Leadership eventually becomes less about what you accomplish yourself and more about what the people around you are capable of accomplishing together.
Leadership eventually becomes less about what you accomplish yourself and more about what the people around you are capable of accomplishing together.
Strengthen Your Teams, the fourth of the LEAP Six Pillars of Leadership, is the practice of cultivating empowered teams that move with speed, agility, and accountability. It asks leaders to create the conditions for people to do their best work, individually and collectively, while building the trust, clarity, and shared standards required to sustain high performance.
That responsibility becomes more important as leaders become more senior. The scope of the work expands, the problems become more complex, and the distance between the leader and the work itself grows. Progress increasingly depends on the judgment, capability, and coordination of other people. You can almost plot it on a graph; success for senior leaders depends on how much they unlock in others.
But we know that strengthening a team creates its own set of tensions.
People need autonomy, but they do not all need the same amount of it. High standards require accountability, but accountability without trust can create fear. Speed matters, but moving quickly becomes difficult when roles and decision rights are unclear. Leaders have to develop people while also making difficult decisions when someone is no longer right for the team.
Executives across the Virtuosi League community have encountered these tensions across some of the world's most complex organizations. Their experiences reveal that strong teams rarely happen because the right collection of talented people happened to come together. Leaders have to continually create and reinforce the conditions that allow talent to become a collective performance.
One of the easiest leadership habits to develop is also one of the most limiting: leading everyone the way we prefer to be led.
Vineet Mehra, Chief Growth Officer at Chime, encourages leaders to begin somewhere else. Before deciding how much direction, support, or autonomy someone needs, diagnose the person and the work in front of them.
Situational leadership gives leaders a framework for making that diagnosis. Someone with deep experience and confidence on one assignment may need very little intervention. Give that same person an unfamiliar, highly complex responsibility and their needs may change dramatically.
The leadership approach should change with them.
That makes strengthening teams a dynamic practice. Leaders have to pay attention to competence, confidence, task complexity, and context rather than relying on a preferred management style. The goal is to give people enough support to succeed and enough autonomy to grow.
Vineet's lesson also exposes an important distinction between empowerment and absence. Giving someone room to operate can be powerful when they are ready for it. When they are not, the same behavior can leave them without the clarity or coaching they need.
Strong leaders diagnose first, and then respond to what the situation actually requires.
Learn how Vineet Mehra interprets and implements Situational Leadership.
When Rustom Dastoor, Chief Marketing Officer at PIMCO, thinks about high-performing teams, he often looks to elite sports.
Championship teams have talent, but talent alone cannot explain sustained performance. They establish high standards, operate with speed, understand their roles, and learn how to work together under pressure.
Rustom asks leaders to examine the friction keeping their own teams from operating that way.
Some friction comes from cumbersome decision-making or unnecessary approvals. Some come from silos between teams. Other forms are behavioral: complacency, unclear expectations, or a tolerance for standards that gradually drift downward.
For Rustom, leaders strengthen teams by deliberately removing those barriers while creating greater ownership. People should understand the outcome they are responsible for and have enough authority to help deliver it. Leaders also have to invest in developing the people around them so that leadership capability spreads throughout the organization.
That combination can change the pace at which a team operates. Clear standards reduce ambiguity. Clear decision rights reduce delay. Shared purpose helps people understand why their work matters. Trust allows people to execute without constantly looking upward for permission.
The leader's role becomes creating an environment where capable people can move.
Read how Rustom Dastoor approaches removing barriers (a subtle nod to Clear the Path) to strengthen his teams.
Even talented teams can struggle when each function is optimizing for its own priorities.
David Edelman saw that challenge clearly while serving as CMO of Aetna. Marketing, technology, operations, product, and other functions could each be working hard and meeting their own objectives while customers still experienced the company as fragmented.
His answer was to make the customer the shared point of reference.
“When you show people what the customer actually experiences, the silos become visible.”
Looking at the experience from the customer's perspective changes the conversation. Instead of debating which function owns a problem, teams can see where handoffs break down, where priorities conflict, and where internal processes create an experience nobody intended. That shared perspective gives teams a common problem to solve.
