Host Sara Kacin speaks with academic leaders at Wayne State University to learn how they have developed their careers while empowering themselves and others.

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Episode notes

Mary Zatina is the general manager of WDET 101.9 FM, Detroit's NPR station. In this role, she leads operations for the 48,000-watt public radio station a community service of Wayne State University to provide programming for listeners in the Detroit metro area and beyond. On this episode of EmpowerED to Lead, we'll discover how Zatina has seen public radio evolve and hear her take on what effective leadership really entails (hint: it's not about creating followers).

About Mary Zatina

Mary Zatina is the general manager of WDET 101.9 FM, Detroit's NPR station. Through her role, she works to provide quality programming for listeners in the Detroit metro area and beyond, focusing on audience and revenue growth and community engagement. A former assistant general manager of WDET and proud alumna of Wayne State, Zatina previously worked as senior vice president of government relations and community affairs at Oakwood Healthcare and Beaumont Health, and as an advisor to Gov. Jennifer Granholm.

Additional resources

Stay up to date with WDET on social media. Follow @WDETFM on Facebook, @wdetdetroit on Instagram and @wdet on Twitter.

Follow Mary Zatina on Twitter @MaryZatina and on Instagram @mary.zatina.

Follow EmpowerED to Lead on Twitter @WSUFacSuccess.

Transcript

Narrator:

Welcome to EmpowerED to Lead, a Wayne State University podcast for academic leaders committed to empowering their community to succeed, hosted by Dr. Sara E. Kacin, director of Wayne State's Office for Teaching and Learning and assistant provost for faculty development and success.

This podcast explores the personal journeys of academic leaders, both current and emerging, to learn more about how they've developed their careers. Dr. Kacin speaks with faculty and staff about their work and how they've empowered themselves and others along the way. By doing this, we hope to empower listeners like you, as you continue on your leadership path.

Sara Kacin, Ph.D.:

Mary Zatina is the general manager of WDET, which is Detroit's public radio station. In this role, she leads operations for WDET, which is a community service of Wayne State University, where she herself is a proud alumna. As general manager, Mary focuses on audience and revenue growth and community engagement to ultimately provide quality programming for listeners in the metro Detroit area and beyond. It is an honor to have her here today as a guest on the podcast. Welcome, Mary!

Mary Zatina:

Thank you, Sara! The honor is mine. I'm delighted to be here with you.

Sara Kacin, Ph.D.:

We are so glad to have you here and we're just going to get right on into questions if that's OK with you?

Mary Zatina:

Absolutely. Let it roll!

Sara Kacin, Ph.D.:

OK. So you began your role as general manager in January 2020, shortly before the world changed with the coronavirus pandemic. What have you learned about your leadership style over the past several months?

Mary Zatina:

I have learned how much I love people and being with them in person, being able to read faces and nuance of tone, and I also learned I'm kind of spontaneous, and the fact that this team is not all together in one place here at WDET on campus, it has been very difficult and very frustrating to kind of recapture and maintain the energy and the synergy that I think we have when we are physically together. So I've learned that's a basic need I have to be around my peeps.

Sara Kacin, Ph.D.:

That's wonderful. I'm so glad you brought that up because, obviously, our entire campus is walking through that same path as you so I'm going to ask the hard question: What are ways and strategies that you're trying to work through that to bring people together virtually or bring people together and build energy and synergy so that you can maintain that, as it's looking like it's probably going to be a virtual world for a little bit while now for us.

Mary Zatina:

Well, I'll start by saying safety of our community and safety of the staff is the top priority. So, very early in the governor's executive order Stay Home, Stay Safe we were deemed or identified as an essential business, which meant we never had to close all media entities we're in that category. But we made a decision that there are some members of the WDET staff who have to come into work. They're the folks that you hear on the radio every day: Pat Batcheller, Stephen Henderson, Russ McNamara, Ann Delisi, Rob Reinhart on the weekends. Those folks have to do their shows from here, but there's a lot of us support staff who can work as efficiently and effectively from home, so we said, "If you can work from home, work from home," and we established a set of values that would guide other decisions we're making through COVID, and those values first and foremost are service to the community; health and safety; innovation we've certainly had to find innovative ways to work together; and unity we really are exploring the possibility of how a radio station can truly connect people and make them feel like they're not alone at home. So, sticking to those values and taking care of our people has been pretty essential to us in this new world order.

