Accountability and Thought Leadership | Vince Molinaro

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Building accountability for leaders with thought leadership.

An interview with Vince Molinaro about developing accountability and scaling content to new markets.

Today’s guest is Vince Molinaro, founder and CEO of Leadership Contract Inc., former Managing Director – Leadership Solutions at Knightsbridge Human Capital Solutions, author of the best-selling books, The Leadership Contract and Accountable Leaders.

Vince shares his experience working at Knightsbridge helping to establish the brand and creating differentiated intellectual property.  We explore how the new knowledge he created was used to help grow the business and expand from Canada into the US market.

Vince shares how different selling thought leadership can be from other products. Also, he speaks about the difficulties sales teams can have with selling thought leadership. In addition, Vince discusses the methods he has used to bring the marketing and sales team together to create a more effective pipeline.

Three Key Takeaways from the Interview:

• Thought leaders can use writing articles and creating other content to help establish their brand.
• Targeting areas with a similar culture can help thought leaders take their content across borders and into new markets.
• Thought leaders should have their sales team take the program they are having them sell to ensure they fully understand the product they are selling.

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Transcript

Bill Sherman Hello and welcome. You’re listening to Leveraging Thought Leadership. I’m your host, Bill Sherman. And today we’re talking about one of my personal passions, organizational thought leadership. That is the people who create, curate and deploy thought leadership on behalf of their organization. My guest today is Dr. Vince Molinaro. Vince is an example of how a practice lead inside a consulting organization can use thought leadership to grow the business. Vince This area of expertise is leadership. He spent 13 years at Knightsbridge Human Capital Solutions and then three years at Lee Hecht and Harrison as their global managing director of Leveraging Leadership Transformation. In addition, Vince has written three books on leadership and coauthored two others. And now he runs his own company, the CEO of Leadership Contract, Inc.. Vince, welcome to the podcast.

Vince Molinaro Thanks for having me. I’m really looking forward to the conversation.

Bill Sherman Fantastic. So let’s start with your background. You’ve got a Ph.D. you focused in education and then leadership. And then you started at Knightsbridge. So tell me how you started to use thought leadership when you were at Knightsbridge.

Vince Molinaro It goes back many years before, when I was 27, started my first company and at the time I was a career counselor and I kind of like writing articles and I found that that actually played a role in in helping establish my brand and my company at the time. Now, at the time, it wasn’t called thought leadership, but that was something that I always sort of did. So, you know, you fast forward a number of years and to the reference point of Knightsbridge, we always, as part of our strategy, had thought leadership as a pivotal part of how we were not only growing the brand, building our credibility, but really creating greater value for our customers. In fact, in the early days when we started thinking Moves Ahead was really our motto and our tagline. And so this connection between thought and the value you could bring to your clients was just ingrained in how we thought about our company and our business and how we wanted to be perceived in the market.

Bill Sherman And I think you touch on a really good point. There is many people were active in thought leadership even before we had the term today. Right? Whether that was individuals or organizations.

Vince Molinaro So. Right.

Bill Sherman So with that, how did you get into. So you said Knightsbridge had the values and the motto. But at some point, did you step up and say, hey, I’m going to start writing and doing thought leadership? Did someone come to you? What’s that story?

Vince Molinaro Yeah. So I joined Knightsbridge, came through an acquisition. So the firm I was with just before that, it was there for about 4 or 5 months and I joined that that kind of mid-term consulting company to drive their learning and leadership practice. And I said to them, Listen, I’m going to come in, I’m going to write articles, I’m going to probably write books, I’m going to create IP off of that. So that was the other important thing for me. It wasn’t just creating thought leadership for the sake of thought leadership. It was an opportunity to create really differentiated intellectual property. And then, you know, so I began to do that. And then after the acquisition, really continue to do that. And then at some point, I was given the role to lead the leadership practice within Knightsbridge, which I did for about a decade of my time there. And so thought leadership was always part of what we did. I did it personally. I work with colleagues and my team. We tried to really encourage other practitioners in other practices, whether it was in the search or career transition practice for my own practice, to really contribute their insights and ideas that they gleaned from working with some of the leading companies that were part of our client base.

