When a team is struggling, leaders often start looking at the people: Who is underperforming? Where is the talent gap? Who needs more coaching, and who is maybe in the wrong role at the wrong time for the business?
After 35 years of leading across advertising, retail, technology, financial services, and some extraordinarily high-pressure environments, Jeff Jones has learned to start somewhere else. His career has included leading Target through a data breach, serving as President of Uber’s rideshare business, and running H&R Block through the pandemic. Across those experiences, he developed a conviction that puts much more responsibility in the leader’s hands: that most team challenges begin with the team leader.
That conviction is rooted in a leadership principle Jeff describes as holding up a mirror. When something on the team is falling short, the first questions become: How clear have I been? What behavior have I tolerated? How consistently have I reinforced expectations? What conditions have I created for this team to succeed?
For Jeff, strong teams are the source of a leader’s leverage. When the team can operate cohesively, make decisions, hold one another accountable, and deliver results, the leader gains the capacity to contribute more broadly across the enterprise.
That requires treating team strength as a leadership discipline rather than something that develops on its own.
Jeff’s Team Strength System begins with a deceptively simple decision: decide to do the work of becoming a strong team.
Leaders routinely establish goals for revenue, growth, customer outcomes, or strategic priorities. Jeff believes team effectiveness deserves the same intentionality. In his most recent operating role, his direct reports had objectives in three categories: how their function would drive the business, how they would lead their own teams, and how they would perform as teammates to their peers.
From there, the system depends on a handful of reinforcing leadership behaviors.
Create absolute clarity. Strong teams know what success looks like, what each person owns, and what matters most. Jeff summarizes it as “clear roles, common goals.” Clarity also extends to how people are expected to behave with one another. When expectations remain vague or unspoken, accountability becomes difficult to sustain.
Build trust through consistency. Jeff sees trust as something created between people through repeated behavior. Reliability matters, as do credibility and genuine personal understanding. One factor can quickly undermine all three: the perception that someone is acting primarily in their own interest rather than the team’s. Leaders build trust by following through, communicating candidly, and creating enough safety for people to disagree, learn, and speak openly.
Make accountability mutual. Jeff encourages leaders to expand the definition of “my team.” For an executive, peers should become a first team, with shared responsibility for the organization rather than allegiance only to individual functions. A meaningful signal that this is working comes when teammates begin coaching and giving feedback to one another instead of waiting for the leader to mediate every issue.
Simplify the focus. Jeff’s own values include “listen, provoke, love, simplify, and believe,” and simplification runs throughout his leadership philosophy. Strong leaders continuously reduce ambiguity around priorities, decisions, commitments, and standards so teams can direct their energy toward the work that matters most.
Turn behaviors into practices. On Jeff’s leadership team, team health became part of the operating system. Meetings began with brief check-ins so every person had a voice and could arrive fully present. Team members could call for “the balcony,” a shared phrase that meant stopping to reflect on what had just happened. The team practiced explicit commitments and, when possible, used a facilitator who could hold the leader accountable to the same norms as everyone else.
Over time, those practices became expectations for membership on the team. New leaders were assimilated into the system so that ways of working could endure even as individuals changed.
That consistency is what turns a collection of leadership principles into a Team Strength System.
Jeff’s model ultimately asks leaders to examine the environment they create before diagnosing the individuals inside it. Talent matters, and leaders eventually have to make difficult calls when someone lacks the values, skills, or will required for the team. Jeff’s encouragement is to examine the system first: the clarity, expectations, trust, accountability, communication, priorities, and practices the leader directly controls.
His conclusion is one leaders can carry into any team they build, inherit, scale, or need to turn around:
“Teams rarely outperform the system their leaders create.”
When that system is clear and consistent, it becomes bigger than any individual. People know what is expected, teammates hold one another accountable, new members understand how to contribute, and the team can keep performing through change. The leader’s job is to build the conditions that make that strength repeatable.
Check out more leadership insights from Jeff Jones:
"Your Values Become Real Through What You Reinforce," tips for bringing those values to life when leading your team
Jeff Jones is a proven public-company CEO and board director with senior leadership experience spanning technology, retail, financial services, and consumer brands, from startup environments to Fortune 50 companies.