Phew and sigh,

I’ve been busy – busy facilitating team building through song, co-presenting at the ASTD International Conference and busy planning for the next event. I’m grateful for the growth our corporate event programs have seen the past couple of years but lately I’ve been missing something. What’s been missing can be described in a word; actually a bunch of words like strategic, relaxed, creative, organizational and inspired.

I preach team building but do I practice?

When we help groups create their story through song we stress the importance of taking time to reflect on the past, to celebrate the present and discuss the future. Creative time can be a powerful catalyst to change and to growth initiatives. Sooo…..I’ve had to slooowwww down… and carve out time to practice what I preach. Guess what? I’ve learned that it’s hard. When the emails are flying and the phone is ringing the doing takes over the thinking and that’s not always a great thing.

Sigh and phew,

I’ve forced myself to make time, to break time away from the day-to-day, and do some team building of my own.The first thing I realized was that my frenetic pace had compromised my efficiency and my natural ability to think strategically. So I booked time to gather my team and talk about stuff – not the next corporate team building activity or keynote speech, but the amorphous stuff like, How do we want to grow? What’s the best way to do that? How do we build in time to be innovative and continue to create the programs that got us here in the first place?

Solution

Those conversations, team building activities really, led to action steps. Scary action steps like throwing out the old website, the old logo and some other boxes we were boxed into. That was scary and yet that was fun. Now we’re staffing up. Not with paper-pushers, but with talent who understands who we are, where we’re coming from and we’re we think we’d like to go. Notice I said, ‘think’ we’d like to go. Because the key component to any innovative journey is to allow the journey to change as it unfolds.

I’m Done

No more time to blog today. My son is graduating from high school tomorrow night. This weekend, I’m taking eight incredibly talented hit songwriters with me to a fantastic team building through song event and then after a looonnnggg nap, I’m going to begin to work with our new staff member. The team builder’s team is being built.

Are you taking the time you need to build your team?

Kid Billy Music - Corporate Team Building Events and Music Team Building Activities

Enter to win a free musical team building program.

This is our full program including the fun, value and ROI that accompanies all our team building events. Tell your story, write a song, create a lasting take-away, enhance team communication and inspire innovation. Answer one or more of the following questions to create a compelling reason for your team to win a free program. Dream a little, be creative, submit a video if you want to.

• Why do you want to do a team building program?
• What’s the worst team building experience you’ve ever had?
• What do you hope to take away from this free team building program?

How to enter

Enter your answer to one or more of the questions in the comment area below. To complete your contest submission, after you post your comment below, please do one, of the following:
On Kidbilly Music Facebook page: Enter this phrase, “I just entered the Kidbilly Music Free Team Building Contest.”
On Twitter: Enter this phrase, “I just entered the #kidbillymusic Free Team Building Contest.”
On our Google + page: Enter this phrase, “I just entered the Kidbillymusic Free Team Building Contest.”

The fine print

The program will be limited to groups of between 6 to 30 participants. If you are located outside of the Metro Nashville, TN area, you will be required to pay travel expenses for Kidbilly Music songwriter-facilitator. Program will be scheduled at a time mutually agreed upon by the contest winner and Kidbilly Music between July 15, 2012 & March 31st, 2013. Employees of Kidbilly Music, LLC or relatives of officers or employees of Kidbilly Music, LLC are not permitted to enter. Contest ends on 6/15/12. Winner will be announced on 7/1/12.

The judges

David Hutchens is an author, business writer and learning designer who creates communication solutions for business. He is creator of the Learning Fables – a book series that uses narrative and metaphor to illustrate principles of organizational learning.
Jody Lentz helps companies create better teams, better meetings and make better decisions. His program, “Think With Your Hands” is a team-building experience powered by LEGO Serious Play.
Billy Kirsch, President of Kidbilly Music, is a Grammy nominated & CMA award winning hit songwriter passionate about helping people rediscover their creativity to become more innovative and engaged in their work.

