The Leader's Playlist Featuring Susan Drumm

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Welcome to amazing Business Radio with best selling author and customer service and business expert Shep Hyken. Shep will talk with some of the smartest thinkers in business to help make you more successful in your professional and personal life. This is Amazing Business Radio with Shep Hyken.

Hello, everybody, it's Shep Hyken here. We're back with another episode of Amazing Business Radio. I'm very excited today because we have Susan Drumm as our guest. She has just written a book, the Leaders Playlist. And this is a book about leadership and about. And by the way, if you've listened to our show in the past, you know I am a huge fan of music. I'm a musician myself. And she talks about how the music, a playlist, can turn our attitudes around, can flip a switch, can make us better leaders. And when it comes to customer service and experience, we need great leadership. We need great managers, great supervisors who are helping us to mentor us and coach us on creating the best experiences possible. A few quick announcements before we dive into the interview. If you've got an amazing story you'd like to share or a question you would like to ask, please use the hashtag Ask Shep if it's a question and go to any one of the social channels out there and post it. I will be happy to share the story. Answer the question either right there in my newsletter on this show, or perhaps on my TV show, which is be amazing or. Or go home. And that can be found on Amazon Prime, Apple tv, Roku, and you can go to beamazing tv. That is beamazing tv. All right, let's get into the interview. Are you ready? I sure am, Susan. Welcome to the show.

Thank you so much. Great to be with you, Bishop.

So I'm excited about this book. And by the way, I must say, I learn more and more about you as I get to know you. And I've now known you for about a year and a half, two years we've been part of this business group where we first met and we took this amazing trip where there were about a dozen of us and we just masterminded and talked about it. And I don't believe your new book, the Leaders Playlist, was even a thought at that point when we first met. Or was it?

Oh, it was. This has been four years in the making. I probably just didn't talk about it yet.

Well, you know what you did do, you shared. You really put us through this assessment. You shared your thinking, which I think is great, which was really a setup. Now I understand what your whole career is about. Which, by the way, speaking of your career, you decided, you know, to, to dump the corporate career for at some point to get your master's in acting in the arts from the London School of Music and Dramatic Arts. And you're a graduate of Harvard Business School. You're really one smart, intimidating woman. Actually, Harvard Law, Harvard Law School, even more intimidating. Excuse me, I'll correct that. Please don't sue me. So.

Well, that's why I got out, because I didn't want to be the one suing everyone.

But no, it pretty, pretty impressive resume as far as background goes. Plus your business is doing very well. So we're going to talk today about the Leaders Playlist, which is your book and it's a wonderful book. And, and just as you think of a music playlist on Spotify, that is like the genesis of what this book is about. And I want to get into specifically the playlist that we play in our head, which has to do with all of the things that happened back to our childhood. But go ahead, give us a little insight about the Leaders Playlist.

Yes. Well, what I discovered in doing leadership development work for the past 20 years is that our childhood wounds show up in the way we lead others. That's what I just see playing out over and over. It wasn't what was going on in the moment that caused this leader to react the way they did. It was triggering an old memory or an old pattern or wound or experience. Because it was fascinating to see. Why would one leader show up one way with bad news, another leader react entirely different? And I think noticing that, but then trying to say, well, how do we shift these deep seated patterns, ones that we know that aren't serving us. In some cases we don't even know they're going on. They're like the background music playing. And in other cases we do, but we just can't seem to shift it. Like I had a leader once say, like, I just can't help myself from micromanaging. I just need to get in there. And so what we do in the.

By the way is this because perhaps this leader's parents micromanaged the way the child was growing up, and therefore they've become accustomed or they've been. Their brain is wired to micromanage every other aspect of their life is. Now they're an adult.

Yeah. They have an internal playlist of I am only loved if I win, and if I'm only loved if I win, then therefore, you know, this was their. Their experience in childhood was I only get attention when I get an A. And I only get attention when things are perfect. And if they're not perfect, then I'm gonna get slammed. So I learned a survival technique to be make sure I have top, top quality work, which is a wonderful superpower.

Yeah, but who wrote that song? Who wrote that song? I'm only loved if I win. I don't play it backwards. This is somebody in a pickup truck hit a dog. And it's like the perfect country song.

