The biggest complaint I hear from Program Directors is that they don’t have enough time to coach their air talent. But, the fact is, your air personalities are the only part of your product that your competition cannot duplicate. Therefore, it is imperative that you find ways to be more productive and make the time to more effectively coach your air personalities. The best way to become a more effective talent coach is by creating a clear, written plan.

Brian Tracy, author and noted time management expert says that you can increase your productivity and output by 25% or more from the first day that you begin working consistently from a list. Most Program Directors have that “big” list with all the things they need to do that involve the entire realm of programming their radio stations. However,do you have a separate list specifically designed to accomplish your air talent coaching goals this year? If Brian Tracy’s figures are correct, wouldn’t you like to get a 25% increase in the effectiveness of your air talent coaching process?

To accomplish that, consider creating a written 2004 coaching plan for each member of your air staff.

In Steven Covey’s book, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, habit number two is “Begin With the End in Mind.” He says “all successful endeavors are created twice.” First you have to have a mental creation and then a physical creation to all things. To create an effective air talent coaching plan for this year, first you have envision precisely what you want to accomplish. The first step is to make a list of all the things you would like to change, enhance or add to each of your air personalities performances. At this point, set aside any thoughts about if, how or can you ever accomplish these goals. Shut out all fear and negativity and just write your goals down on paper.

Next, put a priority number next to each of the things you would like to accomplish in your air talent coaching process this year. If you have trouble deciding how important an item is, ask yourself this question: which one of these items on my list, if I were to accomplish it today, would do the most to increase this air talent’s ratings position? Sometimes we let small, trivial things get in the way of what is really important in the coaching process. Air talent know the difference between minutia and the “big picture.” When coaching your air staff, if you are focusing on too many things that will not really have a big impact on ratings, you also lose the respect of your air staff.

Now that you have a priority coaching list for each air staff member, you need to make another list prioritizing which air personalities, if coached effectively, will do the most to increase your ratings and/or revenue position. In most cases, it is your morning show. Remember, your time is limited and you are judged by results. So, don’t feel badly about not spending enough time with the part-timers. You have put your workload in a priority order that will get the results your boss expects from you: better numbers.

So, rather than spread yourself thin and do a little coaching with everyone, consider dedicating yourself to a coaching plan that spends more time with your morning show or the air personality that can do the most to impact your ratings. That does not mean you ignore the other members of your air staff. It just means “one size does not fit all.” You don’t have enough time to be democratic. It would be great if you could spend the same amount of time with everyone on your air staff, but when you have that mentality, as it relates to coaching, no substantive improvement happens with anybody on your air staff.

Now that you have created your coaching goals list and put your personalities in priority order, it’s time to create a tangible coaching plan. The key to any effective plan is focus. Pick the top two items on your coaching goals list and focus only on those for the immediate future. The time frame for success varies from immediately to a month to never. It depends upon the effectiveness of the plan, the relationship between management and the personality, the depth of the personality’s talent and the skill of the person presenting the coaching points.

In the book Managing People by the Harvard Business Review, it says one of the biggest mistakes people make when trying to persuade others is to “...think the secret lies in presenting great arguments. Great arguments matter, but so do credibility, emotional level and communication language.” Empathy is a critical skill in the coaching process because in order to persuade someone to change you must provide the person with a personal reason as to why it is going to impact their lives in a positive way.

To do that, you need to ask yourself, if the talent were to accomplish this goal, what positive things would happen in the talent’s life. In order to really answer that question, you have to get out of your own head and into the head of the talent. Forget what you would get or what the station would get for a moment and just focus on what the talent would get if he or she met your goal.

Remember, every person has different emotional needs.

Some air talent want a lot of autonomy. So, if that person meets your goal, you might tell them they can look forward to less meetings. Many air talent want more love and attention. Talent who are driven by love want a lot of positive reinforcement and attention.Write the appropriate benefit to the air personality into your coaching plan.

If there is more than one, write them all down on the plan. The more the better, because sometimes you think you know what they want and you’re wrong. Empathy is not a perfect science. Having backup benefits in your plan will provide you with more ammunition in the event the first round is a dud.

Aside from empathy, the second most important element in successful coaching is your entry point or your headline. How well you start will determine how well you will end. So, the next step in constructing your coaching plan is to carefully think about how you will set up each coaching point when you present it to your air talent.

Make sure your coaching point set-ups are constructed in an assertive, not aggressive manner. The difference between an assertive and an aggressive statement are two words: you idiot. If you can easily add those two words to the end of a sentence, you have made an aggressive statement.

Aggressive statements have an emotional “slap” in them. They are received as personal and punitive. Managers starting off a coaching session with an aggressive statement is one of the main reasons why so many coaching sessions end up being counterproductive.

Let’s look at this through a common tangible example. The most common piece of good advice delivered badly that I hear managers and outside resources bring to talent is you talk too much. When that is said to talent, what they hear is you didn’t think anything I said today was valuable. You talk toomuch hits the childhood emotional “shut up” button and is an ineffective way of communicating the problem.

An assertive way of framing or setting up this same idea would be something like you had two really great ideas in that one set. However, because you put them in one set, you sounded unfocused and chatty. While it is very easy to put the words “you idiot” after “you talk too much,” it is much harder to do so with this set-up. Write down your assertive set-up on your coaching plan.

The final step in creating a coaching plan is to do what sales people call “objection busting.” Anticipate every excuse, reaction or deflection you could possibly get back from the talent you intend to coach, and have a response or non-response for everything that might happen in the session. Write each of the reactions down and how you might respond on your coaching plan. 90% of what you anticipate won’t happen if your coaching set-up is a good one.

Now, it’s time to go to work and begin the actual coaching process. Meet with your talent and focus only on one or two things in each session. Sometimes things farther down on your coaching goals list get fixed by accomplishing the ones higher up on the list. If they do not, you can work down your list one or two at a time, after each of the higher priority items are accomplished.

According to time management experts, we are all working at 130% capacity today. That means everything cannot get done. So, in order to succeed in today’s time challenged environment, we must make priority lists and live by them. By creating an air talent coaching plan and coaching in a mindful priority order, you will get a much better return on your time investment in the air talent coaching process in 2004.