We've also experimented with that value of innovation: We had a Zoom party when all of our new members and there were several hundred who joined the station in our March on-air campaign could meet the hosts, and these were the music hosts, so there's about 10 music hosts, and we had them all on a Zoom meeting and invited any of the new members to come and see the faces of the hosts and hear their approach to their musical program. Someone pointed out that we could have had a big party and done the very same thing and had the very same guests and hosts present, but we never would have all been able to hear each other's stories, to hear the good questions one member might ask one host and to really have that full sharing. So we're open to the possibility that new technologies for connecting us have some upsides too.

Sara Kacin, Ph.D.:

Definitely. What I love about your answer is that it was kind of a twofold where you included some process things that you did just to, first of all, say, "You're going to be taken care of. This is OK. We value your health and your safety." And, but then also did some innovative things with some virtual meetings to connect and really bring people together I really love that. So keeping that in mind, how do you inspire your staff to innovate in this new virtual or hybrid, I guess, in your situation environment?

Mary Zatina:

You're the person asking questions today, but in my leadership style, I try to be the person who asks questions of the team, and I think through some strategic question-asking you can really draw out the creativity and intelligence of people around you. For example, right before the shutdown, we had a very successful sold-out event called What's So Funny About Detroit, and we're very committed to arts and culture in our programming, and we feel comedy is an important aspect of cultural life. And we wanted to bring together comics from metro Detroit who we thought were underheard, and we had this great event in a stage in a club everyone gathered, lots of laughs. And we lamented after the coronavirus hit, "Oh, we were going to do more of these. How do we do that?" But then, through saying that question, "How do we do it? What could we do? What is possible?" One of the staff members initiated a conversation with a drive-in movie theatre, and we ended up doing our first one in July, where we had six comics it was funny: They were all from Detroit and they all had jokes about driving so far out to Lake Orion to be at Canterbury Village and they had all kinds of jokes about city and suburb inspired by the locale. The comics were we had a camera on them at the front of this big drive-in movie theatre stage with the capacity for the drive-in was 200 cars. We had 200 cars, we sold out and the cars were even more than six feet apart and instead of hearing each other laughing at the jokes, people in their cars honked their horns when they thought something was funny, and then a camera at the front of the complex projected the image of the comics onto the big movie screen. And we just had a sense that our listeners who came to this event were so happy to have a safe, fun, new thing to do, and that never would have happened if we didn't say, "OK, what can we do? Let's focus on what we still have." We're actually going to do a second comedy night in a few weeks because it was so successful.

Sara Kacin, Ph.D.:

Mary, I think you're exactly right: Comedy is just something that many people value and especially during times of uncertainty and wow, that drive-in example is very innovative. Are there other unique ways that you have been connecting with listeners and keeping them engaged and informed? And kind of a follow-up to that is why was that important to you and to WDET?

Mary Zatina:

Well, we exist to serve, and that has been our mandate for over 70 years since the station was first created and given by the UAW to the university here in Detroit to serve the community. So it's absolutely essential, and when we wrote our values our WDET values through this health crisis and that first one was service, we had really two subbullets if you will, but the first was provide the community with factual and helpful news, a place to engage in conversation and a place to enjoy great music as well as serving each other with factual, timely, frequent communication, and serving each other with compassion and real teamwork and good humor. So, other things we've done have come from asking ourselves, "What do our listeners need right now, and how might we be able to serve them?"