But there's songs, there's songs that reference that. Right. And so in a way, what we're doing with the leaders playlist is we're learning what is this background music playing in the background? It's a frequency that you're emanating and the belief that you're holding that showing that's having the world show up to you the way that it does. How do we use music, the literal use of music to interrupt that pattern? And how do we groove a new neural pathway of a new message and use anchor to use as an anchor music to build the synapses more quickly?

Yeah, that's what it looks about. When I first started learning about your book and understanding what it was about, the first things that went through my mind is I created a playlist on Spotify of customer service songs. And I thought, these are the songs that we want to play prior to my speech and as people are coming into the room and like my. And then my walk on music is Bonnie Raitt's song. Let's give them something to talk about, you know, and, you know, obviously the song is talk about Love, Love, love. But how about love, love, love our customers? So that's that what was going on. And I have a whole playlist, actually, if you go to Spotify, you can find the Shep Hyken Customer Service Experience playlist. But that's what went through my mind. So I'm going to ask you, how does the leader playlist, the leader's playlist contribute to the employee experience. The customer experience?

Yes. Well, for sure, in the employee experience, which trickles down to the customer experience. So think about a leader. I worked with her. Her name was Sahar, and she was an incredible entrepreneur. And she learned over time that if it needs to be done, she's got to do it herself. So she had trouble delegating. And as her company grew, she wasn't able to really scale. Her employees got frustrated. Right. She would take the. She would delegate, but take it back. You know, the gives a backsy thing where she didn't like it. Take it back and you're really hampering your growth at that point. So ultimately, the private equity company that invested ended up replacing her as CEO. And it was incredibly painful for her because this was her baby. It was a software company. And. And really, the employee experienced also. They were revolting at one point because they didn't have. They weren't being given the work that they really wanted to do or they'd get started and she would take it back. Now, what's really going on behind the scenes? We figured out that she had a playlist of I am All Alone and she learned to survive. That's a belief that she was holding. But essentially it was the background music of her life and how she viewed things. So in her mind, leading a team was more trouble than it's worth. And she had these phrases like, well, they just don't get it. And so if you can't leverage the team, what are you going to do?

Right. I'm thinking there's a song out there. I don't know who's saying it. One is the loneliest number that you'll ever know.

Yes, yes.

Who wrote that song?

I don't know.

I have the computer right in front of me and I'm going to look it up.

Isn't it from the Beatles or Paul McCartney or something?

It is. One is the loneliest number. And it looks like it's a song by. I've never heard of this. Oh, it's Three Dog Night. How could I know?

Three Dog.

How could I not know that? Three dog night.

See how we don't know the old things?

Two is just a little better than one. But I can't remember the name of it. I'm not going to try and sing it either.

But.

But I mean, that's, you know, when you're a loner and that's the way you are. And that, by the way, with entrepreneurs is very difficult because they're usually. If they're solopreneurs and they start a small business, they're doing everything. Even if they hire 1, 2, 3, 4 people, they still have their fingers and everything. The people that are successful, growing larger business are able to delegate out and walk away. And as Richard Branson said, basically he wants to put himself out of a job. He wants to hire people that are so much better than he is that he can go on and start thinking about other things to create more jobs that will obsolete his own job. It's. It's really a fantastic thing. Anyway, I digress. So this leader struggled. They had this playlist in their head that was really focused on, you know, one, if you will. And how did they overcome it? Did you.

It was not the record.

Was there a side too?

Yes, there was, there was. So her. Her what we do is we use music to catch yourself before you go down the eight lane highway to hell. I call it where you've got this old neural pathway. And her song was song by Halsey called Alone. And it was her trigger point to remember when she wanted to go rogue or go off on her own, that she actually had resources all around her. And so the new playlist was I am supported. And she had some great songs like Rob Bass, it's Take It Takes two. Do you remember that song?

It takes It Takes Two to make.

A thing go right. And, and the more she, she trained her orientation to look for ways in which she was supported by others, ways in which others came to really be there for her and have her back. Because as a child no one did. I mean literally no one had her back. So of course she developed this patterning, but she just didn't train her attention to focus on all the ways she could be supported. And the more she put her attention on that and the more she used music to get her in the emotional resonance, the emotional state of feeling supported, the more she started noticing how she was supported.

Very good. Tell me about your playlist. What was your playlist as a child or what you think it was and what is it today?

