You know, weeks where there's a holiday just totally mess up my metabolism. I don't know why because Monday was Labor Day. And now this is Wednesday already. How did that even happen?
I didn't leave the house on Labor Day. I did not go to the beach. I did not have a picnic. I did not do any of those things.
I basically hung out of the house. I cleaned my mower. I checked the blade to make sure it was nice and sharp. We're coming into fall in every part of the country except West Central Florida where it's in the 90s and the grass is growing.
I just wanted to check on the blade. Hi everybody, I'm Michael Gross. This is a Daily Grateful and I read an article about gratitude in the workplace. And it had all kinds of interesting things to say about how it's good at boosting employee engagement.
What else did they say? It's a performance booster, leadership and gratitude. It's all of these things that they were talking about. The gratitude's impact on your wellbeing, all of that is very good and it's all true.
I'm going to agree with it. But I'm going to tell you a story about how gratitude totally invigorated my radio card. I started in radio a long time ago and I worked for my first real job in radio. Believe it or not, was a host of a nationally syndicated gardening show on the weekends.
I mean, that's where I started. My first job where they paid me in radio, well, I did fill in work for a guy by the name of Stan Defritis. I filled in for his gardening show. Thus, the program director of the Sun Radio Network would hear me locally because he lived in Tampa and he would hear me fill in for Stan.
He got to hold me and said, we want to make you a national radio star. I say, sure, why not? It sounds good. So my first job in radio was hosting a nationally syndicated coast to coast radio show.
I didn't start at a 5,000 watt radio station in Poughkeepsie. No, I started at the Sun Radio Network in Tampa and it kind of grew relatively quickly. And then finally, the owner of the Sun Radio Network, Chuck Harder, who was also the biggest talk show host on the network, sold the network to somebody called Kayla Broadcasting. They were out of Wisconsin, but they headquartered everything in Tampa.
And they brought in a guy to run things and his name was Bill Wordino. And everybody that worked at the network was freaking out. I mean, these big people coming in here, putting us into a brand new studio, two stories, you know, all kinds of stuff. Just massive stuff happening.
It was rather incredible. But I kind of took it with a grain of salt. I said, okay, this is nice. And then we all got to meet the new boss, guy by the name of Bill Wordino.
Now he wasn't the first boss. The first boss was this guy named Larry who owned Kayla. But he was going to be in Wisconsin all the time. So he hired Bill Wordino to be our boss.
I found out Bill Wordino had zero broadcasting experience, but he was a people person. And you know what? He adapted very quickly. And he learned very quickly.
He read all of the trades. He was on top of everything. He was talking to everybody. And he held meetings.
He held meetings all the time at the meetings where they would drag all the talk show host in to the, you know, and some of the talk show host were broadcasting from different parts of the country. He would fly them in and we would all meet there at the headquarters. And he would critique our shows as we went along. And I heard him start off and he starts with Jeff Brooks who did the auto show.
I said, oh man, you know, Jeff Brooks was in my mind, one of the very best talk show hosts I had ever met. He did a car show called On the Road Again and my gosh, he was fantastic. And Wordino thanked him so much for having the best automobile talk show in the whole country. And it was right there with us.
And he thanked him in front of all of us. I said, wow. And so then he starts talking about other shows and he's, what he kept doing was telling everybody how grateful he was for the job they were doing. I was so nervous.
Then he comes to me because I did things differently than everyone else. I kind of followed the lead of other talk show hosts that didn't work for the network. And I was trying to learn my way. And one of the things I did early was the way I handled callers.
I went through callers relatively quickly. And other talk shows would talk to somebody and say, well, thank you very much for your call and have a nice day. I never did that. I never did that.
As soon as we were done, I would put my little finger down and the guy on the other side of the double bulletproof glass knew to pot that collar down and push the button, make them go away. And then I immediately went to the next caller and I would say, John is insonality. And I moved through callers relatively quickly. I thought he was going to yell at me for that because I was the only one at the network that did that and everybody complained that I did it.
Everybody at the network complained that I did it. So I figured he was going to nail me for that. And the first thing he did was he said, Michael, I want to thank you for your technique on calls. It's absolutely fabulous.
It makes for good radio. You are doing such a good job. I am so happy that you're here. You are fabulous.
I said, whoa. He expressed gratitude to me. Well, as soon as he did that, because I was nervous, but as soon as he did that, I just started feeling, oh, yeah. And looking back at the list in this article, did gratitude have an impact on my well-being?
Yeah, it did. I felt super. The rest of the week, as a matter of fact, it was just great. It was fabulous.
And was it a performance booster? Oh, heck, yes it was because I just concentrated on getting better. And I started reading more articles. And one of the things he did is he hired consultants to come in and I took advantage of those consultants.
I listened to everything they had to say. And I worked hard at building the show and at building my talent and doing all of those things. So yeah, boosted my employee engagement as the article was talking about. Yeah, it did that because I was talking to everybody because everybody was kind of following me at that time.
And the next thing you know, or do you know, bought the national ratings? Now you probably have no idea what that's about, but a radio station will buy the ratings. Back in those days, it was arbitron today. It's Nielsen.
And when a local radio station buys the ratings, that means they are allowed to brag about their ratings. There's that, oh, we're number one or we're number three or whatever. And use that to sell advertising. But radio networks couldn't do that because they had to buy like every radio station across the country.
Negotiated to deal with arbitron to buy national ratings. They spend a lot of money for it. Don't get me wrong. But he wanted to know where everybody was.
He wanted to know where we all were. And as it turns out, on one of the ratings books that came out, they came out three times a year, I believe. I was the number one talk show host on that network. And I was just at a Saturday show.
I had more listeners on my Saturday show than the stars that they had during the week. I had more listeners and advertisers were flocking to me, which was great. It was, you know, it was great. The only reason I knew this was because Wardino appreciated me and he bought the ratings.
And I was allowed to tell people, because if you don't buy the ratings, you're not allowed to tell anybody what your standings are in the ratings. There's very strict rules about what you can talk about with the ratings. Very, very, and if you mess up, they will dump you. The ratings people will, you just don't mess up with that.
You don't do anything to try to affect the ratings. So I never talked about the ratings on the air because I just didn't want to take any chances. But it was all the gratitude that Wardino had for me that just pushed me into being better at that and building that show and making that just work better for me. And it served me very well through the 90s.
It really, really did until consolidation came on and radio networks started changing. And the company called Clear Channel, who is now iHeartRadio, started buying all the stations that I was on and putting their own people on instead of me and the industry just totally changed. But the gratitude I got from that one boss, it was fabulous. I think of it to this day.
I honor him to this day for the gratitude that he showed me and everyone else that worked there. We all got better because of the gratitude and he instilled that with everybody. Everybody there, thank everybody for everything. What was the culture?
It was really, really good. Hope you're having a terrific day. We'll be back tomorrow and I have absolutely no idea what we're going to be talking about. But we will be there and we will be having fun.
Take care everybody.