It’s Impossible to Give 100% All the Time

Insightful NFL coaches and some radio Program Directors will admit that across any given season a leader can only inspire their team to its optimum intensity at best, a third of the time. So the balance of their compensation is really earned across the rest of the season where managing the team’s performance-margin makes all the difference.

Inside your building it’s easy to make this observation and to get buy-in from your department heads. But it’s yet another thing to elevate your motivational climate to inspire your staff to stretch their potential far beyond their self-concept.

In a psychological sense it’s not important WHY a morning team is lit up, or why a seller suddenly begins to break records. Yet the coaching cliché “in the zone” is a reasonable parallel. And the best way to energize your staff lies in pushing your own leadership, engaging your imagination and intensity because good enough just isn’t “good enough.”

So instead of benchmarking your cluster against the competitor you love to hate, measure performance against our industry standards, aiming for a higher elevation. Confidence is contagious; a series of wins takes on inertia of its own; suddenly you find members of your staff generating their own stream of conquests. And even through a dark tunnel like the COVID era, when endowed with a taste of success, your talent staff can generate a stream of conquests.

It’s not possible for someone to be at 100% all the time. But it is crucial for them to want to be! It’s an anatomical, biological, fact: we either grow or we perish. There’s no “crying in baseball” there’s no “staying the same.” Business wars—radio included—teach us that perfection is only approached and never permanent. Thinking of the PD’s we’ve mentored and the talent we’ve coached, while perfection is never reached, many have moved far beyond their expectation; the essence of life and the definition of a “good career.”

When you lose the fear of letting go the life ring, willing to swim out into the channel, you’re halfway there. It’s what fuels radio’s best leaders and their talent, resulting in personal fulfillment from emotion, vibrancy and usually a little swagger!

Today belongs to the quick and inspired while the census roles are populated by “people with potential.” Nothing in radio or any other business can replace resolve, dedication and a sustaining competitive hunger to be coached! Asking for help is a sign of strength. If only more radio air talent would see it that way.

These are the things that elevate “promising talent” to icon, and probably why it’s really not crowded at the top. It’s not how good we are…it’s how good we want to be!