Few organizations experience the same headline-breaking fate as a WeWork or Theranos. In most cases, businesses slowly deplete, with outdated cultures and systems draining teams’ time, energy, and emotional capacity.

The most jarring thing about this “death by a thousand paper cuts” is that the damage is subtle. Weekly meetings and daily scrums show that deadlines are met and tasks are completed. But there is little or no movement towards moonshot goals. And while employees are mostly present, their time and talent are misapplied. 

Emotionally intuitive leaders may sense something is off, but can’t quite name the problem. And by the time they do, the quiet erosion becomes a cultural breakdown, with the issue trickling into performance results. 

Jon Klonsky, Co-Founder and CEO of HaloKinetic and former co-founder of Something Digital, tackles these organizational breakdowns head-on with his Future Commerce Learning course, “Building Highly Effective Teams,” which is available exclusively to Future Commerce Plus members. With decades of experience building, scaling, and integrating teams across agencies and enterprise environments, he has firsthand accounts and the hard lessons to help leaders build teams that perform and stay for the long term. 

Teams Are Systems, Whether You Treat Them That Way or Not

Regardless of size or industry, every organization is constantly balancing three forces: the health of the team, customer needs, and the realities of profit. Teams must be deliberately designed to address all three, while leaders create conditions that sustain performance.

But priorities sometimes shift, especially in moments of growth, contraction, or transformation. In some cases, leaders must make hard or unpopular decisions. They need to break down these pivots, highlighting short-term tradeoffs and longer-term changes to organizational structure, products/services, and operations. Leaders should know their team well enough to recognize how to structure these conversations and how much tension they (and the system) can absorb without breaking. 

Where Performance Breaks Down 

When teams underperform, the typical instinct is to apply pressure. Leaders apply new metrics, tools, and incentives to generate excitement and drive focus. But with these pivots comes a lack of focus, which creates ambiguity and confusion.

Arguably, clarity is the most underrated form of motivation. People want to know how they’re being evaluated, how their work connects to a grander vision, and what growth actually looks like over time. When goals are implicit, feedback is sporadic, and professional development isn’t embedded into goal-setting, employees lack clarity, lose focus, and falter in meeting organizational goals.

Performance systems should be simple, measurable, and humane. Perhaps most importantly, they should be designed to motivate progress, not police behavior.

Hiring and Retention as a Cultural Guidepost

Hiring and retention are often designated as HR mandates. And for many organizations, hiring is a transactional process, while retention is a reactive, downstream problem.

But Klonsky believes that hiring and retention are closely linked to organizational culture. Teams are shaped equally by who is employed and by how success is defined once they get acclimated to a role. While skills and experience matter, attitudes, expectations, and shared understanding play a more central role in long-term organizational health. 

Leadership must be clear about what “good” looks like in their organization. That applies to both projects and culture. If they make promises or grand statements they can’t sustain, churn will increase, while both morale and margin will suffer.

The Contributor False Equivalency

There are different types of contributors in every single team. While everyone may be swimming towards the same goal, each person plays a distinct role. They have other tasks, priorities, and measures for success. They do their work and create value in different ways. 

While some are strategic thinkers and ideators, others are deadline-driven “doers.” And others are leaders through and through, with a natural ability to teach and usher the collective toward the much larger end goal.  

High-functioning organizations embrace these differences and make space for excellence in each scenario. Goals are tailored to individual requirements, and they compensate accordingly. And when everyone understands these differences and how everyone works together, any distinction becomes a way to connect the broader organization.  

Creating Clarity in the Chaos

Commerce leaders are navigating tighter capital, accelerated technological change, and rising expectations from both customers and employees. In this perfectly chaotic storm, team alignment and effectiveness become competitive advantages. And when everyone is aligned around the same vision and strategy, the tactics will follow suit. 

Set the Table offers a way for current and aspiring executives to think more clearly about leadership, performance, and team design before problems become visible in financial results. 

The whole course is now available to Future Commerce Plus members, providing a framework for building organizational resilience, creating shared goals and productivity language, and sharpening leadership judgment. 

Build an enduring team that drives sustainable results. It all starts here.

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