H&R Block Leader Jeff Jones Wants His Team To Check In And Check Out

H&R Block President and CEO Jeff Jones was a catcher on the baseball team at Fork Union Military Academy and then went on to the University of Dayton, but the sport he learned his most valuable leadership lesson from was basketball. This fact will seem less surprising when you realize the basketball figure from whom he learned the lesson was Mike Krzyzewski, the former Duke and U.S. National coach known as Coach K. Jones explains the lesson this way.

“If you were to watch a typical basketball team practice,” he began, “and you asked the crowd to share which noise you hear most in a basketball gym, they would likely guess squeaking sneakers, right? But if you watch a Duke basketball practice, what you hear above all else are people talking.”

They’re “chattering” while they practice—alerting, suggesting, urging, congratulating, correcting … offering a “what if?” They are active in communication at practice because that is important to Coach K. An excellent student as well as athlete, Jones took this important communication lesson—you only come together as a team if you’re talking to one another— to heart and gave it his own twist at H&R Block.

“At the beginning of all of our leadership team meetings, every single person checks in,” Jones explained in a recent interview. “They say whatever they’re feeling that they’re bringing to that meeting that day. For example, I recall one colleague saying, ‘Man, I’m really excited to be here today. We have a great agenda.’ Colleague two said, ‘You know what, I’m really exhausted right now, and I wish we weren’t having this meeting.’ I raised my hand and said, ‘I’m putting my dad in assisted living, and emotionally I’m not here today. So give me some grace if it seems like I’m checked out.’”

At the end of each meeting, everyone goes around and checks out, usually by responding to a prompt or question such as “what inspired you about today’s session” or “what are you worrying about as we leave here today?” And each member of the team offers their candid reply, along with a little banter and cross-talk. More often than not, the team leaves the meeting feeling aligned.

This gift of communication and candor doesn’t end with this executive leadership meeting. It also informs the culture of the entire company, whose 60,000 global employees need to be spot-on as they work to provide the best possible outcome at tax time and all year round.

As an athlete and business leader, Jones believes in focusing on the fundamentals, of which communication is a key component. In the interview he offered numerous practical lessons for communicating with maximum team-building and team-learning effect. Here are some of his choicest nuggets:

As a rather awe-inspiring testament of the high degree to which Jones practices what he preaches—i.e., leaders should focus on the big picture and long-term direction of the company—the president and CEO of H&R Block reported that when he took the job he’d never done his own taxes. But boy can he lead those who do!