Emma Baylin On The Power Of Communal Singing In Leadership Development And Organisational Change

Using singing in the kind of training context that Shared Harmonies does is unique. How did you come to pursue this approach?

I first fell in love with singing when I was very young, so I feel really blessed. When I was about four or five, a teacher pulled me aside at the end of a school assembly and told me that he thought I had a lovely singing voice and invited me to learn a song to sing in the school play.

At that age, you believe what you get told, good or bad. So I believed him, and I just fell in love with singing, and I’ve sung ever since. As I’ve become older, I’ve realised that a lot of people were told the exact opposite story at school. They were told they had to mime in the school choir or weren’t good enough to be in the school choir. Part of my work is being really passionate about changing that narrative.

Singing is something my whole family loves as well, so often at family gatherings you’ll find us all in the kitchen singing together. But the idea of doing something professionally with singing felt out of reach. I came from a small working-class town, and it felt like if you wanted to do anything with singing you had to be a famous singer, and that felt unattainable.

I ended up in a career doing youth and community work, and that became my passion. I started volunteering in youth work when I was around 14 or 15 after training to be a peer counsellor, and I carried on doing that ever since. Through that work, I specialised in things that improved health and wellbeing, which became a real focus. My career moved through facilitation in youth and community work, training in health awareness for the charitable sector, and then strategic partnership work between the voluntary sector and the NHS.

The more strategic my role became, the more I missed working directly with people and seeing that transition from one place to another in a short time period. I really wanted to get back to that. I wanted to do facilitation again and create something that focused on building connection and community. I was beginning to feel that we were experiencing a real loss of that at a societal level.

I also wanted to do something around improving health and wellbeing because that had been such a major part of my career. Then I thought, why not try and do that through my other passion, which is singing?

The idea really crystallised after I attended a family camp when my son was about one year old. At the camp, somebody ran a community singing workshop, and I experienced such beautiful feelings of connection with a whole group of strangers. There was this real feeling of calmness combined with positive energy. I left feeling uplifted, and I thought, “Yes, this is what I want to do. This is what I want to bring to other people.”

I live in Hebden Bridge, which is an amazing place with lots of community choirs. I realised that if people felt confident in their voices, there were already many places they could go to sing. But if you’re one of those people whose voice was shut down when you were young, or if you feel your voice isn’t good enough, you may never choose to walk into those spaces, even though you would probably benefit enormously from it.

I started researching the benefits of singing and found growing evidence around singing for respiratory conditions, stroke recovery, mental health, and dementia. I realised this was an area where I could genuinely add value because it wasn’t being done locally. That’s really how Shared Harmonies was born.

Shared Harmonies focuses on community singing, workplace choirs, workplace wellbeing and leadership development through singing and team building exercises. 

You mentioned the research there, which is really interesting to me.

It’d be great to dive deeper into some of the research you found, particularly from the wellness aspect. Was there anything that jumped out at you that really proved the impact of what you wanted to do?

It’s a growing field and research is still emerging. When I first launched Shared Harmonies, there had only been a small pilot study into singing for respiratory conditions. A wonderful woman called Phoene Cave, who has been a real pioneer in this work, had carried out a small trial at the Royal Brompton Hospital in London. She wanted to expand the research and partnered with what was then the British Lung Foundation, now Asthma and Lung UK.

They began training facilitators to deliver Sing & Breathe groups and monitor participants at the start, then after three, six, and twelve months. I was on one of the first cohorts of that training and part of that research project. Since then, more studies have emerged around singing for breathing and other health conditions.

There’s been fascinating research into singing for stroke recovery. Singing and speech come from different parts of the brain, but studies have shown that participants who engaged in singing therapy regained speech more quickly than those who didn’t.

We also work with people with Parkinson’s. We know singing helps strengthen the neck muscles and vocal folds, helping people maintain vocal strength, which can be heavily impacted by Parkinson’s disease. More recent research has shown that many of the falls associated with Parkinson’s are connected to the timing centres of the brain. If someone with Parkinson’s listens to music that matches their walking tempo, the brain can attune to that rhythm and help steady movement. It’s amazing.

