The strength of culture: how it drives change and challenges the everyday

To articulate why ‘culture starts at home’, I’ve always liked the example of a gardener’s garden. Look around a professional gardener’s garden and listen as they tell you what’s important to them in their business and how they approach their craft. You’ll get a pretty good feel for whether they live the culture they’re describing. We all know how easy it can be to fall into the trap of doing for others what you don’t prioritise doing for yourself.

When you look around at Leading Edge Performance, you see examples of a strong culture. We’re thrilled to have recently celebrated 10-year anniversaries with some of our Team Coaches. And people who’ve just joined have described being told about our culture and then experiencing it so authentically in their first interactions with the team.

In a role where we support culture for our clients, we need to be clear on our own and ask ourselves are we congruent? It’s not about needing to be; it’s about wanting to be. The evidence of longevity of our people along with new team members being able to comfortably play back our culture after just a short while with us is humbling – and it tells me we are true to our culture.

Strengthening culture through paradox

We’re big fans of using paradox to challenge ourselves to push for the best. The paradoxical nature of our cultural statements makes them strong: they spark emotion, provoke reaction, and help create an understanding of what differentiates us.

At Leading Edge Performance, we have a shared passion and energy in a culture we’ve defined as Together, we care fiercely, hunt for the edge, and are curious warriors. These statements give us a clear sense of who we want to show up as – for ourselves, for each other and for our clients. It’s important for a well-embedded culture to be seen and experienced everywhere.

Being curious to understand on a deeper level

Take curious warrior as an example. We believe you earn your right to be a warrior with a client. It’s something our teams build up to with their genuine curiosity to understand a client’s context.

Clients invite us into their spaces for support and impact. We need to be brave enough to swim against the tide, hold up a mirror, and be the warrior, working hard to hold both ends of the tension and connect with both sides.

This is also true internally at Leading Edge Performance. We would expect anyone in the team to be a curious warrior and seek to understand a situation and why someone might have done something in the way they did.

As in many organisations, we try to keep the hierarchy as flat as possible. In reality, it will always be a little harder for someone new to the team or a more junior person to find the confidence to query or challenge. We try to create a psychologically safe space and encourage this, recognising that everyone’s warrior looks different. It’s brilliant when I hear “I’m going to have a warrior moment”, as someone uses cultural language to signpost their challenge.

Caring in a big way

When we say we care fiercely – another seeming paradox – we mean we’re big in how we care for our clients and our people. We care strongly about making a positive impact, and our fierceness always comes from a good place.

This helps us to reach business decisions internally as well. In commercial negotiations, for example, we ask ourselves what our clients will care fiercely about (what the client will need from us). It’s equally important to be clear what we care fiercely about – what’s important to us as a business (what we’ll need from the client).

The paradox of being able to care in a way that’s fierce supports how we ask questions of each other. If we hear the fierceness from someone but not the caring, we’ll say so. This can lead to better understanding all round about what’s important to that person and where they’re coming from. It works the other way, too. It’s not enough to care in a passive way. We really want to see the team being proactive and challenging about the things that really matter to them.

Seeking the extra 1%

Hunt for the edge constantly prompts us to consider is there further we can go? As a performance-based business, we’re always thinking about impact on performance, asking ourselves what are the things that will shift the dial and how can we unleash human performance to change the game?

When an elite athlete has the potential to be world class, we owe it to them to hunt for the edge and show them what would demonstrate that ‘edge’. For business clients, we want every event, programme and intervention of any kind to have that extra 1% – that marginal gain.

We’re proud to hunt for it, both with clients and among ourselves, and we’re uniquely placed to find it, with our Human Intelligence for Performance Specialists allowing us to dive deeper and gain much greater insight. We don’t want to accept the ordinary and will keep looking until we find that extra 'unlocker'. It can sometimes feel hard when your work is scrutinised for that extra edge, but it’s OK if we’re all hunting for that bit more – and it shouldn’t stop us looking.

Our cultural approach is “live it, don’t laminate it”. It’s how we recruit and develop our people, shape our business, drive change for our clients and measure our impact.

When I chat to attendees at our client events and hear our three cultural statements coming through in what they’re saying – not necessarily the exact words but the sentiment behind them – I know we’re living our culture. I know we’ve cared fiercely, hunted for the edge and been curious warriors. And I know our clients have felt the positive impact of how we’ve set out to change their game.

I'm already excited to see how our team continues to embrace and flourish with this cultural intent in 2025.

Patrick Marr

Managing Director, Leading Edge Performance

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