Building and Maintaining Consistent Thought Leadership | Verity Craft

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Tips and advice for starting thought leadership and keeping a consistent schedule.

An interview with Verity Craft about building powerful and reliable thought leadership.

Producing consistent thought leadership is hard work!
Thought leaders have to be deeply insightful in addition to a full plate of work, social life, and everything else.
But as the best TL’s know, consistent content is the only way to make sure your message gets out there and sticks.

To discuss building and maintaining the momentum of thought leadership content, I’ve invited Verity Craft to join me for today’s podcast. Verity is General Manager and Storyteller for Intelligent Ink where she helps purpose-driven experts become thought leaders that have a greater impact.

Verity explains how thought leadership is like investing; it works best when you start early and stay consistent, even if you start small. Starting out you’ll need to use modest resources and grow, but you’ll also want to start as early in your career as possible, to maximize your returns down the road.

Next, we discuss some common traps that people fall into that become a barrier to entry and consistency. Thought leadership means doing a lot of experimenting, while this might sound a bit frightening it means not having to have perfect ideas out of the gate. You can put your ideas out and refine them through discourse with your peers and followers. We don’t have to have a perfect idea or even know everything to start the journey.

With some ideas in hand, we can start to create consistent content. Verity shares how you can keep on track by scheduling time to work on thought leadership with someone else. This creates a sense of responsibility and accountability that is harder to push aside. In addition, we learn how a single piece of content can be stripped down and repurposed for blog posts, social media posts, and even videos allowing your work to go further and reach a wider audience by using multiple modalities.

If you are struggling to keep a consistent release schedule or feel like you’re not able to leverage your content properly this episode is full of great advice that will help you out.

Three Key Takeaways:

• Thought leadership is about trying things, testing things, refining things. And consistently working to make your insights sharper.
• The strongest thought leadership creates a system of community and accountability, to ensure your content stays on track.
• Experiment with breaking down your content, to be used on other mediums. The more ways people can access your content, the more it will spread.

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If you need a strategy to bring your thought leadership to market, Thought Leadership Leverage can assist you! Contact us for more information. In addition, we can help you implement marketing, research, and sales. Let us help you so you can devote yourself to what you do best.

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Transcript

Bill Sherman Consistency is one of the biggest challenges and thought leadership. Okay. Actually, it’s also one of humanity’s biggest challenges, whether we’re trying to put out thought leadership on a regular basis or convince ourselves to go to the gym for a workout. Individuals and organizations need ways to make thought leadership efforts consistent. And that’s a place where I’ve seen people struggle again and again. In today’s conversation, we speak with Verity Craft. She’s the general manager and storyteller for Intelligent Inc, and she and I share a love of thought, leadership processes and frameworks. She’s one of my go to intellectual sparring partners. So this time when we sat down to chat. We recorded it. I invite you to listen in as we talk about building consistency into your thought leadership work.

Bill Sherman I’m Bill Sherman and you’re listening to Leveraging Thought Leadership. Ready? Let’s begin. So welcome to the show, Verity.

Verity Craft Thanks so much for having me, Bill.

Bill Sherman So you and I have been talking now for several years about thought leadership, whether in the U.S. or in New Zealand. And I think one of the things that we’ve seen is a lot more people have popped up their attention level to this concept of thought leadership. And there’s a question behind it. Okay. I could see doing it for a while, but how do I maintain that momentum? I’m busy doing 32 other things.

Verity Craft Yeah, 100%. And definitely what you said is exactly right. We’ve noticed a huge shift in the number of people who are wanting to build thought leadership. But I think for a lot of people, the element of it being a really long term move and needing to keep that momentum going is quite overwhelming for them and a little bit off putting. Even though they know that they can say, you know, the impact that it would have, figuring out how to stay consistent is a massive challenge.

Bill Sherman Well, and the way that I sort of mentally think of it is if you want to start running, you don’t do a couch to full marathon. It might be a couch to a5k, Right. Get out there, do a little bit of work and start building up the stamina and repetition. But I think if you sort of set the goal and your post too far out, it almost feels daunting right away.

Verity Craft Yeah. Yeah, 100%. I often equate it to compound interest and investing, you know, and when you’re starting on investing, you don’t want to invest 80% of your income because that would massively change the way that you live. But if you can start by investing small amounts regularly and often, you know, eventually that builds up and you get massive results from it. And I see built leadership in the same way. If you can start to just build that consistency and get things moving, then eventually that compound interest will build up and pay off hugely.