I’d always known music made me feel happy, but I didn’t understand why until I started researching it. Singing releases all four happiness hormones, creating feelings of uplift and euphoria. It’s also proven to reduce cortisol, the stress hormone.

That powerful feeling people experience when singing together at a sports match, a concert, or in a religious setting, that feeling of “we’re all in this together” is partly because people are collectively releasing oxytocin, the trust hormone. It’s essentially like a giant group hug happening physiologically.

I also think there’s enormous untapped potential in singing’s ability to create new neural pathways. We’re currently doing pioneering work in singing for dementia. Rather than using reminiscence singing, we teach entirely new songs through call and response, including harmony work. We’re seeing people who are regularly told they have no short-term memory capacity learning and retaining new songs week after week.

It’s a fascinating field. There’s already strong evidence, and we keep an updated evidence page on our website, but I still feel the field is relatively untapped. There’s so much more we could explore, especially around workplaces and learning environments.

Moving more towards the workplace side of things, why do you think it’s so hard for learning and behaviour change to happen in organisations?

I think behaviour change is multi-factored and happens on both conscious and subconscious levels. A lot of people hold limiting beliefs, whether they’re aware of them or not. We hear it constantly in our work. Probably 95% of the people we speak to initially say things like, “I can’t sing,” or “I’ve been told my voice is terrible.” Those beliefs often stem from years ago, and people carry them into adulthood.

I also think there are societal pressures around what professionalism is supposed to look like. There’s still an assumption in many workplaces that creativity has no place in professional environments, despite growing evidence that creativity supports learning, development, innovation, and emotional wellbeing.

Music and creativity are deeply connected to how humans learn. We all still remember nursery rhymes because they were taught musically through repetition and call and response. We see both adults and children respond powerfully to that style of learning even now.

I once read a beautiful description comparing the brain to a computer. The logical side of the brain is like the processor, but the creative side is the battery. Without the battery, nothing functions. I love that analogy because it highlights how impossible it is to separate creativity from innovation and progress.

Without imagination, we wouldn’t have inventions, breakthroughs, or social progress. The sciences are essential, but someone first has to imagine a different possibility before research and development can even begin.

Unfortunately, creativity is still often treated as something fluffy or optional rather than essential. When you combine that mindset with people’s fear of judgement in statements like “I can’t sing,” “I can’t dance,” “I’m not creative enough,” it becomes difficult for organisations to embrace these approaches fully.

Thankfully, some forward-thinking organisations are beginning to see the value. We’ve delivered leadership training through singing, which sounds unconventional, but it’s deeply experiential and evidence-based.

I’ve had leaders tell me that a single workshop made them reflect more deeply on their leadership style than six months of traditional leadership training ever had. That’s because people aren’t just reading concepts from a textbook. They’re experiencing something emotionally, physically, and socially, which creates deeper reflection and stronger behavioural change.

It strikes me that the concept we’re getting at here is transfer success i.e. transferring learning into true behaviour change. From a leadership development perspective, how do you think that transfer success is implemented through what you do?

My background is in facilitation and training, so while I absolutely love running singing workshops purely for joy, my real passion is exploring how those experiences can help people reflect, transfer learning, and embed change.

A psychologist friend once told me that what I’d created aligned closely with Kolb’s experiential learning theory. The idea is that people first experience something directly, rather than immediately analysing it intellectually. Then, through facilitation, we reflect on what happened during that experience and connect it back to wider themes.

Because people have actually felt something emotionally rather than simply reading information, the reflection becomes deeper and more personal. They can also better understand the perspectives and emotions of others.

In leadership training, for example, we create experiences that help leaders feel what uncertainty, vulnerability, or challenge can feel like from within a team environment. Leaders may not have personally experienced that emotional state for years because they’re used to operating at a different level of confidence and responsibility.

When they reconnect with those feelings, they begin reflecting differently on what their teams may need in terms of psychological safety, support, and communication. We also help teams reflect on what it means to bring your full self into a workplace and how connection contributes to organisational success.

What excites me most is watching people move from fear and scepticism and the conversation shifts from “Sorry, did she say we’re going to sing?” into genuine enjoyment and self-belief. They realise they’re capable of far more than they imagined. Those shifts then ripple outward into how they see themselves, how they work as teams, and how they lead.

