Your business may face an unfair advantage. This is a challenge that is difficult to overcome. It’s also frustrating and can distract employees from your big picture goals.
As I look back at my time in TV news, I realize that I never worked for a top ranked station. I worked for good stations, in several markets but they never won the quarterly Nielsen ratings honor.
For staff, not being the top dog in your TV market was a bad thing. You wanted to win and believed your work was good enough to achieve the honor.
As time went by, you’d start to realize that ratings, which really only matter for setting station advertising rates, were not always the best indicator of success. Because sometimes, your competition had an unfair advantage you couldn’t overcome. Examples of this include:
- A great lead-in program. Back in the day, if your newscast followed The Oprah Winfrey Show, you’d get a lot of viewers who simply don’t turn off the TV or change the channel, when the show ended. Also, if your station’s network primetime programming was popular, you’d get a similar boost for your evening newscasts.
- Some stations simply spent more than others. The high rollers could pay for more live trucks, better sets, additional crews, as well as more community outreach and advertising.
- A news anchor could represent that unfair advantage. That person may have been in that market for more than 30 years and forged a close connection with viewers. Or the anchor is married to someone in an influential position in town and always gets the scoop, before everyone else, on big stories.
In your world, you may be focused on an unfair advantage and that may be to your disadvantage. Here are some reasons why:
Right Metric?
Are you measuring yourself the right way against your competition? A neighborhood bookstore probably should not compare itself to Amazon.
Decide what really matters for your success. For instance, a business may have fewer sales than the competition but also fewer returns. In this case, customer loyalty and customer service would be better success indicators than sales.
Stress What People Can Control
TV news people tend to be competitive and you want them to be engaged. But one reporter may not be able to change the ratings in their roughly 90 seconds of airtime.
The reporter should instead focus on doing a good job on their stories. That’s something they can control with effort and energy. You can’t let your focus only be on the big picture.
The best coverage of an event may have nothing to do with station ratings. The smart reporters understood that performing well would lead to better career opportunities, regardless of their station’s numbers.
Make sure your employees know what you think makes up a successful day, week, quarter, or year.
Communicate Your Goals
Don’t allow your business to get pulled into an unfair comparison. Otherwise, it can become an ongoing distraction and hurt morale. At one TV station, the joke was that its call letters stood for We’re Stuck in Last.
At that place, ownership was happy with their return on investment. As they saw it, spending more money would have cut into the bottom line and likely would not have changed the ratings significantly. They were happy with a lower rated but profitable business.
Looking back, I can understand that choice but feel that there was not enough communication about what they considered success. The resulting vacuum was filled by ratings, in people’s minds. That frustrated employees, who felt they were coming up short.
Make sure, if you don’t want to follow someone else’s indicator of success, that you supply a different one. You can’t expect employees to instinctively understand your view of success.
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