Dig Deep, Be Original

If one of radio’s superpowers is connecting with the audience, let’s talk about how that grows over time.

Traditionally, we look at character development in a very linear fashion.  Steve’s married; Steve has dogs; Steve is an NC State fan.  For new shows, this is a safe place to start.  Minus a formed relationship with an audience, this gives you the broadest appeal to form a connection with listeners.  That’s where any of us would be if we met someone at a party.  “Do you think State will win ten football games this year,” is a great way to begin a conversation.

There are wonderful human connections in those stories.  Those give the audience an entry point to getting to know you.  That’s Character Development 101.

But true connection, a requirement as a show matures, requires much deeper levels of vulnerability.  As I talk with talent to nurture their relationships with fans, we focus on the F’s:  fears, failures, and flaws.  Those unpolished parts of your life – the things that did not go according to plan – make you human.  When you dig deep, you become more of an original.

The audience doesn’t want a flawless hero.  They want a real person.

Being vulnerable doesn’t mean turning every break into a therapy session, oversharing private details of your life, or manufacturing false drama.  It means having the courage to acknowledge how messy your life is so listeners can get to know you there, too.  Because that’s all of us.

My friend, Sam Milkman, who works for Coleman Insights, told me once of a talent he worked with who ended every break, “I’m Christian, and I have a lot of personal problems.”  That’s quite disarming and deepened the connection between him and his audience.

Polished can earn admiration.  Social media is an endless parade of perfection.  The perfect meal, the perfect outfit, the perfect social life.  It’s the persona those we follow want us to see.  Perfection creates distance, though.  Unpolished earns trust.

Failures, flaws, and fears (mistakes, embarrassments, regrets) have tension, uncertainty, lessons, humor, and humility.  Some tips as you go there:

  • Share the lesson, not just the wound. A story about a mistake becomes valuable when it gives the audience something to recognize in themselves.
  • Be specific in your storytelling. “I was nervous before that job interview” is fine.  “I sat in the parking lot for ten minutes before going into that meeting because I was convinced I didn’t belong there” is human.
  • Don’t wait for the perfect ending. Life’s not perfect.  But do tell me what you learned about yourself from the experience.
  • Let your flaws co-exist with your strengths. The confident personality can still admit insecurity.  The funny co-host can have a bad day.  The successful person can express doubt.
  • Make room for imperfections in your content. When talent admit a misstep without pretending it didn’t happen, listeners get permission to be imperfect, too.

The goal is to become more recognizable to the audience.  Because the deeper a listener sees themselves in you, the more durable the connection becomes.

Give an F:  show your fears, failings, and flaws to the audience.  Besides the standard attributes, know your weaknesses, too.  Because the things we try the hardest to hide are often the very things that make us worth hearing.

In a world overflowing with image management, digging deep may be the most powerful way to stand out as an original.

Garret and Katie, WOKQ, Portsmouth, NH with Lights, Camera, Langley

The topic you choose makes you relatable (“they talk about things I am interested in”), but it’s the treatment of those topics (what you do with them) that makes you memorable.  Radio is a series of experiences for the audience.  Moment-by-moment, if it’s relatable and entertaining, the audience will tend to stick around or return.  Want extra TSL?  Focus not just on the topic, but what you do with it to hold the audience’s attention for those few minutes.  Garret and Katie, WOKQ, Portsmouth, NH had Ella Langley tickets to give out.  They know that only 2% of the audience will try to win them.  So they knew they needed to focus on entertaining those not trying to win them (the other 98%).  Part of Katie’s character is that she is an actress.  So, to build her character around that attribute and entertain those not looking to win the tickets, they did Lights, Camera, Langley.  Create humor with your treatments and the audience who controls a lot of TSL will stick around or return because you have those images.

The Great Elementary School Speed Trap

It’s been done before but always a hit.  With schools heading back in the next few weeks everywhere, partner with your local police department to set up a clandestine radar trap at an elementary school in a hot zip code.  Have the officer (or someone from the show who’s there), share speeds of cars passing through.  All in an effort to remind people to go the speed limit around schools when they’re in session.

Radio’s Culture Wars and the Big Bleed Out

In the 90s when I programmed WRAL-FM, there were some seminal learning moments that have stuck with me for decades.  Things that shaped how I coach talent today.  Let me share one of them.

Raleigh-based Capitol Broadcasting was a progressive media company.  The owner, Jim Goodmon, believed in several core things which is why the broadcast properties always excelled:  hire the best people, treat them well, and invest in growing their leadership skills.  That investment in the people paid dividends.  The company believed if I got better as a manager, my people would be challenged, happy, and in growth mode, too, and help make the company more successful.

I got to choose yearly leadership training.  One year, I went to the Center for Creative Leadership in Greensboro, NC and took a three-day course on how leaders must adapt in the face of change.  They ran us through several exercises and then put significant change in all of them to see how we’d adapt.  I learned much.

