Corporate Stories: Small Successes for All of Us

by Arthur Hull

After facilitating many leadership programs, management trainings, offsite team-building and sales conferences with Motorola, I thought that I had seen most of its corporate culture. Then, a particular Motorola program presented a number of new challenges for me. First, it was not going to be the upper or middle managers with whom I normally work. It was going to be the guys and gals working on the production line at a Motorola plant in Austin, Texas. Secondly, it wasn’t an offsite program where the participants in some hotel venue were doing a series of meetings, which would include a team-building program with me. This team-building program was scheduled directly after their work shift, at what they thought was going to be their monthly managers’ meeting, just before going home. Surprise! Surprise! Finally, this wasn’t going to be a drum circle. The program was held in an auditorium where I would work with three hundred people at a time from the stage. I did all four shifts of the plant in two days, a total of twelve hundred plant employees.

I kept the standard Village Music Circle format, but adapted it to an interactive presentation between me on the stage and the audience.

I started the program with a fun vocal interaction game. Laughter was the best medicine for relieving the initial tension and the resistance that came up in the workers. We kept all of the instruments out of sight, and at each new part of the presentation, my assistants, the managers, would distribute the required percussion toys among the rows of participants. By the end of the programs we were all crowded together on and around the stage with a full complement of drums and percussion, in what I would call a drum donut, rather than a drum circle.

Of every 50 people who participate in a corporate team-building event I usually get one or two people who come to me and tell me a similar kind of story, “My junior high music teacher verified my belief that I was a rhythm dork, by putting me in the dumb section of the chorus. This experience erased that.” Or “I was taught that women were to be seen and not heard so it was hard for me to hit the drum and make noise, but by the end of the program, I didn’t want to stop.”

Of every one hundred to two hundred corporate people I work with in these programs, someone will have a powerful personal experience inside the village drum circle event. They come see me after the program wanting to know whether and where there is a teacher in town, what kind of drum should they get, and so on and so forth.

By coincidence, during the Motorola event described above, a personal growth program was happening at the hotel where I was staying in Austin. Babatunde Olatunji was one of the presenters in that two-day event. However, it was a problem that to see Baba you had to register for the whole weekend event. Happy Shel, a local community facilitator and drum advocate, convinced the personal growth program developers to open Baba Olatunji’s part of their program to the public, since it was celebratory in nature. It helped that Happy offered to have extra drums available for the participants from his Drums Not Guns organization.

Because the personal growth program planners opened Baba’s event to the public, at the end of each of the four teambuilding programs, I announced Baba Olatunji’s availability at his workshop happening in town that weekend. At Baba’s event I recognized at least ten Motorola employees that had attended my corporate team-building programs. That’s par for the course, and gave me a very good feeling inside, that the work that I did in the corporations affected people beyond the corporate walls. I also realized by their comments, that as these Motorola employees drive home from work, crossing over the bridge in downtown Austin, they look down at the thunder drumming circle in the park below the bridge next to the river. Because of their Village Music Circle drumming experience, I believe that they now have a different, and more positive viewpoint of the drumming “hippies” under the bridge.

The Motorola managers liked the results of the program enough that they invited us back a few months later to do a program with twelve hundred of their plant workers.

From the book “Drum Circle Spirit: Facilitating Human Potential Through Rhythm.” Copyright © 1998 by Arthur Hull.

Copyright © 1998–2007 Arthur Hull