Yes. So my old playlist was I am treated unfairly. And I didn't even realize this after doing a lot of self development work over, you know, as I'm a coach doing this work, I've certainly had my own coaching and been to programs and so much self development work. It wasn't until I started writing this book and writing a bit about my life that I saw these patterns of when I hit low points in my life, when what was I feeling and what Was I saying to myself? And inevitably, I was feeling frustrated, left out, and treated unfairly. And I got very clear that that old. That old playlist was I'm treated unfairly. Now, for me, it happened a bit more in my personal life and relationships than it did in work scenarios, but it definitely showed up in work scenarios.

Was it justified in your mind?

In my mind, absolutely. And some of the stories I could tell you, you'll be like, oh, yeah, you were treated unfairly. So it's. But that doesn't matter. It's where you put your attention and it's the meaning you give. You give the experience. And in a way, emotions, believe it or not, half frequencies they can measure. They can measure 3ft off your body, the electromagnetic signal coming from the heart. This is why your dog knows whether you're in a good mood or a bad mood when you walk in the door. They're feeling. You don't have to say anything, right? They're feeling the energy because they can measure it. Well, higher, what they call renewing emotions such as appreciation, joy, and love, those have a higher frequency and resonance than lower, like anger, jealousy, hatred.

How can I get my wife to think like a dog?

So she'll know happy no matter what, Right?

But no, the dog. I mean that. I don't mean that in a. In a derogatory sense whatsoever. But whether it's a spouse, a significant other of a person at work can read your emotions like a dog can read your emotions, knowing whether you're in a good mood, a bad mood, whether you're tense, whether you're relaxed, you know, and it really. I mean, I think back when I had a dog, I know that if I was, like, you know, frazzled and I had a rough day at work, the dog would sit next to me, but on relaxing evenings, the dog would lay on my lap.

Yeah, yeah, they know.

They know.

How do they know? They're picking up the emotional frequency that you're sending out.

So before we take a break, I want to know what. What's the number one top song on your current playlist?

So the one that turned it around for me and always is is Bruno Mars. 24 karat. Yes. I can wrap all the lyrics, but it's the exact opposite. So my old song was the song called Jar of hearts by Christina Perry. This new song is. The party has started. I have arrived. Let's go.

You know what? I know you, and believe me, when I first met you, that's exactly the way I felt. Well, it's time to start this party.

Yeah.

It can begin now. Well, let's take a short break. We come back, we're going to continue the party. We're going to talk more about it. I want to know about, well, there's so much to talk about. The red flags to look for when evaluating yourself as a leader. I think that's important. I want to talk a little bit more about how it ties in to how we manage and lead people, especially as we're trying to create a more customer focused experience for our customers. So let's talk about all that and more coming up in just a moment on Amazing Business Radio. Don't go away. Hi, Shep Hyken, your customer service and experience expert and I'm excited to tell you about my new book, I'll Be Back how to Get Customers to Come Back Again and again.

Now.

This book is packed with idea after idea on how to, just as the title implies, get your customers to come back. In the book you'll learn that repeat customers aren't always loyal customers. Now both are great, but there's a big difference. You'll also learn about 10 reasons a customer may stop doing business with you and three reasons you would stop doing business with them. One of my favorite lessons is a six step process for creating an I'll be back strategy. Of course, there's much more. Much more. You'll start getting more of your customers to say I'll be back almost immediately. Just go to www.I'll be backbook.com again, that's www.I'll be backbook dot com.

You're listening to Amazing Business Radio with best selling author and customer service and business expert Shep Hyken.

We're back on Amazing Business Radio and we are talking with Susan Drum about her new book, the Leader's Playlist. And before we go any further, you know where you can get the book. You can go to Amazon.com or any other place books are sold and if you don't see it there, just ask for it. They can get it. But you might want to also check out Susan's website, which is susandrumm and that's 2M's D R U M M susandrumm.com and there you'll learn more about the book, but you'll also learn about this masterclass that she has created that will take you step by step through all the chapters in the book. It is if Susan is one on one coaching you, you are going to be coached by somebody that has a master's degree from the London School of Dramatic, of Music and Dramatic Arts, and has a degree from Harvard Law School. One very smart, smart person taking you through this important information step by step. All right, Susan, let's talk about some of the red flags to look for when you're evaluating yourself as leader and potentially realizing that you need to read this book. So this is the reason we need to go to either susandrum.com or Amazon and get this book today.