The most thought-provoking included identifying those who reported to me prior to arrival.  The Center surveyed them in two areas:  what leadership attributes are most effective to motivating you as an employee?  And evaluate Steve against those principles.  Kinda like a mini focus group on Steve.  It was all quite fascinating to see me from their perspective and learn from the CCL how to adjust to be a better leader.

The previous Planet Reynolds, I Need This Job:  The Creativity Killer, focused on this.  Radio’s biggest problem is not just its revenue issues.  Bigger than that, it’s the deteriorating culture and fear that permeates everything.  You must fix that to fix the revenue issues.  Because wherever there’s a shitty culture, the best, brightest, and most innovative players (aka the ones who are best equipped to help a manager fix their problems), will leave first.

So, who’s confident enough to do a focus group on their own culture for some honesty to fix what might need to be repaired?  If you’re a curious manager, programmer, or leader of a show, read on because I’ve made this easy.

I’ve put together a short survey you can steal and send your people to assess your culture.  A link is below.  Grab every question and re-create it in Survey Monkey or Google Docs.  This is kinda like your yearly physical.  Your doctor does blood work then shares results that are off so you can adjust what you do to be healthier.

Promise your people and me a few things?  Assure them this is completely anonymous so they can/should be very honest.  There might be a tendency to deny what you see, justify why something is off, or (worse) blame outside forces.  But real leadership is about responsibility and accountability.  Standing up, acknowledging the honest results, then being committed to making any necessary changes to fix what’s off in your culture would be powerful.  It might also help you keep those employees who can help you.

Here are the questions you’ll find in the survey along with why some of them are included.  Completely steal it (link below).  You’ll then get better because you not only listened to your people, you heard them.

  1. How would you rate the overall culture of our station/cluster?
  2. How valued do you feel as an employee?
  3. Do you believe station leadership genuinely cares about employees as people? (This is the most important question because if they don’t feel like the leader cares about them as people, they run.  People will tolerate a lot of challenges when they feel seen, respected, and valued.  When they don’t, they’re scanning the horizon for something else.)
  4. How comfortable are you sharing concerns, ideas, or disagreements with management? (A culture isn’t healthy because people aren’t complaining.  It just may mean key people have given up.  A culture is healthy because people feel safe enough to complain.)
  5. When problems are identified, how confident are you that management will address them?
  6. Do you see a future for yourself at this company (station) over the next two years?
  7. How often do you feel recognized or appreciated for your contributions?
  8. If offered a comparable job elsewhere tomorrow, in or out of radio, how likely would you be to leave? (If more than 25% answer “likely” or “very likely”, your culture will leak talent before you realize it.)
  9. What is the one thing management could do, besides raises, that would improve our culture?
  10. What is the one thing about our culture we should protect and never lose?

This has nothing to do with the company you work for.  It has everything to do with managers and leaders in the building locally.  The most dangerous workplace isn’t the one where people are speaking up.  It’s the one where they’ve stopped.  Let’s be confident enough to ask, and competent enough to act on all of it.  Leaders do that.

The purpose of my doing this for you isn’t to prove you’re doing a good job.  It’s to discover where you can do a better one.  The stations that win the talent war (and by “talent” I don’t mean just the on-air people) won’t necessarily have the biggest budgets.  They’ll be the ones that create a culture where good, smart people want to stay and great people want to come.

Find the full survey to steal/recreate here.  If you want a PDF of the questions and answers to make this on your own, download that here. 

Do this and those you work with will know you care enough to have a great workplace. And know that I’ll be privately cheering you for caring about your culture to ask.

DJ Zog and Ivy Unleashed, Power 96, Miami with The Name Game

On the show DJ Zog and Ivy Unleashed, Power 96, Miami, they’re always making fun that Ivy can’t remember the names of callers seconds after they introduce themselves.  For those of us with the disease PCB (Permanent Content Brain), we see breaks of character development in all of this!  We hatched this idea where listeners would come on, introduce themselves, and attach an interesting fact about their life to the audience and Ivy.  She then had to hold on to the fact and person’s name (no writing anything down) for 24-hours.  The next day at the same time, the callers came back on, reminded her of their interesting personal fact, to see if Ivy remembered their name.  Did she succeed?  Here’s the audio.

The Name Game

A challenge for almost everyone is remembering the names of people you just met.  So, how about doing The Name Game with each cast member?  Take three calls from listeners who’ll give a cast member their name and an interesting fact about themselves.  The cast member must remember the names for 24 hours.  The next day at the same time, have back on all three listeners who offered up the interesting fact to see if the cast member remembers their name.  You can do this multiple times with everyone on the show to see who remembers names best.  Hear audio of this idea here.

The Morning Bullpen, KILT-FM The Bull, Houston with Erik’s Aunt Passes

Human beings are multi-dimensional.  Those in life you have a deep relationship with can show their many sides.  Sometimes funny, other times serious.  To build a substantial relationship with your fans, you must be able to show all those sides.  When you can dig deep (in your life), you’re a true original talent.  Such was with George, Mo, and Erik with a K (The Morning Bullpen), KILT-FM The Bull, Houston.  Erik’s favorite aunt passed away.  Many shows would just ignore this.  I always wonder why?  If I’m close to you personally, to build that deeper relationship, wouldn’t you share that with me in real life?  Erik eulogized his aunt in a break on the show because it was weighing on him heavily.  Can you be this honest with your audience?