Kid Billy Music - Corporate Team Building Events and Music Team Building Activities

When you think of the ASTD 2012 conference, team building songs are probably not the first thing that pops into your mind. Yes, there are the more typical sessions on simulation training, multimedia learning environments etc. But dig a little deeper and you’ll notice their are offerings that relate to team building motivation and how they’re related. No, you won’t find this specific class offered, but you’ll find opportunities to experience how storytelling, song creation and personal narrative can increase emotional buy-in from employees and stakeholders. If you’re headed to the conference in Denver next week, check out Disney’s Approach to Storytelling and the session I’m co-facilitating with David Hutchens, Making Meaning: Story, Music, and Co-Creation in Learning. I believe there’s even a session around drumming and we all know that’s a fun, interactive team builder.

So why does content that appears to be soft get a place at the table at ASTD?

Are there team building goals and objectives that can be quantified, or at least specified?

YES! The goal of our presentation in Denver, is to enable participants to experience the value in narrative. Every individual in your organization has a personal story they bring to work with them. The personal story that is each of your employees and co-workers lives contributes to the overall culture and energy of your organization. Further, the role of trainers, coaches and leaders in organizations is to bring all of those diverse stories together into a single narrative that a company lives together.

So what’s the connection between narrative and a team building song?

Great songs tell stories. And team building songs are stories that distill lots of information about our organizations into a succinct message – a great musical elevator speech that communicates the essence of what a company is and what it does. It’s powerful because its a narrative co-created by employees and leaders, and as such, the level of buy-in and engagement is lasting.

Colorado is a great place for a conference - see you there?

Kid Billy Music - Corporate Team Building Events and Music Team Building Activities

Team building songs have a lot in common with the hit songs I’ve written. While they may not end up on the radio, the songs we create in our team building events communicate personal story and emotion, just like any great song. Story and emotion stick, so team building for values is a great way to get your value statement off the page and into your day-to-day operational experience. Simply put, you’ll share experience, you’ll trade stories, you’ll take lots of information and distill it down to the important stuff – a powerful value statement through song.

Story, Song & Values – How It’s Done

Okay – I’m on a flight from Boston to Portland, having just worked with a major investment bank. Our specific goal was to reinforce the company value statement by creating a team building song. Too often a statement of values is just that; a statement – A two dimensional reference that’s hard to integrate into daily corporate experience. And if leaders aren’t living the values, then their employees won’t be either.

I started the session with a question. ‘Can you share a personal story about how you lived a company value, something specific you’ve done that reflects on this?’ The group was silent, big pause and some tension in the room as participants realized nothing immediately came to mind, yikes… but not uncommon! So I read some of the value statement as a prompt and then someone in the room told a story about how he had ‘acted globally’. Soon other people were sharing experience and building on shared ideas as our song chorus came to life.The song doesn’t re-state values in a dry or literal way, but it creates a story of how the important aspects of an organization’s mission and culture are lived.

Remember That Song

It’s true; you can remember the lyrics to hundreds of songs. We all can. But you probably can’t remember where you put your car keys…By the time this group of investment bankers created, sang and recorded their team building song they owned it, they had memorized it and they were excited about it.That was yesterday. And today they’re back at the office singing the value song company-wide.

The Lyric

Here’s an excerpt from the song -
“Bold leaders here to navigate, innovate, motivate
Coaching teams to do their best, that’s our secret to success
We focus on investor’s needs, with our advanced technology
Community philanthropy, we celebrate diversity”

And now I’m gonna take a nap on this plane. Left Boston early this morning with a song in my head, and landing in Portland, OR later today to create more music.

Kid Billy Music - Corporate Team Building Events and Music Team Building Activities

My mother never gave me that advice, at least she didn’t intend to. But in a way she did. My mother forged a path as a creative person, became a renowned chef and broke quite a few rules along the way. She may have told us to ‘be careful’, but she led by following her heart and taking chances…that must be what I absorbed!

Six years ago when I started messing around with team building through song, I had no idea where it would lead. I experienced the visceral thrill and the challenge of pulling a song together spontaneously, with a group of folks who had never written a song before, and I thought to myself, “Wow – that was fun, I need to do more of this”. Fast forward to present day and I’ve accidentally created a monster. A monster that’s my new life, my business, my passion and quite nicely, my livelihood.