Bill Sherman Well, and we’re definitely off on a roll on metaphors here to continue with the metaphor equivalent on compound investing. Certainly, many financial advisors say the best time to start planning for retirement is in your twenties. And I would argue that there’s also an argument to starting thought leadership when you’re young, but a lot of people raise their hand and go, but I’m not quite sure what I know other than what I learned in college or what I did in my first job for the first couple of years. Who’s going to listen to me? Right. And so I think we. Often face the challenge of telling ourselves we have to know more before we can start. Which then becomes a barrier to consistency. Right.

Verity Craft Yes. Yeah. Yeah. 100%. And I think that that’s one of the biggest things that we hear from people when we’re talking to them about building leadership is they go, But what if my ideas aren’t good enough? Or what if I don’t know enough? Or what if they’re not ready? And actually, you know, I think one of the really cool things about the leadership is that it is a bit of an experiment, too, and you are wanting to put ideas out there and test them out so it’s okay if they’re not perfect and ready. So that idea of just starting when you’re younger, when you’re relatively early in your career is a really good point that actually that can help you build up that momentum so that by the time you’re kind of ready to really take it far, you’ve already built up an audience and people who are interested in your ideas.

Bill Sherman I think one of the other hurdles and you alluded to it and just what you said, there is the fear of thinking in public. Right. And where you say, I’m not quite sure I have the answer, but here’s a pattern. I see. Or here’s a hint of an idea. Let me throw it out there and see how people respond. And a lot of people are like, no, no, no, no. It’s got to be perfect and polished and everything before I send it out into the world.

Verity Craft Yeah. Yeah. And that’s so the case. And I think most, you know, thought leaders are smart people, Right? And most smart people want to be seen as smart because that’s what they’ve always been. And I think there’s a real challenge in that with going actually, you can’t make an idea perfect if you’re not willing to put it out for feedback and you’re not willing to put yourself out there. But we so often hold back and don’t want to put things out until we’re sure that we’re happy with it or proud of it. And I feel like, you know, we certainly used to used to be a lot more We were perfectionists a lot more, and it held us back, I think, a huge amount in the early days, whereas now we’re definitely far more on the journey of done is better than perfect. Let’s get it out and test it well.

Bill Sherman And it’s about small experiments because I think a lot of people start thinking they need this big tentpole piece, you know, sort of like a blockbuster movie of thought leadership, where it’s going to be the book or the research report or whatever that’s going to stand and make their name and everyone will come to them. And really what it is, it’s like you said, done is better than perfect. You’ve got to put 100 ideas, little ideas out there to see what you know, gets people to pay attention.

Verity Craft Yeah. And you won’t know until they’re out there, right? Like, you can’t predict. You might understand your audience, but you can’t predict what they’re going to connect with until you actually put it out there and see what they’re going to like. So, yeah, and I think it’s just unfortunate because, you know, the consistency in that, putting those ideas out. Yeah, it’s not the exciting stuff, is it? I know that’s no more exciting to do, you know, a big report or be out doing a huge speaking engagement or whatever it is or put out, put out your book or to create your book, you need a lot of consistency. But you know, those are the exciting things. Whereas it feels as though all of the small things are maybe sometimes a little bit boring, but actually doing all of that consistently is what builds thought leadership and what’s what gets you to the results.

Bill Sherman It’s about the willingness to be repetitive but still engaged. And I know you have a passion for theater and that’s certainly a passion for mine. And any time you’re in a theatrical run, you write both in rehearsal, then certainly in production, you’ve got to, once the curtain comes up, be engaged and be present as if it was the very first time you were doing the work.

Verity Craft Yeah, exactly. And I think that is such a good analogy for thought leadership, which you and I have talked about lots of times because we are both so passionate about it. But it’s such a good analogy because when you start out creating a show, you know, you are testing out things and you’re trying out things, but you’re repeating them and you’re doing them again and again to figure out what works. And that’s how the rehearsal period works. And then once you’ve got it, the it’s never it gets to sort of a place where it’s good enough to be put on, but it’s never static. You’re always still evolving it and making it better every night. You know, you see people on Broadway who will do shows for years at a time and they still have to treat it like it’s the first time they’ve ever done it. But they’re also able to take all the lessons from all the times that they’ve done it before. And so I think much like theater thought, leadership is all about trying things out, testing things consistently, working on it, and then getting it to a stage where you’re really happy with it. But there’s always an element of improvement as well.

Bill Sherman Well, and can. Texturally. I think certainly when you’re delivering thought leadership in a live environment, whether it’s speaking or in a workshop or if you’re doing an executive offsite with a group. You’re responding to the context of that situation and no audience is ever 100% the same as last night’s audience, right?

