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.
- How would you rate the overall culture of our station/cluster?
- How valued do you feel as an employee?
- 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.)
- 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.)
- When problems are identified, how confident are you that management will address them?
- Do you see a future for yourself at this company (station) over the next two years?
- How often do you feel recognized or appreciated for your contributions?
- 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.)
- What is the one thing management could do, besides raises, that would improve our culture?
- 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.