Why Should You Care?

If you’ve read this far, I appreciate it, and this is why you should care: When you and your team enter into the songwriting process with us, when you trust us just enough to jump before you look, great things happen. We all need to get outside our collective comfort zone just often enough to stimulate new ideas, break down old ways of doing things – to encounter a potential future that’s just a bit better than where we are now.

Will Team Building Through Song change your life? Of course not! But every once in a while, you need to put yourself in midair to appreciate what’s really important when you’re back on the ground – Take a chance, tell your story, sing your song.

Kid Billy Music - Corporate Team Building Events and Music Team Building Activities

A creative life is built upon self-motivation and trust. The motivation part is obvious, but the trust part a bit harder to understand and to accept. It took me years and a bit of success to gain the confidence I needed to trust the cycles of motivation and non-motivation. Or in creative terms, inspiration and lack thereof.

After beating myself up this morning for several hours because I wasn’t making a dent in my to-do list, I realized I wasn’t motivated and had to . I did. I ate an early lunch, real early, and that was fun. I texted my daughter, that was fun, and I swept out the garage. Then I grabbed my laptop, came outside, and here I am; working away with enthusiasm. I’m not going to quantify results by the ‘hourly time’ I wasted this morning, but rather by the quality work I’m doing right now – and that reminds me…

You can’t motivate people but you can create a context in which people are motivated.

I came across the line above in a great blog article on motivation and leadership. Great leaders know that they can’t force feed motivation. However, they can create an environment in which people feel vested in the outcome, are supported, and have the freedom to express themselves through their work – this promotes self-motivation and engagement.

What Are You Doing to Create A Motivated Team?

• Trust your employees or team members to self-regulate. If they care about their work and your team’s mission you won’t need to micro-manage. Enable them to lead as well as follow.
• Invite new ideas and don’t judge them quickly. When people are invited to contribute their own ideas they’ll be motivated. Maybe not every day, but they’ll learn to trust their own rhythms of engaged work time and when it’s time to take a break to refill the tanks.
• Lead by example; Don’t be afraid to schedule time to ‘play‘ together as a team, as a division and as a company.

Kid Billy Music - Corporate Team Building Events and Music Team Building Activities

We build teams with music because music draws us in. When we’re engaged in creative activity we stop standing outside ourselves, we stop judging and second guessing who we are and what we should say. Our authentic selves surface. That’s what happens when we’re in the moment and in a creative state. I’m all about music based team building. It’s the vehicle I use to help companies tell their stories, revisit the past, recognize the present and envision the future. Isn’t that what great songs do?

Team Building with Lego

Great songs and Lego…what’s the connection? I couldn’t answer that question about a week ago when I went, somewhat reluctantly, to a day long training facilitated by my friend and right brained colleague Jody Lentz. I wasn’t exactly looking forward to a day doing non-music related activity but somewhere along the way I got hooked, and I got excited. First of all, it’s fun. When we’re having fun we’re in the moment – quite the opposite of boredom. And when we’re in the moment, we’re our most authentic selves, kinda like when we’re creating songs.

Aha Moment

Jody’s program is called, Think With Your Hands® powered by Lego Serious Play®. We build our stories as models; Who are we? How do we fit into our organization? What does our ideal team look like? So last week, we were building this stuff, imagining it all and, Aha, I realized this is like the songwriting process. It’s kinesthetic, it’s fully engaging – we make discoveries about ourselves, our co-workers and our corporate mission – it comes to life through what we build. I got really excited and the day flew by. Team building through song or with Lego; they’re both messy, multidimensional creative activities that provide real ROI because they move us toward a productive end.

Maybe We Should Try This

My reluctance is gone. I’ve been up in the attic rummaging through the boxes of almost forgotten Lego kits and I’m offering up the benefits of team building with Lego. Hmm…after we do that, maybe we can write a song about it.