Once people identify meaningful actions from that emotional space, they’re much more likely to implement them in real life. We guide people through a process of experiencing, reflecting, identifying actions, and then embodying those actions. That’s what creates lasting change.

Just as important is the post-training side of things. What are your best practices for helping organisations continue embedding and implementing what they’ve learned?

We try to help people identify one realistic action they can genuinely implement rather than overwhelming them with twenty-five different goals.

Sometimes those actions sound incredibly simple. Someone might decide they’re going to make a concerted effort to walk into work more positively in the morning. Another person may realise they enter the office every day without making eye contact with anyone, immediately sit down at their desk, and communicate by email rather than conversation and decide to start the day differently.

Those seem like small things, but imagine the cultural difference if an entire workplace shifted from disconnected, head-down behaviour to people making eye contact, smiling, and greeting one another intentionally.

Ideally, we encourage people to write those commitments down, and best practice would involve revisiting them after three to six months. We don’t always get the opportunity to do that with organisations, but where we can, it’s incredibly valuable to check in, reinforce the learning, and explore whether meaningful change has happened.

I like the idea of a communal choir becoming part of an employee assistance or wellbeing programme.

Have you had those conversations with businesses, and what would that look like in practice?

We have run workplace choirs for businesses before, and it’s something we’d love to do more of. One-off sessions can be incredibly powerful for reflection and insight, but ongoing workplace choirs operate on multiple levels simultaneously. They positively impact mental health and wellbeing while also creating connection, positivity, and energy that people carry back into their wider roles.

A workplace choir is also a great leveller. You can have everyone from the part-time cleaner to the CEO creating something beautiful together, all equally outside their comfort zone in the beginning. It becomes a physical embodiment of collaboration and harmony.

Because singing releases oxytocin and other positive neurochemicals, bonds form quickly. The benefits compared to the cost feel like a complete no-brainer to me.

The challenge is shifting workplace culture so organisations genuinely prioritise it. Too often, businesses try to squeeze wellbeing activities into lunch breaks, which means they become the first thing people abandon when workloads increase.

Actually embedding creative wellbeing activities into the workday, even allowing paid time to participate, sends a different message to staff. It communicates that the organisation genuinely values wellbeing rather than treating it as an afterthought.

On the other side of that, there’s always the danger of wellbeing becoming a tick-box exercise. How would you encourage organisations to approach it in the right way?

There’s definitely been a culture within the wellness and learning sectors of doing things as a tick-box exercise.

What’s interesting is that some organisations will immediately dismiss something like singing, but become enthusiastic about perk packages or gym subsidies. Yet the research around those benefits is nuanced.

Perk packages tend to work best for people who are already invested in health and wellbeing. If someone already enjoys the gym or nutrition, those benefits feel valuable. But if someone is struggling with confidence, mental health, or isolation, those perks may not help at all. In some cases, seeing colleagues engage with those benefits can actually widen feelings of exclusion.

Real workplace wellbeing requires building confidence, connection, relationships, and support systems. It also means recognising that wellbeing looks different for different people.

Staff can usually tell whether something is genuinely valued or simply performative. The difference lies in whether wellbeing activities are protected, embedded into workplace culture, and embraced by leadership as well as employees.

When senior leaders participate alongside everyone else and not as something done to staff, but as something shared collectively that’s when culture genuinely begins to shift.

How do you keep evolving and learning to improve what you do?

I absolutely love learning, and I think there’s always more to learn. Running a business has constantly stretched me because although I’d held senior leadership positions before, I’d never run a business. Every stage of growth requires new systems, new processes, and new knowledge. At different points I’ve had to learn about CRM systems, operational structures, procedures etc.

I’m a huge believer in continuous development. Even after more than fifteen years in senior leadership positions, I recently completed another leadership development course because there’s always something new to discover, something you’ve forgotten, or a different perspective you haven’t encountered before.

I’m also a part of several amazing networks which include business networks, singing for health networks, and wider singing communities  and I regularly engage in professional development opportunities.

I also think it’s important to continually push yourself outside your comfort zone. I would feel like a fraud asking other people to stretch themselves if I wasn’t willing to do the same. I need to keep learning, evolving, and stepping into discomfort if I’m going to authentically encourage that growth in others.