Bill Sherman You mentioned the creation of IP. And I think in an area such as leadership, that becomes essential if you’re going to do thought leadership in an area is leadership because it’s easy to do content marketing or repeat what others have said. There’s good stuff that’s been said before, but it takes an effort to say, I’m going to raise the bar and add something new to the conversation. On leadership as a topic. Talk about that mindset and sort of that ambition where you sit and you say, okay, this is something people have been talking about for years. What do I have to say that’s new, different, interesting, or to a different audience?

Vince Molinaro Well, it’s funny, you know how you position that it’s so accurate. But as I reflect on, you know, the answer, it really was rooted in my academic preparation because ultimately, you know, as a researcher, your job is really to create new knowledge. And part of that process is to look at any field and to say, okay, what do we know about that topic now? What are the shortfalls of what we know in terms of solving problems or future problems we face? And what new knowledge will your research reveal that will really advance our thinking? So in many ways, my own take on that was really influenced by my graduate work that I did. As I read my company, though, I was kind of immersed in two worlds for a period of time where I was in that kind of academic research world and then in the entrepreneurial world and merging the two was quite fascinating. So to me, that really is, you know, is that on a more practical level, you know, your clients come to you with their toughest problems, right? Because if they could solve all their problems, they wouldn’t need consultants like us. And so when they come with your toughest problems and the advantage we have is, you see one problem when in one organization and then you start seeing that same pattern emerge company after company. They don’t know that because they tend to be kind of focused, their heads down, focused in their own company. But but someone who consults and has that external view sees it because you really cross a number of companies. And so then that’s where that process comes in. Okay, so what do we know about this challenge? What’s missing in the thinking and in the practice? And how can we, through our research, our thinking in partnership with our customers, really generate new insights that help companies be more successful? So for me, you know that that’s clearly the driver is ultimately how do we create how do we continue to create great value for organizations so they can continue to be more successful?

Bill Sherman The creation of value is very much the language of someone running a practice. You want to serve your clients so that you create value, so that you’re growing the business At the same time, you’re talking from the language of a researcher and adding new knowledge, right? So how did you marry those two worlds? To use the new knowledge you’ve created to grow the business. What did you do and how did you do it? So tell that story, please.

