Dean Leak: Two Hours a Year on the Ice, What It Really Takes to Win Well

About 15 years ago, the people running British skeleton set themselves a goal that looked faintly ridiculous. They wanted Great Britain to become the best nation in the world at the sport, and then the best winter nation across every winter sport. There was no skeleton facility in the UK, and because there was no facility, there were no athletes. The only option was a track overseas that the team could use around 30 times a year. And because the G-force of travelling head-first down the ice at more than 100 miles an hour is so punishing, athletes could only manage three runs a day.

"If you do the maths, they're only actually training two hours per year on the track," says high-performance coach Dean Leak. "How on earth are they gonna become a world-leading nation?"

They did, winning medals across multiple Olympics. What fascinates Leak is how. Speaking on stage with ActionCOACH's James Vincent, he is clear that the people behind the skeleton programme never sat down and said, "Let's just try and build a good culture here." They got obsessive about one question instead: what does it take to win? That distinction sits at the heart of everything Leak teaches. High performance comes from getting specific about the few things that decide success, then building an environment where people can focus, disagree honestly and learn faster than anyone else.

Why the Word "Culture" Gets in the Way of High Performance

For someone whose work is all about improving how organisations perform, Leak opened with an unexpected confession. "I kind of think the word culture is just a little bit rubbish."

His scepticism comes from experience. His career began in elite sport around 2008, when government investment poured into Olympic programmes. He has since coached Olympic champions including Jade Jones and Joe Clarke, was trained by Steve Peters in Peters' first group, and has worked with the UK special forces and MI5. Today he develops high-performance teams for organisations such as IBM, L'Oréal, Microsoft and Rolls-Royce.

In business after business, he hears the same vocabulary: culture, psychological safety, resilience. When he asks leaders what they mean, the answers tend to be vague and sweeping. "Our organisation lacks accountability." "It doesn't have any sense of resilience." Those universal claims then become the justification for a culture change programme. Yet when Leak looks at what is actually happening day to day, the behaviour he sees often bears little resemblance to the description. There is rarely one cause, either.

His answer is to drop the abstractions and highlight specific standards and behaviours, then get really focused on them.

There is a second reason for his caution. As British sport racked up gold medals, the language around it hardened. Sport became "no compromise" and environments drifted towards winning at all costs, with high levels of cortisol, burnout and people who never gave their best. Leak is in no doubt that sport, business and government are all in it to win. The question that obsesses him is "how do you win well?" How do you create performance that lasts, and an environment rich enough in learning that people thrive in it?

Finding Your Key Determinants: Lessons from Skeleton and Taekwondo

Back to skeleton. Without the resources for a facility that would have cost around 30 million, the coaches studied who becomes the fastest athlete on the planet. The answer was the start. So they built a five-metre dry sprint track in Bath and set about perfecting the first five seconds. "It's the 80/20 rule," Leak explains. "They knew that if they get the first five seconds right, they are going to dominate in the sport."

Every decision flowed from that. If the start mattered most, they needed the fastest sprinters. So they built a talent transfer programme with GB Athletics, recruiting athletes who might run the 100 metres in 10.2 seconds rather than 9.8, which turned out to be good enough. They partnered with BAE Systems and defence experts to refine the technology. The mantra became "constraints breed resourcefulness".

"It isn't always who has the most money or the best talent or the brightest minds," Leak says. "It's how you create focus in people and build that kind of camaraderie so that we get the best out in terms of how we learn."

One small story captures the spirit of it. For years, skeleton athletes sprinted at the start holding the sled with two hands. Coach Mark Wood suspected there was a quicker way and took the problem to his team. One of the athletes suggested running with one hand on the sled, and that idea rippled across the sport.

The same thinking shaped Leak's own work in Olympic taekwondo. Working with UK Sport's performance director, he helped create Fighting Chance, a talent search that recruited fighters from MMA, kickboxing and karate who had the raw fighting spirit and some technical ability. Jade Jones, who went on to become a double Olympic gold medallist, came through that programme.

What set Jones apart, Leak says, is that her coaches did not try to change her. She arrived from kickboxing with a devastating front foot and a nickname to match: the Headhunter. Rather than reshaping her into a traditional Korean-style martial artist, they told her, "We're gonna make your front foot like a super weapon so that nobody can get near you." Watch the footage and most of her wins come from that right leg.

For business owners, the parallel is direct. Get clear on what it takes to win, then find your super strengths and make them spectacular. Leak admits he has fallen into the opposite trap himself. "I've made this mistake many times. You try to be someone for everyone rather than having a real clear focus."

Performance Equals Ambition Minus Distraction

Focus is where Leak's own formula comes in: performance equals ambition minus distraction. Most businesses are reasonably good at deciding their priorities. Far fewer ask the harder question of what they need to stop doing. "If you remove the friction, you create space to do the things that really matter," he says.

He puts it bluntly. A competent team makes a good priority list. A super competent team also makes a de-prioritisation list. Too many choices lead to no decisions at all, and humans are far better at adding things than taking them away. So when a team commits to new priorities, Leak asks how they will create the space. What will they stop, get rid of or minimise? That, he says, is where you find "tensions that I think are really healthy".

On how many priorities to hold, Leak points to Molly Graham, a former Meta executive and COO, who argues that every organisation, team and individual should have no more than three, and everything else is a distraction. The challenge set for listeners: try three priorities and three de-priorities for a week.

