think like sports teams in how they manage performance.

And a huge part of performance is recovery. It’s a hugely underrated quality in the workplace. Right now, the trend is ‘go fast’, ‘speed will win’. Everyone is sprinting and burning out.

Resilience is knowing when to sprint, when to slow down, when to refuel, and, dare say it, rest.

The most resilient teams are those who learn the fastest. And they have the mindset that sometimes, slowing down is speeding up.

So, to be a resilient team. Build in space to debrief team performance and dynamics. Build in space to think critically. Ask each other, with openness, how are we working as a team? What could we start, stop, continue?

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How do you approach cultural transformation in organisations?

We’re delivering some really interesting projects with scale-ups, enterprise, and the public sector. Our ‘performance sprints’ help companies build their culture into a visible ‘Performance Operating System’.

We’re genuinely fascinated by the link between a company’s origin story and their vision of success, and how we can connect the dots between culture, behaviour and performance. We’re less interested in vanity metrics and more interested in genuine performance metrics that build momentum and impact.

We take a human-centred, performance-focused, technology-enabled approach. We do this with a deep sense of care, curiosity, and challenge.  

Our tension mapping tool really helps teams to understand the tensions within the culture. That’s the really fun part. And we make it safe, enjoyable, and engaging to tease out those tensions. Unresolved tension is a real killer in culture. And it’s often misunderstood or avoided. We help surface them, address them, and build into scalable performance systems.