What does positive change look like and how can it be led successfully? Who is holding back change in your station and who is driving it forward? At the 2016 CBAA Conference, Holly Ransom explored the challenges that change poses to community broadcasters.

“I want to look at the trends that are going on in the world that we need to be alive to as leaders in this sector as people who are looking to ensure we move in line with our community,” said Holly.
 
“This is one of my favourite quotes, ‘Everything That Could Have Been Invented Has Been Invented’, but check out the year, it was 1898 – it suggests humankind has peaked.
 
“It seems extraordinary to think that we said that in 1898 when you look at the transformation and change that has happened in the last 12 months alone.”

Holly believes change is not a dirty word suggesting it scares a lot of people but “it doesn’t have to be that way“. What does positive change look like and how can it be led successfully? Who is holding back change in your station and who is driving it forward?

“We need our passive members who love tuning in and listening at the same time, we need our active members, people who are calling up and engaging and wanting to interact and be part of the programming and the shows,” she says.
 
“Finally, we need to think about our partners. Who are the incredible army of people who run our stations, business corporations and governments across the country who support the sector in different ways?

“Where are the areas that you say, there’s an opportunity for us to do a little bit more there?”

Holly is the CEO of Emergent, a company specialising in the development of high performing intergenerational workforces, leadership and social outcomes. Holly is renowned for generating innovative solutions to complex multi-stakeholder problems for corporations, governments and non-profit organisations, and for coaching and professionally mentoring leaders around the world.

“We need to focus on the generational shift,” she says.

“There is a perception that radio is dead within the current generation, that’s not so and the numbers we are seeing suggest there are enormous consumers of audio type media but there are ways this is dramatically changing and we need to be alive to and thinking about.
 
“If we push pause on the planet right now %50 of the world’s population is under the age of the 30. It’s the largest generation of young people we have every seen.
 
“So one of the big things we are going to see in terms of the makeup in our workforce in the future is, that by 2025  75% of the Australian workforce will be millennial. Because of the transitioning out of the Boomer Generation.
 
“What will that mean for our communities when we ask who is able to volunteer.“

Changing Wants and Needs:
 
According to Holly, smartphones are responsible for 41% of the millennial’s radio use, “the growth rate year on year is massive”.

“So it’s important for us to think how are we catering to that?

“If we track attention spans over the past decade they have shrunk from 12 minutes to 4 minutes and that’s after we have given an initial 7 to 8 second window where we judge a book by it’s cover and work whether to give it the four minutes.
 
“It’s important for us to be thinking of that as our engagement window…you have a 4-minute window up front to position your message and content in a way that is going to get that buy in for extending listening and engagement,” she says.
 
“Part of the reason why we watch Millennials is we expect about an 18-month lag time before Generation X will follow.
 
“We expect them to trend lead when it comes to engagement trends so we want to watch them because  our community is probably going to follow them.
 
Holly was one of the world’s youngest-ever Rotary President s with a challenge to grow the organistion and attract the next generation.
 
“I went looking for who had done a really good job of engaging people differently to get a result, I was reached out to and blown away by this year’s Australian of the Year, Lieutenant General Morrison who had tripled the number of women in leadership roles in the army.
 
“He shared with me one of the biggest single insights I had ever had into how to drive engagement and get the buy-in of people who might not otherwise be engaged.
 
“I made sure every single person my organisation could see my why in their why?” he explained.

“For long as this was a thing we should do , could do, ought to do we may have been able to get one step forward but we would just as readily hop two back.
 
“The moment I could create a nexus between this initiative and mission safety, the initiative and your ability to get promoted…that was the moment we started to get real traction and momentum behind what we were doing,” he said

“As we think about how we communicate individually, collectively in our teams as a station when we are going to commercial partners, going out to our community, how is it we can challenge ourselves to lead more with why?”