Vince Molinaro You know, if we think about the work, I didn’t leadership. It began with a customer problem where, you know, around this is just really coming out of the tail end of the great financial global crisis, 28,009. I think at that time, you know, a lot of companies were reevaluating a number of things in their companies. And one of the things they were reevaluating was leadership development. And by that time, you know, the spend and leadership development had continued to increase. But I was just encountering this frustration around we’re spending the money. We’re doing everything that’s supposed to be best practices, but we’re not seeing it translate into stronger leadership. There’s something going on here. And they were kind of bewildered and they didn’t have an answer. And as I started to hear this over and over and over again as a problem, I began to say, there’s something here we got to dig into. And as I step back and thought about the challenges, this idea of a leadership contract came to my head around, I think what’s missing is we have a lot of people in leadership roles who don’t fully appreciate what it really means to be a leader and are not been stepping up to the expectations of the companies. And so those ideas kind of began to formulate that began to grow. And then as I was testing the ideas with clients, I was seeing that. That’s right. This is what’s missing. This is what we need. And that was kind of the validation process. So it’s kind of this this kind of go back and, you know, you’ve got an idea, then you kind of try it out. You get initial feedback, you iterate, you iterate, you iterate, and then you start writing. And then, you know, the leadership contract came out in 2013 and it really tried to uncover this kind of for terms of this contract that a lot of leaders aren’t aware of. And it immediately resonated in the market. We built products and solutions around that that we brought into our client organizations. And for Knightsbridge, when we did it, we were expanding out of Canada into the US and used the thought leadership strategy to grow our brand in the world’s largest leadership development market. And very quickly, you know, went from zero revenue in the US to two millions in a pretty short period of time because that formula kind of work. But I think it’s not just about the book, it’s not just about a speech. It’s about having that whole platform of solutions you can bring to a customer tied to the ideas that helped them solve that pressing problem. And, you know, that was the journey we were on. And then I started to, as we were doing a lot of client work, you know, new problems emerge. And then, as you know, the Knightsbridge was acquired by Lee Hecht Harrison at the time. They brought myself and a colleague into the deal saying, you know, you guys need to come over. And they gave him the country to run. And they gave me a global role to say, You seem to have figured out a formula that worked at Knightsbridge. Help us do that here on a global basis. And so we basically took the formula we developed around leadership and research and IP and really exploded it globally and there as well in a very short period of time after traveling to, you know, 25 countries, 80 cities, we went net new incremental revenue from zero with these solutions from about €11 million. And you really got to see that formula put into action. But then the clients kind of said, okay, this is great, but you know what? We need more from our leaders. We need them to not only hold themselves accountable, we need to really hold others accountable. They’ve got to build accountable teams and they’ve got to work together to ensure that accountability is ingrained in our culture. How do we do that? And so that led me to write my newest book, Accountable Leaders that just came out that really now takes those ideas more from an organizational lens. And in my company, we’re developing solutions to bring to clients as well. So that’s kind of been the flow of the story and how we’ve kind of gone at it.

Bill Sherman Well, and that’s fantastic. And I can hear in that story you were wearing several hats along the way, still serving clients, finding time to write books, and then get out there to speak and attract attention for it. I think one of the things that a lot of practice leads who think that, you know, they’re going to get into thought leadership, they’ll write the book and then all of a sudden business writes itself because you’re a published author. And that process usually isn’t as simple of the people say, you’re published now, great, come in and solve this problem. Talk about how coming from Canada into the U.S. market, how did you get that attention and how did. Thought leadership play in that role. What did you do? How did you get noticed? What did you try that worked? And what was like? While we wouldn’t repeat that again because it didn’t have any traction.

Vince Molinaro Yeah. One of the things we did is we partnered with a small firm in Boston that did outdoor outbound sales. Right. And the business model was really simple. He would call a bunch of organizations in the industries that we wanted our focus on to kind of land appointments that then our salespeople would go in to start talking about Knightsbridge and talk about our solutions. And we had developed an initial script tied to my book, the Leadership contract. And I remember one afternoon he called me on my cell and he was just Frankl’s. It’s about leadership, accountability. That’s it. That’s the hot button issue. And once he clicked in on that, then his track record of conversion just went through the roof. That somehow between the ideas and him reaching out to organizations, he landed on that and that became an accelerator. Once we got really, really clear on what was the hot button issue. And while my ideas in my book talked a lot about leadership accountability, it probably wasn’t framed as clearly as the customers were seeing the problem or organizations were seeing the problem. So I think that was something that really helped accelerate our ability to be successful there. You know, the other thing we did is, you know, the United States is a massive market. So we focused on a few areas. For example, our first office, we opened in Chicago because we felt that kind of that Midwest culture was similar to the Canadian culture and that we would have success there and that and that kind of that kind of work, that the challenge that we face that I think all professional services firm and probably all companies face is really about building scale. How do you how do you build the consistent delivery arm, the consistent sales arm, to bring a unified experience? You know, like the success we were having in our home country? How are we ensuring that we’re generating that in a new market? And that is always that’s always the scale is always the challenge, you know, to drive that that consistent growth. We were, you know, we had hiccups along the way. But I think overall we were able to drive some success to the point that, you know, Knightsbridge was that was a sizable quite a sizable firm. And then, you know, the Adecco group in L.A. came along and acquired us. So that that’s a testament to our success and the power of a brand that was built in that time.

