There was a time in broadcasting when leadership felt less like a promotion and more like a passing of the torch. The men and women who ran stations had walked the same hallways, pulled the same overnight shifts, and sweated the same sales budgets as the people they now led.
They knew what it meant to ride in the station van on a rainy Saturday, to calm a nervous advertiser, or to stay on the air through a storm because a community was counting on them. Along the way, they didn’t just do the job; they told the stories — about the format flip that almost didn’t happen, the promotion that surprised everyone, the moment the audience showed how much the station mattered. Those stories gave context and purpose to the work.
Today, the landscape looks different.
Consolidation, competition from every direction, and the march of technology have opened the doors to a new kind of leader, many from outside traditional radio. They bring valuable skills: financial discipline, digital know-how, experience scaling businesses in tough environments. In an era when radio must live on every platform, those talents are not just welcome, they are needed. But when leaders — no matter where they come from — step into this business without first understanding its history, its people, and its promise to listeners, something important can be lost in translation.
For new leaders who haven’t yet “walked the walk,” the invitation is clear: come all the way in. Sit with the veterans in programming, sales, engineering, and promotions, and ask them how the station became what it is. Absorb its history, its call letters, its format changes, its community moments. Visit clients and community partners and let them tell you what the station has meant to them. Listen to the air staff off-air, not just on-air, and hear how they think about the audience. That is not nostalgia; it is orientation.
For those who have been in radio their whole careers, there is a responsibility, too. The stories, the lessons, the cautions about past mistakes; they all need to be shared intentionally, not kept in desk drawers and fading memories. Mentoring, documenting, and inviting new decision-makers into the culture are not optional extras; they are part of safeguarding the future.
When the best of both worlds come together — seasoned radio wisdom and fresh strategic insight — our industry is at its strongest. Leaders who know the numbers and also know the neighborhoods can make choices that both protect the balance sheet and honor the bond with listeners. That is how we move from simply changing with the times to truly leading through them: by making sure every new set of hands that holds the keys also holds the story.
New leaders don’t need to be from radio, but they do need to be in the studio, in the control room, and in the community long enough to hear the story before they rewrite it.
Thank you for this article. You are exactly right.
Deborah,
I’ll say it again. I sincerely wish you were the CEO of a large radio group today. Your deep understanding of radio, it’s important place in each community, the talented people inside each station that create that magic, your past accomplishments that have never been surpassed and your proven management skills would be such a beam of sunshine.
That’s because too many people in charge today aren’t even in the radio business anymore. We now have the proof. The “best of the best” have all failed to make a dime of profit in the last decade. Instead of making money by designing successful business plans and executing them, they’ve all borrowed money, paid themselves handsome bonuses and surrounded themselves with complicit boards of directors who look the other way.
During their quarterly earnings reports, CEO’s today speak of “soft” market conditions and yet advertisers spent $201 billion with Facebook and $402 with Google last year. That means a river of CASH with $603 billion dollars in it just flowed past their radio stations last year and none of them came up with a successful plan to even dip a bucket into that river of cash.
None of them.
Do you know if they simply focused on the deceptive mirage of “pay per click” display advertising and its frequent inability to deliver anything more than fluffed up website traffic instead of actual unit sales, they could easily claw some of that money into radio? Do you know if they only managed to claw back 3% of what was spent last year on Facebook and Google alone, that would double what was spent in the entire radio industry last year?
Instead, the CEO’s in charge of the most stations all lost money last year again and this year doesn’t look any different. That’s because they’re not in the radio business anymore. They’re in the self-enrichment business, which doesn’t help their companies, it only helps them. As they borrow more money to pay off other loans, they periodically fire people to reduce expenses. When the numbers don’t work anymore, they just declare bankruptcy. Rinse and repeat. That’s not a business plan.
This isn’t leadership either. It’s nothing more than a heist in broad daylight and the security guards are in on it. Let’s just call it what it is.
Tim Cook is stepping down from his 15 year run as the CEO of Apple. If you invested in Apple when he took over, you would have reaped a 1,900 % return on your investment. If you invested in the largest publicly traded radio groups 15 years ago, you would seriously regret that you did that today. That’s called failure.
At what point can we call this what it really is, which is a small group of people engineering their own personal gains at the expense of everyone who works for them? It’s nothing more than that. These CEO’s and their management teams are failing miserably at a time when there is more money being spent today by more companies to desperately reach their next customer than ever before. That could hardly be described as “soft” conditions.
It’s called incompetent leadership failing to recognize the tsunami of money being spent right now in advertising and forming an intelligent business plan to capture some of it. Are you creating cultures of excellence? Establishing best practices? Training and equipping your sales team to be marketing experts able to turn conversations into orders and inventory into revenue? Are you forming lifetime partnerships with clients? Are you trying to deliver a high quality CX? Do you even know what a CX is? Are you striving to improve every single process in each department?
Crickets…
Radio stations reach more people than Facebook or Google and offer at least 15 different ways to connect with consumers. Radio stations have a 100 year track record of successfully building some of the largest brands in the world. Radio stations still reach more people in the US than every other social media.
Radio stations used to generate 50% profit margins, or more, when they were run by mom and pop owners who sometimes barely finished high school.
CEO’s, if you can’t work with that to make money, what exactly do you do all day?
Great Message and Charge To All.
Thanks
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