Liftoff, 2nd Edition

Chapter 5Charter a Clear Team Purpose

When you have a sense of purpose for your work, your commitment deepens, your momentum increases, and your performance elevates. In his book, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us [Pin09], Daniel Pink calls out autonomy, mastery, and purpose as the three primary human motivators. In their book, Wisdom of Teams: Creating the High-Performance Organization [KS99], Jeffrey Katzenbach and Douglas Smith list common purpose as the top characteristic of effective teams. And in Extraordinary Groups: How Ordinary Teams Achieve Amazing Results [BR09], Geoffrey Bellman and Kathleen Ryan support this view in their model of what extraordinary groups need. They write that shared purpose is “the reason we ...