Verity Craft Yeah, 100%. And if you delivered it in the exact same way that you had to last night’s audience, it’s probably not going to connect the same way.

Bill Sherman Yeah. And if you let it go on autopilot, if you just sort of cruise through and if you’re the actor delivering your lines, the audience knows. And so one of the hurdles for consistency is can you breathe that spark of life into the idea, even if you’ve been talking about it for six months, a year, five years or 20? Right.

Verity Craft Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And I think it’s one of those things that, you know, in an ideal world, consistency frees up to be more creative. So if you, you know, if you’ve delivered something 100, 300, 500 times and you know it like the back of your hand, that’s when you can play with that and bring something new to it and bring a spark to it. Whereas if you, you know, just letting it be. Well, here I’m going to deliver exactly the same thing. It’s exactly what you said. You know, you don’t get that spot. You don’t make it interesting for people. People recognize that. And so you’ve got to use consistency as a base for the fun and their creativity and a little bit more experimenting to make it interesting for the people that you’re engaging with.

Bill Sherman And I think a lot of people get focused on the delivery of the idea, not the experience of the audience.

Verity Craft Yeah, that’s such a good point. Yeah, 100%.

Bill Sherman So as we continue sort of exploring this concept of consistency, let’s talk about recruiting others, because if you’re in an organization, you’re going to need help. So how do you do it? Because it’s really hard to carry an idea in your own outer world.

Verity Craft Hundred percent. I mean, it varies so much by organization, right? But I think there’s some core things that stay the same across any organization, the first of which is getting that vision really clear. So understanding why you’re doing thought leadership, why you’re building it, why anybody else should care if your thought leadership is literally just about, Hey, we want to look good, then probably the rest of your team are not going to get that excited. But if you can use it to go, well, here’s the impact that we can have with it. And he is how we can help people and he’s how that will then help us as a business. Then it has meaning for people. And so people are actually excited about it. So I feel like that’s one element, but that doesn’t necessarily get people to actually stay committed. You know, it might get them excited to begin with. So I think the other element of it is making sure that you’ve got the right people on board so that those who are contributing are contributing in a way that they can best add value and that it also works for them. Right? So, you know, wherever you can. Having someone, say, managing your content calendar as an example. Don’t put that on someone who hates doing admin and that kind of thing. Make sure they’ve got someone who loves that kind of stuff. That way you can leverage your experts and the people who really know their stuff within the organization to just share their ideas. So have people, you know, if the people within your organization and not writers have other people, interview them and get all of the content out of them or film it on video and get that passion or whatever form it takes, make sure that you’re helping people play to their strengths and there’s someone kind of managing it overall so that in that way you’re not expecting people to do the pieces that they’re not good at.

Bill Sherman And I think that alignment of individual to skills, individual to purpose and even individual to their goals. One of the things as you’re trying to recruit others internally within the organization is you’ve got to make sure that there’s something in it for them rather than, as you said, proving that either you or the organization is smart. That just doesn’t fire people up to the same way.

Verity Craft Yeah, exactly. And this that’s such a good point, I think, because there’s one thing saying, well, here’s why we’re doing it as an organization, but it’s entirely another thing to be able to say, well, here’s why you should get involved and here’s why it works for you. So making sure that balance is right.

Bill Sherman So we’ve talked about recruiting others. Let’s talk about habits and let’s get really practical tips and techniques. And you and I have seen a lot of situations where it’s easy to fall off of good habits and consistency and thought leadership. What do you do to stay on track? How do you keep it going? Because we all have lives. And at the same time, the calendar keeps moving forward.

Verity Craft Mm hmm. And I would be the first to put my hand up and say I fall prey to this all the time. You know, I, without a doubt, lose consistency all the time and have had to put lots of scaffolds in place to try and make sure that I actually stick to things. And same thing with the clients that we work with. You know, you see how easy it is to fall, fall off the wagon and lose those habits. So I think that the there’s a few different things that we’ve found have worked really well for our clients and also for ourselves. One of which is creating some sort of accountability or community within it. So if you know that you are someone who will push your thought leadership till after any client work or delivery work or whatever it is that your role is, then actually setting aside, not just setting aside time for it, but setting aside time when you’re going to work on it with somebody else is massively powerful, even if it’s literally just sitting on Zoom with Newton while you both work on it.

Bill Sherman Well, and that’s something that you actually do as a team, right?

