Leadership Lessons From Making Mixed Tapes
I’ve been reminiscing about making mixtapes. For myself, for friends and family. And by tapes, I mean actual physical cassette tapes, not just playlists.
Back in the day (stifle your yawn please!) one of the ways I’d make mixtapes was by recording songs on the radio from the weekly top 40 count down, or the annual countdown of the top 100 songs of all time (that’s how I first came to record, and then love Bohemian Rhapsody – my Dad was more of an Elvis fan, my Mum loved Gene Pitney, but I digress…).
I’d had mixtapes on my mind because I was using them as a tongue in cheek way to describe one of the things that inspired my business name: Pause and Play People Solutions. But prior to publishing this, I had only mentioned it to close friends and people over 40. It goes a little something like this: My business exists to help leaders be at their best while they help their teams realise their potential. If leaders employ some of the same techniques used to make an awesome mixtape into their everyday activities, they’ll really learn to fly.
Let’s break it down:
Pro tip #1: when making a mixtape remember there’s a moment of white space (aka a ‘pause’) before the sound will record. The white space is not nothing. Use this small sound of silence: breathe, set an intention, enjoy the anticipation, lock eye contact, prepare.
Pro tip #2: You need to hit both the ‘play’ and the ‘record’ buttons together for the song to magically transition from the radio onto your mixtape. The play button is needed as that’s where the movement and then momentum originates. As any good leader working this side of the industrial revolution will know, all work and no play makes for a dull, listless and ultimately ineffective workforce. The importance of the record button is perhaps obvious, but I enjoyed the connection made after recently listening to Dr Amishi Jha on a podcast. Dr Amishi is a neuroscientist who specialises in the science of attention. Her work explores how we can harness our limited attention ability to better meet the demands of our lives. She said, “Paying attention is your way of pressing record… What we think of as a memory problem, is actually an attention problem.” The choice of song is not only what we’re recording and paying attention to when we’re making the tape, it’s also what is available to access afterwards, and as we play it over and over, it becomes part of the soundtrack of that part of your life. The summer of ‘69’, the family road trip to the beach, the six-a-side soccer team pre-game rev up anthems… you get the idea. If you’re really clever, you’ll curate the tape with the context in mind.
Pro tip #3: To get a seamless transition between songs, instead of using the ‘stop’ button, use the (you guessed it!) ‘pause’ button. Not only do we not pay enough attention to the good things when we’ve got them, we completely miss the opportunity to be deliberate in how we use the transition space when we’re under pressure in our busy lives. We often pivot so hard between activities and priorities we get whiplash. And we give our teams whiplash too.
Pro tip #4: The better you know your target audience, the better you’ll be able to bring different songs together to create a seamless, enjoyable experience. Your audience/team will come to trust that you prioritise building a depth of understanding about them and that this knowledge forms an integral part of your planning. They will hold onto to that feeling as long as you keep on delivering. You’ll have an ongoing engaged audience who will be itching to hit the play button on their Walkman as soon as you give them the chance. On that note, let people use their own Walkmans whenever you can, don’t insist all the music has to be played through the company stereo. You might not be able to let everyone be a Rock DJ, but you can seek to empower and give autonomy more often than you may think.
Pro tip #5: (This one is just for those who want to take it to the extreme) You can create hours of fun by recording a mixtape of yourself and your younger brother singing duets of your favourite songs into a pedestal fan and strategically using the high-speed dubbing button (if you have to ask, you’ll never know). Find the fun. Just like what we pay attention to will become what we record, when we’re being playful and having fun, we’re increasing our chances of remembering something, we’re improving trust and forming bonds (my brother trusts that I did, in fact, record over our duet album) and we’re creating a fertile environment for creativity, experimentation and innovation.
Finally, if you’re up for a bit of a play right now, re-read my article and count how many song and album names or lyrics I dropped in.