Bill Sherman If you are enjoying this episode of Leveraging Thought Leadership, please make sure to subscribe. If you’d like to help spread the word about the podcast. Please leave a five-star review and share it with your friends. We are available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and all major platforms as well as at LeveragingThoughtLeadership.com.

Bill Sherman You talk about scale and I think one of the things that thought leadership is about is taking an idea to scale. And you mentioned the first step is you got to get your salespeople to understand what is it that we’re selling? What is this idea? Because if they don’t understand the idea, it’s going to be harder for them to communicate to a prospect or a buyer. If it’s an existing client and you’re trying to communicate a new idea, they need to know what they’re talking about, whether that’s in a meeting at a dinner. And so they have to understand and then your delivery arm has to understand what’s this idea that we’re implementing in the organization. And all of those are prerequisites to implement before you can bring that idea inside of an organization to scale. And so I think your answer was very much on point with the opportunity the thought leadership allows, as well as one of the challenges you have to be looking going, does my team get it or am I the one person in the organization saying, I’ve got this great idea?

Vince Molinaro And part of the evolution that we learned we needed to do it all changes. You know, it was the world’s largest career transition company, a huge brand, and they had a sizable talent business. Even today, they’re recognized as one of the top ten trading firms. So a really great story there. But the other the other sales implication is, you know, historically they sold a set of products or solutions to their customers and it was a more transactional sale. The second you start introducing thought leadership into the mix, it now shifts the expectations of that salesperson. They now need to come in and add a little bit more of an elevated level. It’s less about a product sale. It’s more about having a business conversation. And we found that some were able to just migrate to make that more. Eat really, really quickly. And others really, really struggled because our solutions were leadership development solutions. But they all said, well, if I can experience this program personally, that would really help me. And we clearly saw when whenever we were able to do that, we saw that that impact on the success of those salespeople and the very regions they were geographically. So. So I think that’s the other thing that you have to understand. If you are an internal leadership practitioners, this interface between marketing and sales is critical. And you need to kind of gauge can your folks you’ve got to help them understand how to have a sales conversation that’s about thought leadership, that’s about presenting a point of view. And sometimes you may have a prospect in front of you who disagrees with you. And a salesperson never wants to have a prospect disagree with them. And that, you know, we would say, but that’s okay. That’s going to start a conversation, right? Dig into why they disagree with it. It’ll help you uncover their needs even further in a way you didn’t before. So those are the subtleties that we learned just through trial and error of seeing what was working, what was not working as quickly as we would have liked. So I think that is the other element. If you’re kind of a thought leadership practitioner inside a company, kind of with your own small team and you’re an island disconnected from the rest or on the other side, your house of marketing, and it’s essentially a content factory. I don’t think those models work as much. You’ve got to find a way to really integrate into the into the business, both from a sales marketing standpoint.

Bill Sherman Several things here. One, that sense of what is the business, your business that you’re creating thought leadership for trying to accomplish. Second, who are you trying to reach with your thought leadership and is that the same as your current buyer of services? Is it an extension? Is it a different pain point? All of those things impact how sales has the conversation. One of the things that I’ve seen successfully, whether it’s a practice lead, doing thought leadership or head of thought leadership, is you’ve got to sit down with marketing, you’ve got to sit down with sales. You’ve got to understand what the pulse of the field is saying so that you’re not talking in a vacuum. Because if you’re not connected with what the world is talking about or what problems people are on the buy side are trying to solve, you’re in an echo chamber. You’re writing for yourself.