Verity Craft Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So we do this now because we would push all of our own work at our own thought leadership till after all of our client work. We started doing that. And so we now, yeah, just two weeks ago we sat on a session for 3 hours and we all worked on our own different pieces of content or different frameworks that we were working on. And basically at the start of it said, This is what we’re going to do. At the end we said, Look, we’ve done it. What’s left? There’s only that piece left. When are you going to do that by? And created some accountability around it. So that’s definitely for us made a huge difference. And I kind of equate it to having a personal trainer, because for me, I never went to the gym when I signed up to the gym and I would have all these great plans to exercise and do all of this. But it wasn’t until I got a personal trainer that I actually gained some consistency in my exercise. And it wasn’t because she particularly pushed me harder or pushes me harder than I push myself. Like if I’m exercising, I’ll push myself. That’s fine. It’s that because she’s there, we’ve got an appointment. I’ll be letting her down. If I don’t show up, I show up every single time. And so I think that in terms of thought leadership, you know, we’re not solo creatures as humans. We like connection and we like to be involved with other people. So building some sort of community of accountability around it is a really powerful thing.

Bill Sherman And whether it’s a smaller organization from a boutique consultancy all the way to a Fortune 500 that need for collaboration and someone else who understands what you’re doing, staring at stickies on the wall or trying to figure out a problem of how do I communicate this idea so that because it’s easy to feel, Hey, I’m in the bubble, I’m the only one who’s doing this, and then you feel alone, right? And the weight of sort of the work settles on your shoulders. I like this idea of even if it’s just quietly working beside each other, the accountability piece of, Hey, we’re all pushing the ball forward really works.

Verity Craft Especially I think, in a you know, with so many of us working from home now, you know, back in the day, you would sit next to somebody in the office and you’d kind of have that. You’d say, Oh, I’m working on this. So it’s sort of creating that feeling. And actually just today someone introduced me to something called Focus Night, which is basically where you can do that with someone virtually across the world. You can sit in a session, you start out saying what you’re going to do, and then you come together at the end and say, I achieved this or not. So there’s lots of ways you can do it, but I think it’s a really important piece to just keep yourself engaged with it and not get distracted by the many distractions that we all have in our lives and work.

Bill Sherman If you’re enjoying this episode of Leveraging Thought Leadership, please make sure to subscribe. If you’d like to help spread the word about our podcast, please leave a five-star review at ratethispodcast.com/ltl and share it with your friends. We’re available on Apple Podcasts and on all major listing apps as well as Thought Leadership Leverage.com/podcasts.

Bill Sherman So what other habits can you adopt to for consistency?

Verity Craft Yeah, another one that’s worked really well for us and for clients is around leverage, which you guys obviously talk about a lot, which is basically having a process or a system around everything that you. So that you can use it in many different ways, many different times. You know, you and I both know that you can’t just get a message across to people by sharing at once that it’s not going to do anything for them. You have to consistently share the same message, which can feel a little bit boring if you’re writing about it or you’re talking about it for the hundredth 200th time. So leveraging what you’re creating I think is hugely important with that, having a process whereby if you create, say, a new keynote that then gets broken down into blog posts and social posts or whatever they are. Or if you create a workshop or something online, for example, that could get broken down into pieces for us. When we write a blog, the blog then becomes a carousel, it then becomes social post, then becomes an email. And we’re not necessarily the person who’s writing. It doesn’t have to do all of those pieces. We can use other people to break down that content. So that would be a real a really good habit to get into. Same thing with if you’ve written a book, for example, or if you’ve got a report or created a research report, for example, that has a lot of stuff that can be used in many different ways, and the person who created it doesn’t necessarily have to create everything from it, but you’ll get a hell of a lot more mileage and make it easier for that consistency. If you then every time you create something, it gets broken down into multiple pieces.

Bill Sherman The other thing that I would say coming out of that is you have to figure out which entry points are the most effective and a great way to try that. And I know you and I both spent a lot of time on LinkedIn in terms of repurposing. Even if you’re repurposing an article or a piece that you’ve written, you may play with the first couple lines of the post because you only see that ransom note, two or three lines at the beginning before the dreaded see more button and everybody’s scrolling through their feed trying to figure out, is this interesting? Does it relate to me? Should I click see more? Right. And we’re making that decision in a fraction of a second. And you have to figure out for your audience and the target that you’re trying to reach, what’s going to get them to click see more. And it’s really, really unlikely that you will accomplish that first time out of the gate. Right? Yeah.

Verity Craft Yeah. 100%. And I think the other element of that is, you know, what format is it in? So you and I both probably tend towards more written content because that’s where we naturally kind of sit. But you can use the same post as you could film a video or you could start with video. If you’re not a writer, you know, start by interviewing someone or talking to camera or whatever kind of content you want to create that you’re comfy with, and then get somebody else to turn that into LinkedIn posts or whatever it is that you need and test out some of those hooks as well.