Kid Billy Music - Corporate Team Building Events and Music Team Building Activities

Every city has a unique musical personality and Chicago is no exception. We’ve worked in Chicago a lot the past couple of years, and I always come prepared to offer up a blues melody to our team building clients. But singing the blues doesn’t have to be a downer. In fact, bringing some grit, some attitude and rhythm to a team building event, not only sets the stage for a great song, it helps groups to loosen up and jump into our program. Great songs tell stories and this process helps teams tell their story through song to re-connect with their mission, refine their message and celebrate the best of what their company does.

Chicago Blues seems to be a great catalyst for musical team building and that’s why we keep connecting with Chicago based organizations like Sunstar Americas, PCMA and conventions at Navy Pier. I’m starting to consider Chicago a second home. In fact we’ve been looking at real estate there and I love hanging out after a client event. So of course as someone who is fairly new to Chicago, I’m always looking for Things To Do In Chicago. That link is a good place to start. A friend of a friend owns the company and they’ll steer you in the right direction – steer me in the right direction too. The more I learn about this city, the more I seem to uncover what I haven’t yet discovered.

But back to Chicago team building. You don’t have to sing the blues, but sometimes singing the blues is a great prescription to cure the blues; yes, I’m sure you see the metaphor coming… Cure your organizational blues, ’cause your company has paid some dues… But seriously, music will enable you to crawl through some of the bad, sing about it, and get to the good. Examine what’s not working for your team, celebrate what is working and envision where your company is headed. See photo below, it’s a lot of fun!

They didn't think they were musical, but before too long they were playing blues harmonica

Kid Billy Music - Corporate Team Building Events and Music Team Building Activities

There was a great story in the New York Times on Sunday about a guy who created a niche and found a new job within his company. By proving that he could improve on an existing system, this employee made himself more valuable to his team and became a unique contributor. From a team building perspective, my first thought while reading the article was about the system within this organization. This leadership group welcomed input and innovation from employees and rewarded it, yielding benefits for all.

One of the great things about the team building work we do is that we get to witness the reduction of communication static and hierarchy during our programs. Music is a leveler, and we often discover that an employee may have more outwardly creative skill than the CEO. In this context, leadership patterns can shift, allowing better communication, increasing employee confidence and engagement.

When employees feel confident, it’s easier for them to suggest new ideas and improvements. It’s easier for members of your team to become agents for change, knowing their ideas will be considered and valued. As a musician, I never labeled the work I did as innovative. But I was always comfortable experimenting, falling flat on my face, getting back up and trying again. I was rewarded for this behavior with success. And that fueled a great cycle of inspiration, innovation and more success.You can create these conditions within your organization by doing some team building, either informal or formal. The first step is to let your team members know that their ideas are heard; that their ideas are honored. If you do, you’ll see employee creativity, engagement and retention rise.

The best answers only come after allowing the questions to live -

• How do you respond to new ideas from your team members?
• Do you allow employees to spend time at play – playing with current problems and playing with new solutions?
• Does your corporate culture reward the change agents within your ranks?

Kid Billy Music - Corporate Team Building Events and Music Team Building Activities

I’m so excited. I know where I’ll be the weekend of April 20th – In a beautiful spot nestled in the mountains outside of Portland, Oregon at The Journey. This weekend retreat will be full of AHA moments, will help you tap into your creative power, and allow you to relax, relax, relax while making some great new friends.

I’ll be presenting my program based around Team Building Through Song, but with some extra goodies; as we delve unhurriedly into our creative curiosity and tap into our own unique abilities to be our best selves. I’ll be in the company of other wonderful presenters who are authors, entertainers, plus experts in fields of creative thinking, the arts, movement, energy work, meditation, feng shui, shamanism and more. I’m so excited about this weekend. Knowing it will be memorable, I’m bringing my wife, Julie, and I hope to see some friends there – so come on!

The Journey is the brainchild of my friend and inspiring creativity guru, Whitney Ferre along with her co-host Bill Olsen. It’s gonna be a good one.

Kid Billy Music - Corporate Team Building Events and Music Team Building Activities