Tales from the TSA

With summer vacation travel about to kick into high gear, airports will be quite busy.  Let’s lean into a group of people who have stories.  Tales from the TSA is where you get great travel stories from current and former TSA workers in your market.  Solicit for them offline then record a bunch you can air through the month as everyone will be at the airport, looking to head out of town for some time off.

I Need This Job: The Creativity Killer

Tuesday, June 16, 2026, approximately 1:15pm.  I’m in the middle of a creative talent coaching session with a show then a cast member lays this on me:  “I’ll do it because I need this job.”

It was a gut punch to hear.  They weren’t moving forward with an idea because it was sound, strategic, entertaining, or memorable.  But because they needed the job and they didn’t want to rock the boat.

Fear is an absolutely shitty place from which to make creative, artistic decisions.  But that’s where we are.

Much of what I do is remove fear from rooms.  An idea appears that might get us talk or an image that we’re original around relevant content.  But a show doesn’t want to do it.  Why?  Maybe because they don’t know how, maybe because they disagree, and maybe because they’re scared of what could happen.

Then iHeart offs hundreds of people with smaller companies adding to that number and, once again, to our creatives on whose shoulders rest the kind of radio that works best, more fear.

The Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud once said, “Fear is the path to the dark side.  Fear leads to anger.  Anger leads to hate.  And hate leads to suffering.”  Freud didn’t say that.  Yoda did.

Fear kills creativity and culture.  We must address the fear with a laser focus.

I cannot speak to radio’s financials.  I’m not that smart despite taking accounting in college (I got a D+).  I don’t understand it all.  I do know that fear courses through the veins of our talent and that, dear friends reading this, leads to failure all the time.

Who’ll take that fear away?  Well, good reader, that’s on us all.  Here are things Stevie Wonders®:

  • If you’re in corporate and participate in these conversations, do you owe it to the survivors to have an open forum where they can ask any questions, so they understand this better?  Stepping into the arena means you will take a few punches.  But many are angry from their fear.  Having that open forum could bring short term pain but rebuild trust with those who remain.  If not, we’ll get public corporate statements like this to justify the RIFs (aka terminations):  “We’re always looking for ways to maximize our verticals for efficiency that bring a heightened experience to our audiences.”  Huh?  WTF?  The cynicism deepens as a narrative is affirmed you DO NOT CONTROL, which is NOT GOOD for any of us.  There are companies where this happens when these decisions are made.  How straight can you be with everyone so they can help solve the challenge?  Knowledge and transparency past “we have revenue issues” builds trust.
  • Part of being a leader is being with people. It’s on all of us (not just someone in a managerial position) to listen to those who are scared. You don’t do that by having Panera once a month so everyone can have a free lunch in the conference room.  The very best managers I’ve worked with over the years have EQs off the charts.  Do much more of that.  And if you’re not a “people person manager” learn those skills and/or find those who can.  Our future depends on it.
  • For God’s sake let’s all of us pay attention to those whose passions and livelihoods we’re just taken away from them. They may say on Facebook what a pleasure it was to work there or remind us that you’re bound to be fired in this industry (an awful way to think, but I get it).  Wonder what those people are really thinking in bed at night, fearful about their future in a contracting industry, if they’ll be able to afford their gas or rent, and what happens if they get sick.  We really need to show leadership and be with them.

If there is one skill worth mastering, let it be making people feel heard and valued.  Your words, energy, and presence leave a mark long after the moment is gone.  Most people are fighting this battle and we cannot see it, because they might be too proud to admit it.  Be the person who leads, inspires, listens, and uplifts the survivors and those who lost their jobs and those with fear.  The greatest gift you can give these people is reminding them of their worth.

The “I need this job” people remain and the only way to fix our substantial issues is to not complain about the industry and reference it as though it’s circling the drain, but to do the hardest thing possible and be with people who are impacted – and that is on us all.

Life’s about seizing control.  We can all do that.  A prominent show in a prominent market at a radio station all of us have wanted to work for in our careers just asked for some professional advice.  I told them to find someone who’ll help put together a business plan moving forward where they can create income streams with their talents in other ways than radio only.  Doing that puts you in control of your future.  I say this from personal experience – once you do that, your self-worth is affirmed and you’ll thrive in ways you cannot comprehend today.

The most troubling thing I’ve heard in the last few weeks wasn’t, “Hundreds of people were laid off.”  It was, “I’ll do it because I need this job.”  Fear has never created great radio.  Great radio comes from curiosity, from conviction, and from people willing to raise their hand because they are fearless.  Talent are protecting their jobs – which means the radio they do becomes forgettable.

Each of us have a choice.  Let’s commit to listen more, to explain more, to encourage more, and to lead more by making our people feel safe.  When we do, they create.  And when they create, they connect.  And connection is still the most powerful thing radio has ever done.

Do it for them.  And do it for you.