A second example another example would be early in the pandemic when everyone is locked down at home, we knew a lot of listeners had fundamental health questions but either couldn't get to their physicians or didn't want to trouble them with something that our audience our community thought might be a lower priority than caring for COVID patients, so we added a second hour of local call-in program we have a program called Detroit Today. It's hosted by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Stephen Henderson. Stephen added a second hour of the program each weekday so that we could have physicians on the program and people could call in, and we kept doing that until the phone lines weren't jammed because we knew we had the ability to connect the community with health experts and by golly, we were going to do it.

Sara Kacin, Ph.D.:

That's wonderful. So, actually, this isn't your first experience at WDET: You were previously an assistant manager from 1985 to 1988. So, then kind of thinking about then and now, how have you seen public radio evolve?

Mary Zatina:

Well, I'm going to have to deny how old that makes me but you're right! I'm back for my second tour of duty at WDET. And it is totally different from the way it was back in the '80s when I was here the first time. I think what is so different about WDET and public media in general right now has everything to do with other media. If you look and take stock of how news is reported in today's day and age, there are many, many more sources of news and information. There is much more scrutiny on the validity of news and information that is being shared and there is much more variety in the level of quality of reporting. So we have tried I don't think it's old-fashioned; I think it's fundamental. We have tried to have tremendous integrity and ethics about how we report news and features. And we have worked diligently to make sure we reflect the community, both in what we say and in what we hear, and in who is reporting. I'm proud to say we have more journalists reporting news than any other electronic news source radio or TV here in metro Detroit. And people might take that for granted they turn on the TV, or they turn on any radio station but it is so important to have people from the community actually investigating and reporting on news and information. And the same is true for music and entertainment, and WDET is an unusual station and its mixed format of news, conversation and music.

But our music is never programmed. There's no host who is told what to play; it's not based on any algorithms of popular songs or big-name artists. Our music hosts in many cases are musicians themselves who know a genre of music who are working hard to identify emerging talent and the best talent through history, and they curate the best musical hours for our listeners too. It really is important for this community, and I dare say all communities, to have that live, local touch with the community we serve, and that used to be more commonplace, but now it is rare, and I'm proud to say, it's present here at WDET in how we serve the community.

Sara Kacin, Ph.D.:

So speaking about talent, Mary, how do you seek out and find new talent for staffing and broadcasting?

Mary Zatina:

Well, I would say, as a new general manager here at the station, my first step is to make sure I know the talent of the incumbents here. You walk in and there's great people doing great work, so I've really made it my first step to make sure I understand everyone's capabilities also what they're doing. In many cases, there's a far higher, broader spectrum of capabilities than actual function. Before we had to sit six feet apart or not sit together at all, I had the good timing, for once, to sit down with each and every member of the staff, one at a time, and I asked him three questions: Tell me what you do here, tell me anything about you you want me to know and my third question was, what advice do you have for me? In those little, quick conversations and they were half an hour, tops I learned so much about the aspirations and the history of each and every one of my folks that has helped me think, OK, I've got a new project, who has the skills and interests to step into this? And I think that's the first step. And then the second step is to really be crystal-clear about what the organization needs that we don't have, and in being crystal-clear about it, starting with that clearly articulated before you go and look for, "OK, who can we get? Who can do that for us?"

Sara Kacin, Ph.D.:

Definitely. So as a leader, where do you find inspiration and who do you seek out as a mentor for your own professional development?

Mary Zatina:

That is an excellent question, and I would say I pick up a lot of things in a variety of places. I talk to people someone a few years ago told me that he works very hard to make sure he meets one new person each week and has a conversation with them, and I cannot say I'm hitting that bar of one person per week, but I really do try to talk to people I don't know. That's been the case in the university: I put a list together of people I just really wanted to meet, ask them their impressions of WDET, tell me about your job … I've had fascinating conversations with people who are right here on campus who have very interesting perspectives and good information and good advice. So I've done that with people internal to Wayne State University and then external people in the community, and I always get a little gold nugget or two from each one of those conversations.

Sara Kacin, Ph.D.:

Wonderful. So there's balance, right? Leadership is all about balance. Is there anything you like to listen to or watch outside of work? What are your favorite things?

