How Group Goals Can Emerge from Individual Goals

I joined School of Rock (SoR) over a year ago.  Our group, called Full Immersion, completed its fourth season since I’ve join, and we just delivered two amazing performances.  Most in our group feel we are ready to “graduate” and start performing on our own.  After our latest performances, we are eager to see if we can book and deliver gigs ourselves without having the instruction and support of the school.  To do this, we need to act as a team. Our first band meeting is coming up in a week and one of our members suggested we use that time to establish a vision for the band and set goals for the group.  Sounds like a great idea!

The most effective teams have a group vision and group goals.  One of the pitfalls of teams is when team members’ individual goals are not aligned with the group goals.  By way of this blog, I am going to enumerate the individual goals that I will share with the group when we meet.  I hope all members share their goals, too.  If we understand each other’s individual goals, we can collectively create a vision for the group that is as inclusive as possible of all members’ individual goals.

Matt’s Individual Goals (in no special order)

• Understand how learning and playing music helps me process emotions
• Experience the joy of playing music together in a group
• Understand how my three intelligences – intuitive, emotional and intellectual – contribute to learning and playing music
• Understand how the band members with their distinct Enneagram types interact, support and/or detract from the group effort
• Apply my distinct Enneagram type’s energy towards making the group a success in various ways: musically, performatively, and as an effective team
• Use music as a distraction from the emotional heaviness of my work on the climate crisis
• Learn to channel my feelings into my performance
• Establish regular patterns for both rehearsals and performances
• Design performances to appeal to our target audience, not just ourselves
• Learn new music, especially music from the 90s and onwards (while appreciating that audiences still tend to love 80s music)
• Have a mix of music that keeps us challenged and growing musically
• Support my band mates in growing musically and performatively
• Bonus: learn how music may help humanity solve the climate crisis

Also, here are participation goals that are not important to me but that I would not object to:

• Making money
• Becoming famous
• Creating new music
• Including “guest” artists in our performances

I appreciate all my band mates and instructors over these past four seasons—I have learned so much from everyone!  I appreciate all the support we’ve received from SoR.  I wish everyone much success and look forward to seeing Full Immersion carry on.

Rock on! 🎤🎤🎤🎸🎸🎸🎹🥁🎶🤘