Yes. Well, I would say, you know, leaders are faced with so much coming at them these days, so much change and disruption, and I think you may be having trouble engaging or retaining your team. Right. You can't get the team to. To engage or you can't attract the right talent. You can't keep them motivated the way you used to because they're distracted by all the things going on in the world. You're frustrated. How are you? I would check in and say, where is an area of your life where you feel like you're bumping your head up against a ceiling? You know, where you feel you just can't seem to break through? And the work we might do is to say, well, what's that? What are you saying to yourself about that problem? And what are you saying about yourself about that problem? That's the deeper work that we do in the leaders playlist, but it manifests itself in terms of how you retain and engage your employees, how your company is doing. Right. How you're showing up with your family, where do you really feel that you're misunderstood. All of these are symptoms, or you might be feeling burnout. Right. Change is happening at a faster and faster rate, and it's as if we can't keep up. So all of those, I think, are symptoms of a deeper underlying playlist of how you view the world. Even though external circumstances appear to have shifted and are causing it, how you're responding to the cause is what's in your control.

Right. So can you share with me? I'm gonna. I'm. This is just making my mind swarm with ideas. What music would I want to play over the loudspeaker as people are walking into work in the morning? What. How do I put them in the mood? And what. Are there songs in your playlist that can, you know, just start the motivation?

Yes. Well, here's. Here's the little secret about music. How it impacts you versus someone else is very personal.

So one song is going to work.

Differently, for it's what the music does for you. That's why people sometimes ask, does it matter what genre of music I'm listening to, does it matter if it's instrumental? It's more about what emotional state does that music put you in. And now there's some songs that just generally get people up and going, but you might find someone else who hates that song. So we're not all the same. And I don't think that there is one song that's going to get everybody up and going, but you could probably shoot for something upbeat that is relatively new. So people aren't sick of it yet. Right. There's that song happy that pharrell did.

Oh, yeah, yeah, Right.

And so I think when that first came out, that would get a lot of people up and running. If you played that now, people like, oh, my God, I'm so sick of that song.

The song has to change.

I think this song has to change because the brain likes variety and. And it doesn't have the same impact. When you first heard a favorite song of yours, it could lift you up. Oh, I love that song. Let me turn it up. There are a few songs that every person is different that do it to us every time. And for me, 24 Karat is one of those. I could hear it a hundred times and it would still light me up. But in general, for a lot of music, that's why music is transitory. Unless it's a really good song and they're out there, we need to consume more of it to get that emotional state.

I know. And you and I talked about this a while back. There's this one song, and I can't remember. It's like, oh, what's her name? But it was the perfect day. And it's upbeat and it starts like, you know, wake up a little afternoon. Okay, well, I'm never going to wake up after 12, but, yeah, I'd be lucky if I wake up after six or seven in the morning. But it was like the perfect day, and I just listen to the song, and I think this is how I have to start my day every day. And after about a month of listening to this every day, I said, it's time to change the record and find something else. So I'm actually trying to find my playlist on Spotify. It popped up, and then I lost it. The top 10 customer service doesn't matter. I'll find it later on and we'll post it. I thought that would be fun to share what some of those songs are, so. Well, let's talk about some. I guess the leadership, you know, past leadership, transformation that stands out, stands out it stand out. I am struggling today with my words today. My tenses, my, my, my. You know, I feel like, you know, I didn't have anything to drink yet. I'm thinking about it now, though. Not that there's anything wrong with that middle of the workday afternoon, kind of a, you know, just have a little chill, you know, out there. But, you know, there's. There have been some great transformations that you've seen happen and is there a. I mean, maybe you can share with us another example similar to the one that you shared earlier in the show about how a song just clicked for somebody and they figured it out?