Mary Zatina:

This is a time of great imbalance, I feel; On days when I'm working from home, which are most of my days, I find it hard to have any balance. Maybe running down to the basement to change a load of clothes has become the equivalent of taking a walk around our beautiful Midtown campus but boy, that's no substitution. So balance has been hard, but I have recommitted myself to spending time outside every single day, and I have long believed that the only magic pill for anything mood, physical fitness, weight loss the only magic pill is exercise. I don't love running I don't like it at all but I love walking. And so, for me, taking a walk outside in a full stride and I don't mean fast, just a full stride those steps we take in our office and we take in our home office or kitchen, we're not even getting stretched out like a full stride walk will do, so I'm trying to find more balance when I walk. I've been doing walking meetings; unfortunately, I live along some busy streets, so it gets loud, but my coworkers are very accommodating of my walk-and-talks!

Sara Kacin, Ph.D.:

I love that. So some of the really important things that I've heard you say over our time together is kind of the values that you have been utilizing is taking care of people, showing compassion, taking time to get to know them and asking a lot of questions of the team to draw out creativity. Thinking of everything that's happening as an iterative process. You mentioned that after COVID hit, you had to kind of regroup and rethink what are the values? What do our listeners need right now?

A couple other things that you mentioned were really keeping an eye on integrity, and ethics or core values that you live by. And then, in general, just working as far as your own development is building relationships finding the golden nuggets within those and sharing. And then, of course, what you just mentioned: having some check-ins on balance, right? It's real easy to kind of go off in one direction, and so you kind of have to come back to yourself and check back in. Are there other things that you think, "Oh, no, I need to share this piece as well," or any of those areas that you want to reiterate on?

Mary Zatina:

Thank you, Sara. I really believe a leader's job is not to create followers, but to create other leaders. And I think there's a tremendous amount of watching and personal observation that goes on between coworkers and between colleagues. And one word when you were recapping the things I said that I was so happy to hear you repeat a few times is that word: values. And I think any leader a formal leader or an informal leader will have greater success in what they're trying to do, what they hope to do, if they operate from a values perspective, and sometimes that takes an everyday form of … there have been instances where I have no clue what is the right decision to make in a particular situation, but if a few of us are gathered working on that situation, it helps to say, "I value the following,: equity for all employees in this decision. I value timeliness. I value that we keep our listeners first," and that tends to be enough to get a whole team to work together and say, "OK, if those are the values we want to apply to this particular decision-making, what should we do? What can we do, and ultimately, what must we do?" So I would encourage leaders or want-to-be leaders to talk out loud about their values and by the same token, be open to the people around you saying, "I heard you say you valued full awareness and understanding and transparency of our business. Why didn't you then tell us that we're going to have to cut this budget," or this and that. That's OK. That's part of the trust-building process, but lead with your values and talk about them would be one more thing I would want to underscore in this fabulous conversation with you.

Sara Kacin, Ph.D.:

I'm enjoying it quite well as well. So, Mary, we're about to the end of our time here, and I was wondering if you could share with our listeners how they might connect with you in the future, or how they might be able to follow you online?

Mary Zatina:

Well, I would love every single one of your listeners to listen to WDET public radio. They can find us at WDET.org or in the local area on 101.9 FM in Detroit, and also, we have an app. And me? I can be found at Mary M-A-R-Y, the old-fashioned way Mary.Zatina@wdet.org. I'm on LinkedIn with my name; I'm on Facebook using my full name, and Instagram as well, so I would love to connect with our listeners and continue the conversation.

Sara Kacin, Ph.D.:

Mary, wow, thank you so much for sharing such amazing insight today around leadership values and ways to communicate and just in general, things that those who are already leaders or those who are looking to become leaders can use, in some ways, as almost a guidebook. You hit several really important points, and we thank you so much for being here today.

Mary Zatina:

My pleasure, Sara.

Sara Kacin, Ph.D.:

Be sure to join us next time on EmpowerED to Lead.

Narrator:

We're glad to have you listening to EmpowerED to Lead. To learn more about our podcast, please follow us on Twitter @WSUFacSuccess.