What makes a thought worth leading with?
“Thought leadership” is such a brilliantly aspirational term. It’s no surprise it’s caught on – who doesn’t want to be a thought leader? Not only leading our organisations, but also leading how people outside think of the issues we care about. What a win! What a lovely feeling.
I confess it’s also a term I regularly use, though I just checked and it’s not in my own Continued Professional Development plan. I do have a goal to “contribute my knowledge to the nonprofit comms and PR sector,” but I try to do that through my actions more than my social media activity.
I am curious, though, since thought leadership has become part of every leader’s comms aspirations, to understand what thought leadership is at its best, and how we can cultivate it and measure its impact.
I see a growing number of voices in my network calling for a rethink. Taazima Kala, writing for the Forbes Agency Council, argues that thought leadership is “losing its edge” because it has become predictable. Organisations are recycling themes and tropes, without any innovation that makes it interesting and new. And as the term has become integrated into leadership goals, there is less risk-taking. Taazima Kala says that real thought leadership involves bravery, and a willingness to challenge audiences and unsettle the status quo.
LinkedIn – one of the platforms for thought leadership with the lowest barriers to entry, sees this type of content as a marketing tool. It’s full of helpful advice for integrating thought leadership into your marketing plans, and getting more eyeballs on your content. They themselves have cashed in on thought leadership’s rise by creating an ad category for it.
I agree: for any activity that requires resource (time is money!) we have to be sure it delivers some kind of result. But while LinkedIn’s algorithms play a part in getting your thoughts to people’s brains, the intrinsic motivation of any social media platform is to maximise its income from your content. So where do we find that confluence between serving the platform (so it will profile our content), and serving our own mission?
The marketing lens on thought leadership
The FT Longitude’s Proving Our Value report presents a framework for linking thought leadership to business outcomes: customer lifetime value, SEO results, and internal adoption of new policies. It encourages marketers to treat thought leadership as a long game. This means tracking (and reporting, probably) the true business effects of your thought leadership content, beyond measuring vanity metrics like clicks and traffic.
I’m on board with measurement, but I am not sure that selling should be the main purpose of thought leadership.
Assessing the value of thought leadership: the ‘bigger pie’ view
When we treat thought leadership as a strategic asset, we are avoiding the question of intellectual value. The core issue is the purpose – what is the point of your thoughts? Are they any good to anyone?
Ritika Puri, a strategist and storyteller who specialises in thought leadership, sees thought leadership as a legacy practice. For her, it is about listening, learning and sharing with generosity. “Leadership”, in this view, is about self-mastery and creating space for others, not asserting expertise. Thought leadership, for Ritika Puri, is not content production. It’s participation in a real conversation.
The FT model, useful as it is for evaluating campaigns, has no space for these qualitative, relational aspects. It assumes the content being measured is worth making in the first place.
Mimi Kalinda, Group CEO and Founder: Africa Communications Media Group (ACG), recently wrote (thought leadership about thought leadership – woah) that thought leadership is not about repeating what is already known. It is about shifting conversations and offering insights that leave a real gap if they disappear. Just because you have an opinion doesn’t mean you’re a thought leader, she argues.
And this is what I think, too. Thought leadership is participation in a discourse that takes the community forward in useful ways. It should be driven by the same drivers behind research and science: what isn’t widely known, or understood, that should be? And what can I usefully contribute to that understanding.
If your report, blog or keynote were removed from circulation, would anyone notice? Would anything in the industry shift? For Mimi Kalinda, these are the tests of meaningful thought leadership. Without a unique contribution, visibility becomes noise.
What to do?
In any marketing or comms effort, I try to coach our team to start from a place of respect for the audience. People don’t have much time. What do we offer them, in exchange for a moment’s attention on our cause? Audiences can tell the difference between positioning and insight. So it’s the communicator (and leader)’s duty to approach any kind of content creation from a value-add perspective. Is this useful to the people who will receive it?
For purpose driven leaders, this is the most meaningful measure of thought leadership. The rest – clicks, reputation, even conversions – will follow.
If this has prompted you to rethink what you’re putting into the world, a simple test is worth returning to: is it genuinely useful, and would anything be lost if it disappeared?
If you’d like support shaping thought leadership or refining your communications strategy, you can explore our work and get in touch to start a conversation.
