Climbing the mountain is one thing, staying there is another.

When I was consulting to the GWR Group in the UK I wrote a note to the Programme Controllers, as they were called, in November of 2000, it was titled Leadership – What it takes to Win and I came across it the other day and that note is the basis for this article.

My first job programming a station in a major market was in 1990 at PMFM in Perth. I interviewed for the role while I was Content Director at Coast Rock FM on the Central Coast of NSW and I remember the flight over on the Sunday before I started and how apprehensive I was as the plane began its decent into Perth, I had never been to Perth, and I knew no one in Perth. After we landed, I headed to the hotel, checked in and decided to listen to the competition. The first station I listened to was 96fm, the number one station at the time and it sounded big, the competitions were big, the voices were big, the music sounded very cool and well put together and the station was very Perth. I stared out the window and I thought to myself, this is now the real deal, this is not a regional market, I was now in a multi competitive major market with four surveys a year.

They say that number one is a team sport for people who don’t think they need a team. In any field, a small number of people produce a large share of the results. The harder problem is not becoming one of those people, it is remaining one, while leading others who are also high performers, specialists in what they do, radio stars with strong personalities who don’t like being managed. In Radio and specifically Content the team captain is the Content Director and in FMCG companies the closest comparison is the Brand Manager although there is no other role like that of the Content Director, the person who shapes what a station sounds like: the music or talk, the announcers, etc and the standard everyone is held to. The product goes out in public every day and the ratings are published for rivals and indeed everyone to see. One person no matter how good they are cannot do the work alone. What the evidence does show is that the traits that help someone outperform their peers are not the same as the traits and habits that help them raise other high performers.

“When all is said and done, more is said that done” - Vince Lombardi

When I arrived at PMFM I had had no formal training in managing teams and in fact no training in management, what I knew was only what I had observed since I started in radio back in 1981 and what I had learnt from discussions with consultants I was lucky enough to spend time with. I knew that to keep my job I had to get the ratings and that meant getting PMFM to number one and my approach was to carry no passengers and to be across every part of the product. I wrote the promos, I wrote the liners, I wrote the formatics that every announcer had to follow and I held everyone accountable and I did that by listening a lot, and to drive home the point that I was always listening, twice a month I would set my alarm for 2am (we had live mid-dawns back then) and I got up and rang the hotline and asked the same question every time, “hi mate it’s me, what happened?”. Every time there was a confession, and the word around the station was that I was always listening and of course I made sure I had a great team of people around me.

Most Content Directors want to win and generally speaking the ones who get there, and stay there, are not the most available people in the building, they are not the best at dealing with matters that don’t impact the product, they are not great at PowerPoint presentations, not great at articulating why they want to change that sweeper or music clock and they’re not great at playing company politics but they are experts in strategic programming. A Content Director can fill a week with meetings, presentations and never ending emails and still not be able to hear the station. The role is not facilitation; it’s a specific craft that involves a number of skills which I covered in my very first Substack article “A Misunderstood Role”. It must be thought at three levels at once. Tactical: what is on-air today, Operational: the systems, clocks, coaching, music discipline, who has authority when the CD is not in the room etc and Strategic: who the station is for, how do we deliver that and what we won’t become. Live only at strategy and you become a commentator on your own station. Live only in the tactics and you never build anything that survives a survey. Number one requires all three, with more hours given to the product than to the explanation of it.

“Leaders do much more than demonstrate attributes. Effective leaders get results”.

I remember my first survey at PMFM which came after we’d repositioned the station musically and formed the Morning Crew with Gary Shannon, Amanda Walsh and Paul Redman. The station dropped from number two to number four. The mood in the boardroom was sombre as the results were read out and I remember as we shuffled out of the room when the meeting was over hearing the receptionist saying to a small group people, “we just have to have confidence that Duncan knows what he is doing”.

Getting to number one, and staying there, is rare because it requires a combination of individual skill, the right team, timing, resources and the ability to raise other people’s performance. There’s not a winning personality type as such, as plenty of high performers lack some of the traits associated with high performance and plenty of people with the traits never reach the top. Context, opportunity and luck also matter. The most consistent findings are around how people work, how they learn, and how they persist, not charisma or inspiration. Across dozens of analyses covering thousands of people, the strongest trait is Conscientiousness; follow-through, reliability, the tendency to finish what was promised and Industriousness; staying focused and pursuing goals. High performers deliver results they commit to and show consistency rather than bursts of brilliance then nothing and they demonstrate resilience through setbacks.

When at PMFM I used to get sent aircheck tapes from the USA, that’s the way we heard what other stations were doing as this was pre-internet. One morning I was listening to Eagle 106 in Philadelphia and heard a segment called Worst Joke Wednesday and it was really funny. As Gary Shannon walked past my office on his way out, I grabbed him and got him to listen to it and he liked it. Gary changed the format and made it his own with weekly characters and callers telling jokes as well as reading out jokes listeners had sent in and Worst Joke Wednesday became the biggest thing on the station and at their peak The Morning Crew rated #1 with a 31% share and the station reached #1 with a 28% share.

Studies comparing high performers with average performers find the former stand out on delivering results, championing change and innovation, and being strategic rather than only executing tactics. They tend to be above average on more of the key traits and not merely excellent at one. Resilience, mental toughness and perseverance are important if you want to stay number one. Sustaining success means focussing on the product, on the detail, making sure announcers are coached every week, research is used and not just filed, listening to the competition, changing something that’s broken now not next week and avoiding meeting madness (back-to-back meetings where nothing gets decided) which takes away valuable thinking time, and not treating being busy as progress.

“Programming a station is like having a twelve-month-old child, you can’t leave it alone for very long”.

What getting to number one is not being the most amicable person in the building. It is not a single survey. It is not process in place of having a good ear. It is not a culture that lacks urgency. It is not boldness without judgement; it is not winning the meeting with Sales while losing the listener and it is not copying the competitor’s music clock. A number one station is run by someone who is an expert in strategic programming; who is decisive; who treats poor survey results as their responsibility; who rewards initiative; and who has earned the trust of the talent and the team. In a nutshell, it’s action and intellect, in the same person, focussed on the product, for a long time. That is the job. That’s what it takes.