At our Leadership Circle, held in collaboration with Lexington Consultants in London on 26 November 2025, a select group of professional services firm leaders gathered for an interactive session exploring the evolving best practices worldwide – and the cultural choices that can drive or derail growth.
Using a structured scenario to anchor the discussion, at the London Leadership Circles event, we explored with a selected group of professional services leaders how firms can strike the right balance between financial performance and cultural cohesion.
A question that is becoming increasingly central to a firm’s strategy is the extent to which culture enables or constrains sustainable growth. A recurring theme in London was that culture is not an adjunct to strategy; it is a core performance system that shapes behaviours, decision-making and long-term competitiveness.
A number of strategic lessons emerged from the session:
- Clarifying the full spectrum of performance. Firms that define performance solely through financial metrics often struggle to create the behaviours needed for sustained growth. An effective model integrates financial and non-financial contributions, with equal clarity around how underperformance is managed.
- Aligning rewards with desired behaviours. Leadership expectations, remuneration systems and partner obligations must reinforce collaboration, client stewardship, innovation and a clear “firm-first” mindset. Inconsistent signals dilute both culture and performance.
- Ensuring governance frameworks support the culture. Constitutions, committees, voting structures, duties of partners and promotion criteria must all operate coherently to maintain alignment and protect cohesion. Without this, firms face slow decision-making and inconsistent accountability.
- Embedding culture within strategy and vision. As highlighted in the session, firms that articulate a clear strategic direction and connect it to purpose and values are better able to break down silos and mobilise partners around shared priorities.
Across the discussion, there was strong agreement that firms achieve sustained growth when culture and performance are integrated, mutually reinforcing and clearly understood by partners.
In conclusion and drawing on our recent work with firms, one point is increasingly clear: developing and maintaining a genuine high-performance culture has become one of the most significant sources of competitive advantage in the sector.Firms can hire talent, invest in technology and open offices with relative ease, but a disciplined, cohesive and high-performance culture is extremely difficult for competitors to replicate.
High-performance culture is often the factor that underpins long-term resilience, differentiation and client confidence.