Pre-Mortems and Hot Debriefs: What Special Forces and MI5 Do Well

If the skeleton story shows the value of knowing what it takes to win, Leak is just as clear that the answer keeps moving. "As soon as you stand still, things have already moved on." What keeps a team ahead is constant iteration, and sport does this through two habits: the pre-mortem, where you imagine both success and failure before an event, and the debrief afterwards.

The debrief is the one he has found most effective. "It sounds really simple, but just having those hot debriefs after events or interactions with your employees or situations that you're in, just debriefing it to actually capture that learning."

He has seen the special forces and MI5 do this "spectacularly well". Part of what makes it work is a willingness to talk about failure. "We often have this idea that we've got to be positive, when actually when you face the reality, things go wrong." Anything that reduces uncertainty, or removes unnecessary friction through upfront conversations about what could go wrong, means people can react in a healthy way when it happens.

So why do so few businesses bother? Leak suspects it is partly because talking about what might go wrong feels negative, and partly shame, as if admitting risk means "we haven't got our stuff together". There is a deeper issue too. Business is obsessed with strategy, metrics and performance, and pays far less attention to human dynamics. Any group of people is inherently dysfunctional at the start, with silos, confusion and conflict avoidance. Without intention, debriefs feel like a waste of time.

Leak hears complaints about "poor meeting culture" constantly. When he investigates, the real problem is usually a lack of clarity about what is expected, what the priorities are and where the decision-making guardrails sit. "There's a relationship between trust and agency," he says, "and that relationship is clarity."

Toxic Politeness, Toxic Fighting and the Healthy Conflict in Between

Here Leak makes his most provocative point. After years of win-at-all-costs environments, he believes many organisations have overcorrected into an overfocus on employee satisfaction and engagement. When he worked with L'Oréal on its Race to Win strategy, one of the company's stated values was "We're a family". He sees this across business, with the emphasis on happiness and harmony. Start there, he warns, and it can lead to all sorts of unintended consequences.

On one side sits toxic fighting. On the other sits what Leak calls toxic politeness, a phrase Vincent admitted he had never heard before. Both create a performative environment. In the polite version there is artificial harmony and performative conflict. It is the emperor's new clothes: everyone admires the outfit while privately thinking something else, until someone brave enough says the obvious.

The goal is the middle ground of healthy conflict, where people have tough conversations and disagree, but in a way that is connected, genuine and "spirited in empathy". Leak concedes a brutal approach may seem to work for some companies, but doubts it creates sustainable success.

Leaders play a disproportionate role in which way a team goes. Leak borrows an exercise from the head of the special forces, who mentored him: ask a room who thinks they are a leader, then tell them they don't get to decide. Leadership is about whether people choose to follow how you show up. If they follow your title alone, that is consensus culture, which is another name for groupthink.

He describes one leader who opened a meeting by saying the discussion would be complex, that difficult decisions and trade-offs lay ahead, and that disagreement was welcome because they would not reach a better outcome without it. Leak says you could see people's physiology shift as they heard it. Saying it was not enough on its own, though. The moment that mattered came when a colleague challenged the leader directly. The leader acknowledged it must have felt uncomfortable, and told the whole room that this was exactly what he wanted to see. Leak calls that receptivity, and it sends a ripple through a team: here, I can speak up without repercussions.

The Two-Minute Mental Warm-Up Before a Difficult Conversation

All of this asks a lot of people who would rather avoid conflict, and Leak counts himself among them. He describes himself as a "conflict avoidant conflict fitness coach" who has built the muscle over time.

One idea from Steve Peters has stayed with him: "The person that you want to be is the person that you are." We become attached to our thoughts and feelings, and they harden into identity, which then shapes our habits and behaviour. Seeing thoughts as stories, often outside our control, gives us choice in how we show up. Leak draws a sharp line between choice and control. Trying to control a thought, such as imposter syndrome, tends to make us more attached to it. "Control keeps you trapped. Choice creates a sense of agency."

His practical tool is the mental warm-up. Before a difficult conversation, take two minutes to "prime your brain to be ready for the environment rather than being primed by the environment". Ask yourself how you want to show up, how the other person is seeing the world, what is going on for them and what outcome you want. He links this to a to-be list, an idea from Simon Curran of New Zealand's All Blacks Labs: spend less time on what you will do and more on how you want to be.

The phrase he repeats to himself is "connection before correction". Under tension, most of us fall back on a default: getting defensive, correcting the other person, taking control or slipping into persuasion mode. Those reactions often backfire. Leak's measure of a good conversation is that both people leave thinking, "I would do that again," because it felt genuine and there was some growth in it.

When an audience member, a charity trustee caught between warring board members, asked how to raise concerns without triggering defensiveness, Leak offered three things. Play back what you have heard so people feel seen and heard, and you will often find they correct themselves. Find a grain of agreement, however small. And "spend less time trying to be interesting and spend more time being interested".

It brings the conversation back to that skeleton team and its sleds. The idea that changed their sport came from an athlete who was asked a question and felt able to answer it. Specific goals, ruthless focus, honest debriefs and leaders who welcome challenge are all part of the same thing. That is what winning well looks like, and as Leak shows, it can start with two hours a year.

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