Corporate Team Building Drumming: What Really Happens in a Session
There's a moment in every single corporate team building drumming session we run that never gets old. It's the moment a room full of people suddenly sound and become your own performance band. Not a shaky, half hearted attempt at one either. An actual, polished, Brazilian street style performance that they built themselves, together, in the space of an hour or so.
We've been doing this for almost twenty years now, so we've watched that moment happen thousands of times, and it still gets us every time.
Why corporate teams choose drumming
Corporate team building drumming works for pretty much any reason a business gets a group together in one room. We're regularly booked for away days, conferences, client days, culture days, and straightforward corporate team building sessions where the goal is simply getting people connected and energised. If your team is spread across offices, or mostly remote, it's one of the few activities that genuinely needs everyone in the same space to work.
Everyone starts together. There's no splitting into groups, no "you six over there, you six over here." Every single person in the room is drumming from the very first minute, together, as one. Nobody sits on the sidelines watching someone else have the fun.
You don't need any experience. Genuinely, none. Within seconds of picking up a stick, the whole room is making music together. That's the bit people are always most surprised by. They walk in expecting to feel a bit awkward and self conscious, and instead they're grinning within about thirty seconds. If that sounds like exactly what your team could use, get in touch and we'll talk you through how it would work for your group.
It starts messy, on purpose. The opening few minutes are, frankly, a mish mash cacophony. And that's completely fine, because that's the whole point. We use mnemonics to build the rhythm piece by piece, so everyone gets an instrument and everyone gets a feel for how their part fits into the bigger picture. Depending on the size of the group and how long we've got, we'll rotate people through different rhythms so nobody's stuck doing the same thing the whole session.
By the end, that mess has turned into something we'd happily perform in the foyer of the Albert Hall (we're working on getting invited to the main stage).
The finale. Every session closes with a full group performance, one that the room built entirely themselves. That sense of collective achievement, of a group of colleagues who half an hour ago felt a bit sheepish now nailing a rhythm together, has to be felt to really understand it. We can describe it, but we've never quite managed to put it into words that do it justice.
Where the rhythms come from? This is samba style drumming, with roots in the streets of Rio and further back still in drumming traditions from across Africa. There's a real depth of history in what your team is picking up for the afternoon, even if all they're focused on is not dropping the beat.
What a corporate team building drumming day needs from you
It's simpler than people expect:
Venue? Your offices or any space big enough to get all of us in a circle, we can also help source the right venue.
Chairs are great at the beginning, but not critical.
It's always best to have a phone call, so give us a call.
Booking and the logistics are simple. If you want to talk through what space you've got and whether it'll work, drop us a line here and we'll figure it out together.
Why we do it this way. We actually pitched this business on Dragon's Den back in 2009. We were offered a deal, and turned it down, because keeping full autonomy over the business and over how we deliver our events mattered more to us than the investment would have. It's part of why, nearly two decades later, every session still feels handmade rather than rolled off a production line.
These days we deliver corporate team building events for everywhere from 6 people up to 500+, for teams doing everything from general team building and culture building to celebrations, or helping a business recalibrate and reconnect after a big change. About half our sessions are in London, the rest spread out around the country. Manchester is a particular favourite of ours, we're often down in Reading too, and every now and then we get the genuine treat of setting up in a beautiful venue in Cornwall or the Cotswolds.
If you've got a team that could do with walking out of a room sounding like a band, we'd genuinely love to hear about them. Tell us what's going on, what you're hoping to get out of a day like this, and we'll be honest with you about whether we're the right fit for your corporate team building plans. Get in touch here and let's have a conversation.