Team Building

The Reward in Risk

March 9, 2010 9:00 PM
No matter how much I witness and understand the impact that Drum Cafe has on people’s lives, I’ll never lose touch with the fact that what we do might seem risky to an outsider looking in. I know it’s easier to offer a round of golf to a top sales team than to offer them a round of drumming.  But so often shaking up business as usual comes with some great rewards.

To punctuate this point, I just reconnected with a client who spoke with me so openly about the risk she took by bringing Drum Cafe to her company. Rebecca Brown had only been at QWBS, a division of Qualcomm, for less than two years. A new president had just come on board and together they were planning their first all-hands kick-off event.  The president wanted to start with something “a bit out of the box and really impactful”.  Rebecca had seen Drum Cafe in action and had a strong belief that we’d be a perfect fit for the 500+ attendees.  But the moment she mentioned the idea, the room went silent. Drumming??

Sometimes, what we resist most in life ends up having the most meaning for us.  The idea of bring drumming to the QWBS kick-off was hardly met with an embrace. The president wanted to ‘tone it down’ and ‘break it out’ and ‘make it shorter’. She nearly wanted us to go away before we got there. Her other big concern was if drumming started off the event, how was she to follow it with her keynote? Wouldn’t she fall flat? Rebecca heard these concerns and saw the risk in pushing forward. Her job was at stake and as much as she believed that her gut was right, she had trouble sleeping during the intense period of this decision. Of course now, she remembers all of this with a big smile on her face because she knows how things really turned out in the end.

After the president said “either we do it right or we don’t do it all”, Drum Cafe got the green light to proceed. Rebecca told me how on the morning of the event, she stood in the back of the room terrified that no one would participate, let alone transform in the way she knew they could.  But within five minutes, all her fears fell away.  From the stage, when I felt the participants go from hesitation to happiness in what seemed an instant, I caught a glimpse of Rebecca, knowing that she felt it too.

Rebecca said that seeing the president herself dance on stage wasn’t the best moment— though it was a huge relief and reward. But it was hearing her keynote address afterwards. “By virtue of the experience the president had just been through that hour – she was on fire!”

I know the participants had an incredible experience that day, and in large part due to the conviction and courage of Rebecca. It’s never easy to introduce new ideas. There’s risk in the unknown. But isn’t that the starting point for all of life’s discovery?

In Rhythm and Joy,

Natalie Spiro

Posted by Natalie Spiro at March 9, 2010 9:00 PM

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