Don’t make it a life sentence

Part of what radio managers do today is avoid risk.

The safe play can’t be questioned or second-guessed. Doing what we’ve always done, or walking shoulder-to-shoulder with our company’s crowd, means we can’t be the target if/when something goes horribly wrong. We don’t stand out.

We’ve sentenced ourselves to this prison of sameness and seem to have forgotten that we actually hold the key to our own release.

What if I told you I know a station that replaced a well-known syndicated talent with a live announcer 7pm-midnight at considerable cost to their own bottom line. Salary, benefits, moving expenses…people cost money.

And if anything is true for consolidated radio it is that you should save every penny you can so you hit that net profit number you have to hit to keep your job.

But something funny happened to that station that added a live talent at night: Their 6am-6pm numbers started going up, way up. Mornings took off first, and that led to increases in middays and afternoons, and the whole thing just kept on snowballing.

That station now dominates every daypart in their market. That station produced record profit for their owner. And they managed to do that by better-serving their own local community and adding personnel.

If you only invite people whose opinion already agrees with yours into your meetings, you’re unlikely to hear things you don’t want to hear. Less risk anyway.

If you surround yourself with people whose jobs depend upon keeping you happy — not the listeners, you! — chances are you won’t hear many questions about your decisions or policies. Less risk, anyway.

You already know the kicker: Growth doesn’t happen without risk.

When our children are babies, we can protect them from every potentially risky situation, but as they grow and leave our circle of protection, they encounter all sorts of dangerous things: failure, injury, unhappiness…

And it is from experiencing all of these that they grow into capable, confident adults, able to handle adversity and defeat, to take a step down before they take two more steps up on life’s ladder.

Life is risky. Growth is risky. And if your station doesn’t have someone advocating for risk, someone messing up your neat, quick meetings, someone who makes you distinctly uncomfortable from time-to-time, you’ve locked yourself into Radio’s Risk-Free Prison.

And it’s our listeners who feel punished, if they notice us at all.