As clinical and dry as the title reads, I promise not to write a treatise on something new-agey and boring. I’m not trying to sell you a book or convince you to hire me as a consultant to help motivate your team. I’m just jotting down some thoughts that have come to me from my years of working all sorts of bands.

I’m going to draw my experience from my music background – music in a large group situation requires just as much if not more teamwork as team sports. As a trumpet player, I’ve been in all the seats, I’ve led a section and I’ve played the last chair. I’ve had a taste of everything and I’ve played in enough groups to know what works and what doesn’t.

Here’s the secret to it all… Situational Awareness.

Lets look at it from the team player perspective. Let’s use the music example: let’s say you have a player on the 4th chair.  At the very basic level of teamwork, this player will perform the music exactly as written with no regard for anything that occurs around him. If performed competently (which many players still struggle to reach this), there will be nothing particular bad or particular good about this performance. In this situation it is a pure 1+1=2 situation – the player adds himself to the equation but nothing else.

This is sort of where my ideas break down. There are few players who are technically competent AND show no sense of situational awareness… but I digress…

When playing in a band, situation awareness means you must be aware of what your section leader is doing, what the other sections of the band are doing, and what the conductor is doing. I put the conductor last because he/she is the first person most players look to when performing with a group but in reality the conductor is really the only one in a musical group who is NOT creating music. Educators will love to disagree with me on this – that’s their job – to drill into less accomplished players that there is only one source of musical guidance. It’s centralization of power, they don’t want to loose that.

The truth is, the conductor is simply a means for the musicians to have a common adjudicator. Yes, he/she is the only thing you need to be aware of, is silly. To even say he/she is the most important thing is really far too much simplification (jazz bands rarely need conductors). The conductor is like a traffic director, the musicians are the ones driving the car. Imagine if you were at an intersection, if you stared at the traffic director the entire time, you could still end up the ramming the car in front of you.

The answer is “Situational Awareness” – be aware of what you’re doing and how it fits into the big picture. Back to the 4th trumpet player- if he has a G on the 3rd beat – the question now is what’s the point of that note? Is that G octave doubling the lead? Is the lead playing it short or long? Is the rhythm swinging it or playing it straight? Is that G a third in a major chord (in that case you’ll want to play it a bit flat). Is that note part of a melody section or are the trumpets doing hits at that point. Are the drums setting you up there? Is the passage leading to a melodic section? Are you going sharp or flat? All these factors are important in how  you play that note – and you make those decisions by being AWARE of your surroundings and anticipating what’s coming next. If you do that, we get a situation where 1+1>2.

Notice I didn’t mention what dynamic or what’s written on the music. Sheet music is just a suggestion – a darn good one though. Sheet music is NOT music, it gets interpreted into music. I’m so EFFING sick of people asking me what dynamic is written or what the tempo marking is. I don’t play piano (soft) because the music says to play piano. I play soft because that’s what would sound good. Of course, dynamic markings are all relative anyways. My rant on tempo markings will be saved for another night….

Now in terms of leadership, it should be pretty obvious how situational awareness plays in. A section leader needs to know precisely what’s happening and respond correctly. The further you go up the command chain, the more aware of what’s going on and how to communicate to the different individuals in the group. A good leader needs to be aware of what those under him/her are dealing with as well in order to adjust and alter the plan of attack.

That’s about a gist of some of the things running through my head. Leave a comment if anything makes sense or you totally disagree!

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