After starting out as one myself, I’ve now spent three decades of my life managing and coaching local radio on-air talent. It’s been incredibly rewarding at times, when you feel like you played a role in the upward trajectory of someone’s career, and equally as frustrating, when no approach you try helps a talented on-air personality get out of their own way to keep from self-destructing. It’s not a task for the faint of heart, the thin-skinned or for someone who either loves or hates confrontation. Managing and coaching talent is a specific skill that is hard to teach because much of it has to be learned through hands-on experience. However, there is a simple hack to put anyone who’s new to it in a better position to succeed. That hack is learning how to pick your battles. Here are some thoughts on the two sides of that.

When to give In

A big part of coaching and managing people in any position is motivating them to perform. That’s even more true with radio on-air personalities. No one is motivated by hearing ‘no’ every single time they throw out an idea. That’s part of why I encourage managers to stop saying ‘no’ and start saying ‘no, but’ and redirecting the majority of their employee’s bad ideas into something that fits the format or the budget. But, we also have to learn to say ‘yes’ occasionally on some of the suggestions that may be a tad off target but aren’t going to do any harm to the brand in any way. Usually because they’re either too small to matter or close enough that they’re not worth redirecting. Talent have to feel like they’re getting the occasional win or most personality types will stop trying all-together or start actively rebelling.

When to push back

Most managers have a pretty easy time figuring out when to give in because it’s human nature to enjoy making people happy. The harder part is figuring out when to strategically push back. That’s partly because many stations haven’t clearly defined their brand, their demo and their strategic point of difference from the competition. If those things are established it’s much easier to evaluate everything that’s proposed based on whether it helps build that brand or hurts it. Like I mentioned above, many of the things that fall on the wrong side of that can easily be redirected. However, things will certainly come up that are too far out of bounds to be redirected and simply need to be a hard no. Luckily, those tend to be pretty obvious. Some examples include out-of-format music suggestions, promotions with little to no listener value, on-air features and benchmarks they’ve done on other stations that don’t fit on their new station and events they want to attend that take them away from work without adding any clear station benefit. Does it necessarily mean the talent suggesting these ideas doesn’t belong on the station? No, often it’s because their judgement is clouded by personal interest, lack of experience or because we ourselves haven’t done a good enough job communicating what the station should and shouldn’t do.

Why this all matters is because being a radio on-air personality also requires a very specific skillset that tends to attract people who are creative, smart and often contrarians. Some of them are extroverts, others are introverts, but they all are performers and performers tend to function at a higher level when they’re given more positive feedback than negative feedback. That’s why I start all aircheck sessions with positives before going into the things to work on. Performing a job where our performance is judged in real time by the masses is stressful enough without the added layer of a bad manager.

What do you think? How have you determined when to give in and when to push back when coaching and managing on-air talent? Comment below or email me at Andy@RadioStationConsultant.com.

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