Dig This...

June 26, 2025

About Motivation and Trust

When I do keynotes I bring a live band on stage and we show people how to build and lead effective teams. It’s like an awesome concert where you learn a lot.

When it comes to teams, most of us are used to hearing about motivation, trust, and things like “buy-in”. And these things are very important - even critical - to a successful team.

A band is a team. And having played with excellent bands for a long time, I can tell you this - a band can get on stage and all the members can be oozing with motivation, dripping with trust, and full of buy-in. But if we don’t have or agree on a shared understanding of the tempo, what do you think will happen to motivation and trust?

With a live band, we can show exactly how a lack of tempo sounds - when everyone plays whatever tempo they want, or play with no tempo at all. You can imagine how bad that would sound, and you’re right! It's terrible. It so bad that we laugh about it, but so many organizations "sound" this way.

One of the best things leaders can do to develop motivation and trust is to make sure the team has clarity about the “tempo” of your project, or the purpose of whatever the team exists to do.

When the team truly has a shared understanding of this, motivation and trust are natural and the team's talent can be set free.

Clarity of purpose. Clarity of goals and objectives. Make them simple to understand and constantly visible. This is having a shared tempo. This is key to being in the groove.

You dig?