Radio Companies Need to Talk About Psychological Safety

Seth Resler

By Seth Resler, Jacobs Media Digital Dot Connector

Recently, I heard a radio DJ talk about how a former boss who used to constantly text them during their show with criticism. The DJ said it got so bad that it drove him into therapy. I can relate; I have worked for Program Directors like that.

I have long believed that you can tell the difference between Program Directors who have been DJs and Program Directors who have not because former DJs know that you should never hotline a jock in the middle of their show unless there is an emergency. Doing so undermines the DJ’s confidence in a way that not only makes the rest of their current show suffer, but will also negatively impact future shows, and even the shows of their colleagues. While I understood this at a gut level, I only recently learned that there is an academic explanation for this concept: Psychological Safety.

Behavioral scientist Amy Edmondson, who is credited with coining the phrase, defines psychological safety as “a shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking.” In other words, people who feel psychologically safe at work feel that they can freely speak their minds and even make mistakes in the workplace without fear of retribution.

There is a growing body of research that shows that psychological safety is a crucial component in building a high-performing team and that it may, in fact, be THE key factor. In 2012, Google launched Project Aristotle with the aim of unlocking the secret to high-performing teams. At first, those involved in the project struggled to find any common denominator among their high-performing teams. But eventually, two factors emerged. The New York Times explains:

“First, on the good teams, members spoke in roughly the same proportion, a phenomenon the researchers referred to as ‘’equality in distribution of conversational turn-taking.’’

“Second, the good teams all had high ‘average social sensitivity’ — a fancy way of saying they were skilled at intuiting how others felt based on their tone of voice, their expressions and other nonverbal cues. One of the easiest ways to gauge social sensitivity is to show someone photos of people’s eyes and ask him or her to describe what the people are thinking or feeling — an exam known as the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test. People on the more successful teams in Woolley’s experiment scored above average on the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test. They seemed to know when someone was feeling upset or left out. People on the ineffective teams, in contrast, scored below average. They seemed, as a group, to have less sensitivity toward their colleagues.”

Google was not the first organization to discover this. Prior research by Baer and Frese has also shown the benefits of psychological safety, including higher levels of employee effectiveness and retention.

Much has been written on the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on the mental health of workers, and in the coming years, expect to see research that focuses on the impact of both working from home and returning to the office on psychological safety. But one thing we already know is that proximity has a direct impact on employees’ sense of psychological safety. As Daniel Coyle points out in his book The Culture Code, there are a number of physical patterns that create bonds between team members, including profuse eye contact, verbal exchanges that come in short bursts, and physical touches, such as fist bumps or hugs. These things don’t happen over Zoom.

It’s not just working from home that can prevent the bonds that lead to a sense of psychological safety from forming. I know from my experience as a Program Director that when your employees are in the station at different times because of their different shifts, it is more difficult to build a sense of team spirit. When some employees are voicetracking shifts from other cities, the problem is only getting worse. In other words, radio stations had significant barriers to building a sense of psychological safety before the pandemic; it’s only been exacerbated.

A lack of physical proximity isn’t the only way in which the pandemic had a negative effect on the psychological safety of broadcasters. Job insecurity is also a major contributing factor. When radio companies cut thousands of jobs in response to the pandemic, it not only affects the people who find themselves out of work, but also those who remain in place. Whether they worry that they could lose their job next or are simply stressed because they have to assume additional duties now that there are fewer people in the building, these employees have a harder time performing at their best.

I became a Program Director when I was 27 years old. I was very good at the Programming part of the job — improving the quality of the on-air product — but I was not very good at the Directing part of the job — managing people. Like most people who work in radio, I never received any formal management training.

When I left my role as the PD at WBRU in Providence, I also left the radio industry. I had found myself working in the marketing department at a consulting firm that specialized in leadership development. At the time, I didn’t know that leadership development existed. But I paid a lot of attention to the various authors, speakers, and consultants that came into my orbit. I learned that there are huge bodies of research and writings on precisely the issues I struggled with when I managed people in radio. Needless to say, both the radio station and I would have greatly benefitted if I had received this training earlier.

Radio is a very insular industry. Broadcasters have a bad habit of asking what other radio companies are doing when they could benefit most by looking outside of our industry. This is not only true of marketing or sales strategy but management skills as well.

For years, I have heard aging broadcasters bemoan the loss of “live and local” radio. Perhaps they’re on to something — but not for the reason we might think. While it’s good to have radio broadcasters who are in the same city as their audience members, perhaps the more important factor is having radio broadcasters in the same room as each other. Only then can we build high-performance teams by developing a sense of psychological safety.