Vince Molinaro You’re absolutely right. The challenge there is it’s you need. You need to kind of strike this balance of definitely tapping into the field because they’re in front of prospects and customers every day. You know, number one, which is great. Number two, though, is you will get ideas and insights that are across the spectrum, you know, where there were time. And while we should be setting up a compensation practice because, you know, I went to this one prospect and if we did this, I would be able to drive that sale and I would go, But we’re not a compensation from why would we even do that? You know, so you got to you got to manage that a little bit. But I definitely agree with you. I think you’ve got to put in some practices that regularly tap into the insight of sales and marketing because they’re so close to your prospects and your customers.

Bill Sherman If you look at sort of the arc of your work on leadership, it seems in some ways that comment that you said, your sales guy going, it’s about accountability. That feedback has sort of influenced the shape of the content that you’ve been creating going forward. Is that fair to say on that?

Vince Molinaro Well, you know, I think I think for me, it comes back to probably my right in my research background, Right. It’s at the end of the day, you know, thought leadership is a hypothesis at best. Right. Of how you think the world should be or how you think a problem should be solved. And if it’s informed by a lot of actual experience and customers or working with leaders, then, you know, then you’re good. And I think when it’s not, then these are far flung. And the leadership world in particular has Philip filled some really great romantic ideas that I know when I read it. They may sound intriguing, but will not work in practice, right? And so I think that’s one of the variables. But I think my nature is I’m you know, sometimes I feel like I’m almost like a stand up comic where I’m always testing material, so to speak, right now. You know, I’ve got I’ve got a notebook that I write feverishly. In fact, when I was writing my most recent book, I was, you know, I had done all the external research that you would do to create a book. And then I thought, wait a minute, I got all my notebooks and I and I keep all my notebooks that I found in my garage, a couple of box banker’s boxes, and I had notebooks to 2000 dating back to 2005. And I went through every single page really kind of saying, what did I see in a lead it from a leadership standpoint over that period of time. It was pre great, you know, the financial crisis and everything since then. And that became really fascinating to see that play out. But for me, my nature is so that validation that, you know, I’m thinking about this. What do you think? You get a reaction. And that kind of keeps feeding your ideas. So I’m I’ve caught in the back of my notebook all of my brain waves that come and I kind of got them down. And then I’m constantly testing the ideas, formulating the theory sort of speak.

Bill Sherman So the connection between hypothesis testing and stand up comedy, I think is spot on, right? You may fall in love with something and think it’s the greatest piece ever. But if it doesn’t get traction, if people don’t lean in or it goes over their heads, it doesn’t matter if you’re brilliant. You’ve got to meet people where they are with your content.

Vince Molinaro Yeah, and it’s why I made a decision early on that academia wasn’t for me. Right. Is because I could have easily done that. And in many ways I many ways I sometimes feel like an entrepreneurial academic. You know, it’s taking the things that I learned in research and particularly qualitative research, applying them into the world of business and bringing that sense of rigor and how research is done and ideas are cultivated. And that I think, is and everyone has their own formula. That was my formula.

Bill Sherman You’ve had a couple of different perspectives in terms of being the researcher, being an entrepreneur, doing your own writing, then doing IP creation inside of various firms. And now back to being your own entrepreneur who’s creating content and putting it out into the world. If you had advice for someone who is a practitioner, practice lead, who has an area of expertise and they’re often running on the challenge of I’ve got a billable hour or I’m responsible for filling the pipeline. How do you balance those responsibilities with creating IP and then give them advice on what might work, what might not work, and then talk about where you are today.