Yes, yes. Oh, the one story that just warms my heart is a leader I worked with. We'll call her Deborah. None of these names are actual the leaders names, by the way, but she got some 360 feedback that she was always trying to insert herself in various meetings and would get pissed off if she wasn't cc'd on certain communication and was having a lot of fights with a particular leader. But in general it was pretty consistent. Like, why does she feel like she needs to be involved in everything? And from her standpoint, these were all that. She had very good justifications why they impacted her line of business. She was head of marketing. She needed to know these things. But what was really going on is she had this old playlist of I'm left out. Where did we find out? I'm like, well, where? What are you feeling? We get to like, what do you feel when this happens, when you're left out of communication or not invited to an important meeting? And we talked about those emotions and we. I asked her, where else has that occurred in your life? What happened happening in her divorce when her kids are choosing to go to visit their dad's lake house and she's left out and she does all sorts of funky things to kind of find out about it. And it they try to keep secret from her then because they know she's going to get upset. But it goes all the way back to childhood when she was. She had a sister who was just a couple years older who was the pretty one and got all the attention. You know, neighbors would come in and they'd fawn over the older sister and she was the mousy one that nobody paid attention to. So her whole worldview got shaped by the fact that she was left out. And so anytime she felt a whiff of that, what was she going to do? She going to make sure that's not going to happen again, right? She's going to say, no, I'm not going to be left out. I'm going to. I'm going to get in there. And so for her, the song that she used to catch herself so she wouldn't go down that pathway again. It's just a neural pathway that got very grooved was Adele's hello. Because it was like, hello, can you hear me? You know, she's just like begging, like, I've been. I've been trying to reach you, you know, please pay attention to me. And she would catch herself when she would get upset by something and go, oh, there's Adele again. There's Adele again.

And then that's all that it took for her to like, the. The trigger. The.

The trigger to get old pathway. But then we got to build a new pathway, right? Because the impetus needs to go down a different path. So. So then we start looking at her playlist, which was I am Welcomed. And her core song was that song Sit Next to Me. I think it's by we the people or something, or Free the people. And. And. But she had a. A real playlist of. Of about 12 songs. And she would practice it. She would put it on in the morning when she got up, you know, at lunch when she got triggered, right? She like, let me play one of the songs. It would get her off. Get her off that old neural pathway. And she started to. Not little things about how she was included. You know, neighbor inviting her over for a glass of wine or, you know, the kids inviting her to do something that they might have otherwise invited the ex husband. And the more she put her attention on ways in which she was welcomed, the more it showed up in her experience, even at work. And now people say she's like a different person. Like, they love working with her. They don't feel this energy of like, I gotta get in there. They welcome her in because she's not inserting, she's being invited. Does that make sense?

It makes total sense to make total sense, and I love it. And while I was listening to this, I'm inspired. I went on Spotify and I found some of the songs. Something to talk about we already talked about.

Yes.

This is what you want when you call customer support. You've got a friend by Carole King. Oh, yeah, okay. Rick Astley. Who? This was like a big hit way back when. Never gonna give you up.

Oh, yeah. Such a good song.

You know, Selena Gomez, Kill him with kindness. Ben King, Stand by Me, Tina. What's love got to do with It? It has everything to do with it. Right. It looks to me like people have been adding to my playlist because these aren't songs. It's. That's what people. And hello. Is on there. Okay. From Adele. Yeah, yeah. And then Ain't no mountain high enough. Okay. I will climb the highest mountain for you. I mean, yes.

Oh, that's a great one for customer service.

Wow. I can't believe all these people have added to the list. Oh, and here's one from Randy Newman, You Got a Friend in me in Toy Story. So there's some great, great hits here. All right. We're just about out of time. And I've had fun talking to you about this. And you know, I'm a musician at heart. It's not what I do for a living, but it's what I do virtually every night when I come home. I don't know if you know this, but I. I play on a regular basis with John Mayer and Eric Clapton. Did you know that?

No.

Yeah. On YouTube. I turn on their songs and I play along with them every night. I gotcha. I got you. So the one final question. It's the one thing question, One last nugget. Your favorite piece of advice from the book.

What would it be that you can shift, you can change? The brain is what they call plastic, meaning malleable. So even the deepest seated patterns can be shifted with practice and music. Is your brain hack to make it happen?

Love it. That is a perfect way to end. Again, the book is titled the leaders Playlist. You can go to Amazon or you can go to Susan Drum with two M's. D R U M M susandrum.com learn about the book. Learn about the masterclass. Susan, thank you for being on our show today.

Thank you. You're the best, Shep.

Well, thank you. You too. All right, everybody, it wraps it up another episode of Amazing Business radio. We will be back next week with another interview. And until that time, this is Shep Hyken reminding you to always be amazing.

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