For leaders, the lesson extends well beyond customer experience. Strong teams need a source of alignment that is larger than any individual's role or function. When people understand the outcome they are collectively trying to create, collaboration becomes easier because success can be defined across the whole system.
Strengthening a team therefore means helping people see beyond their individual responsibilities, breaking the barriers between them, and understanding what they are building together. This guidance also nods to Clear the Path, which stresses the importance of removing obstacles to ensure the teams can operate at their best.
Read how David Edelman strengthens teams by removing organizational silos.
Sometimes strengthening a team requires a leader to confront something they would rather avoid.
Nick Tran learned this after hesitating on a difficult people decision and watching the consequences spread beyond the individual involved. The experience left him with a simple lesson: “When you hesitate, the whole team pays the price.”
Leaders can delay difficult decisions for understandable reasons: they want to give someone another opportunity, they hope circumstances will improve, or they worry about acting too quickly or damaging a relationship. Meanwhile, everyone else is watching.
A performance or behavior issue left unresolved can create ambiguity about standards and force other people to compensate. Over time, the leader's reluctance to act becomes part of the team's experience.
Nick's approach combines clarity with courage. He works to make expectations explicit, diagnose where someone is struggling, explain the reasoning behind decisions, and invest deeply in people who are willing and able to grow.
That makes accountability part of strengthening a team. People deserve to understand what is expected of them, where they stand, and where improvement is required. The broader team deserves that clarity, too.
Read how Nick Tran approaches decision-making to model behavior and provide clarity and context for teams to build muscle.
Teams pay especially close attention to their leaders when conditions become uncertain.
William White, CMO of Walmart U.S., has seen that dynamic across large organizations and periods of rapid change. When priorities shift and external pressures grow, people look to leaders for signals about how to respond.
For William, those signals are built through consistency: “Trust is the foundation. Without it, nothing else holds.”
Consistency means aligning words and actions, creating clarity around priorities, listening before making decisions, recognizing contributions, and maintaining steadiness when pressure rises. These behaviors may seem small individually, but together they tell people whether their leader can be trusted.
That trust creates capacity within the team. People can focus more of their energy on the work when they understand what matters, believe decisions will be handled fairly, and have confidence that expectations will not change unpredictably.
William's experience also demonstrates why strengthening teams is ongoing work. Trust accumulates through repeated interactions. Every meeting, decision, difficult conversation, and moment of uncertainty gives a leader another opportunity to reinforce trust.
Learn why William White establishes trust and consistency to develop strong teams.
Across these leaders' experiences, we see that strengthening teams requires leaders to pay close attention to the conditions surrounding performance, and act decisively when something is off.
Yet, each leader interprets their role in unique ways. Vineet asks leaders to diagnose what each person and situation requires. Rustom focuses on removing the friction that slows talented people down. David creates alignment around a shared outcome. Nick demonstrates how clarity and difficult decisions protect the potential of the whole team. William shows how consistent leadership builds the trust that allows people to perform through uncertainty.
Together, their experiences expand the definition of what it means to lead a team.
The work includes coaching and developing people, while also setting standards. It requires giving people autonomy while remaining present enough to recognize when they need more support. It asks leaders to move quickly while building enough clarity that others can move confidently with them.
Ultimately, the strength of a leader becomes visible in the capability of the people around them. As responsibility grows, leadership increasingly means multiplying judgment, confidence, ownership, and leadership capacity throughout the team.
The LEAP Six Pillars of Leadership build on one another because the work of leadership starts from within and expands outward.
Strengthen Your Teams turns that awareness toward the people whose capabilities, judgment, and collective performance will determine how much the organization can accomplish. From there, leadership extends beyond your immediate team. In many cases, it extends beyond the company. Build Bridges, the fifth of the Six Pillars of Leadership, asks leaders to create the relationships, influence, and alignment required to move work across an increasingly interconnected enterprise. We’ll dive into those perspectives next.
The LEAP Six Pillars of Leadership form the foundation of our programs. Learn more about LEAP Flagship and LEAP Essentials.