Vince Molinaro You know, it’s a great question. And part of my role as a particularly internal role was to help others grow those who were motivated to become thought leaders. And what I would often say is, well, let’s start let’s start capturing your thoughts. So let’s say when you write a blog, let’s start with one blog. Can you get your ideas down in one go in 1000 words? And I can tell you, of all the people that that would come to me, I wouldn’t hear back from 95% of them. And of the 5% would come back and say, Great, let’s edit it. We’re going to post it now. I’m really interested in your 10th blog, so let’s start developing a map. And how do you get from your first blog to your 10th blog? 95% never came back. So in many ways, it’s really easy, right? It’s really easy for people to become thought leaders. But you’ve got to find a way to create how you approach your job or how you approach your work. So you are carving out time to capturing your ideas. Sometimes we become our own barriers because we look for perfection. We stare at the blank page. It doesn’t have to be good. The creation process is separate from the editing process, so just fill that blank laptop with ideas and you will refine them over time. The great thing why I get jazzed about it now is that we there’s so many more options to put out your IP, right? To put out your thoughts, whether it is a thousand word blog, whether it’s a video. There are really no barriers now because traditionally when I started it was you had to write a book. Everyone tries to jump to the book. You don’t need a book. You could do really well with a really well developed, well-designed, thoughtful e-book. That’s about 4000 words. That’s a chapter in a book. So there are ways to chunk that work down. But I find many of us kind of get in our own way sometimes. So I think that’s what I would do. Just carve out your role. So you’re constantly finding ways to figure out a formula where you can spend time to think and capture the outputs of your thinking and then put it out to the world and get feedback. The world. The market will tell you whether your ideas have any value immediately, and that’s okay If you don’t get the response you want, it’s okay. You just keep at it. You keep at it. And that’s I find it’s just a practical exercise and you’ve got to find how to write your life that way.

Bill Sherman Well, and from a rapid prototyping perspective, the ability to test ideas is so much easier now, right? So now with writing a book, you work on it, you polish it, you polish it, you get your manuscript done, goes through editing, and you put it out in the world and you wait to see what people think. Writing as opposed to you can go on LinkedIn, do a short post and you’ll see very quickly what feedback likes and responses you’ve gotten or if there are crickets. And so a buddy of mine years ago when blogging started said you have to be prepared for the long haul if you’re going into this. And he said, if you’re not ready to do what 100 times, rethink what you’re doing and make it simpler so that you’re committed to doing it 100 times.

Vince Molinaro And what you think may resonate. So I’ll produce a blog and I’ll kind of go, that’s a good one. And you put it out there and you kind of go, Well, that didn’t have the reaction I thought it was going to have. And then you post something that it’s even just a throwaway. Like when the pandemic started, I had the sense that I said, wow, the extroverts are going to lose their time during lockdown and the introverts are probably going to relish this period. So a few weeks went by and I just I just decided, let me put that out there to see. And that thing generated a ton of interest and activity and commenting and views. And that’s not even something I would have expected. But so you just to your point, you just got to try and you’ll get feedback. Now, I’m not going to be doing work on introverts versus extroverts, but the whole point is it’s really about you just never know what’s going to be meaningful and resonates with people. But if you’re always worrying about putting the one perfect piece out, you’ll never figure it out. So just, you know, just as good. Quality that you can put out on a consistent basis. And as you said, no over the long haul.

Bill Sherman That’s really good advice, Vince. And I loved what you said about the mentoring and asking that question of, okay, you got one out, how are you going to get ten? And preparing people for the journey. I think people think that one piece of thought leadership is enough. It’s a magic bullet. And that’s not true. It’s the persistence that matters.

Vince Molinaro Yeah, you’re absolutely right. I sort of think about it as, you know, being on this massive beach and your blog post or your Twitter comment is one grain of sand. Right. And that’s the reality today because of the volume of ideas that are out there. But that’s okay. You’ll find your audience. You’ll find your fan base, the people who will resonate with your perspective. They’re out there. You’ve got to find it. But if you put nothing out, you’ll never find them. And that. And that’s where you got to begin.

Bill Sherman Wonderful. Thank you very much, Vince, for taking time to talk with us today.

Vince Molinaro Thank you. It was a great chat. Appreciate it.

Bill Sherman If you’ve enjoyed this episode, please join our LinkedIn group. Organizational Thought Leadership. It’s a professional community where thought leadership practitioners talk shop about our field. So if you’re someone who creates curates or deploys thought leadership for your organization, then please join the conversation in the organizational thought Leadership LinkedIn.