Bill Sherman So I had a conversation earlier today with someone specifically about getting over that hurdle and starting with video. Right. And she said, I know you’ve been telling me to start this since December of 2021. And she she’s like, I’m sitting here feeling almost this twinge of guilt that you’ve reminded me of a good idea yet again. Right. And I think we have and you talked about it. Default methods that we’re all comfortable with, right? Some of us are happy on camera. Some of us are happy on stage. Some are happy writing. And then we have to consciously step into our area of discomfort to try different modalities, because really, at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter where you’re in your happy place creating, it’s where your audience is looking for content. And so, yeah, I mean, what was it? Two and a half, almost three years ago now, when starting the podcasting and joining Peter in this podcast, it was a new set of skills that I had to develop, right? But first few times out, you realize, Oh yeah, this isn’t that hard. I know how to do this.

Verity Craft Mm hmm. Yeah, exactly. And nearly everything that thought leadership encompasses are skills that we all have in different areas. You know, everybody is capable of talking about what they love, because if you have a conversation with someone, they’ll talk your ear off about something that they passionate about. Everyone is capable of writing, you know, two different labels, obviously, but we all write emails every day and we all, you know, we all communicate in different ways. And so it’s just about I really like your model that you talk about where if you start out by testing a new idea that you’re uncomfortable with in an area that you are in a format or modality that you’re comfortable in, that’s a really good way to do it. But when you’re comfortable with the idea, that’s when you can start to push out into some of those modalities that you’re uncomfortable with.

Bill Sherman Exactly, because if you’re trying to test a new idea in a modality you’re not comfortable with, you’re on shaky ground on both sides. So you’ve got to pick. Are you going to be comfortable with the modality and try out a new idea or be comfortable with the idea and try a new modality?

Verity Craft Yeah, exactly. And so I think that’s a really good way to approach it, is to constantly look at ways that you can push yourself out of your comfort zone. But when you’re comfy with the ideas and that’s where that leverage piece comes in as well, I think because you can use that leverage pace to break down the content that you’ve created or turn it into different things, test it out in lots of different ways. And then when you’re really comfy with that and you know that it’s as strong as possible, that’s when you could start to potentially push that into other modalities.

Bill Sherman So I want to ask you a couple of questions that move away from the concept of consistency and putting out content more towards your journey into thought leadership. And then I know you and I have had conversations around sort of how the community and culture in New Zealand has responded to the concept of thought leadership. And you’ve watched that and we’ve talked about sort of the light bulb coming on both literally and metaphorically. So my first question is to you, how do you stumble into the world of thought leadership?

Verity Craft Yeah, I love that your question is stumble into because I think that seems to be the case for virtually everyone.

Bill Sherman Almost all of us. Yes.

Verity Craft Yes. It’s a stumble. So we started out, Christina, which were to my business partner, started intelligent. She started the business as purely a content creation copywriting agency AT we intend to PR. I started working with her and then we discovered we were really complementary in lots of ways. And over the years we kind of said yes to a lot of things and we tried out a lot of things as you do it, which is nine times out of ten, the wrong way to go about it, saying yes to everything. But I think most people in business do that. And so we had lots of years of trying everything out in terms of content and working with people. And what we realized over time, we got rid of the PR side. We got rid of virtually anything that looked a little bit too much like marketing and that side of things. And what we realized that was that it wasn’t the content that we were really passionate about, it was the ideas behind them. And it was the fact that we could work with really smart, passionate people and help them make the thinking better, which then just happened to be. She had fire content. And so that was kind of how we sort of stumbled into thought leadership and then found the term for it, which I think is also the case for a lot of people. And so for the last Yeah.

Bill Sherman Yeah, definitely me. Yeah.

Verity Craft Yeah. So I think for the last probably six or seven years, it’s been a real journey of discovering what thought leadership was, discovering what our piece of that was and where we could add most value. And then really coming to look at, okay, well, you know, if, if we know that thought leadership is a thing and we know that it’s a valuable thing, how can we be support clients to do it? And so now we’re on a much more of a we still create some content for some clients, but a lot of our clients, we don’t create the content for them. We work with them on, on purely developing their positioning, helping them work through their ideas, making sure that they’re getting their ideas out there and really acting as coaches and advisors, then it’s just content creators. So that’s been a really cool journey and I think one that is particularly I’m really pleased that we’ve been on that, particularly coming into an era where content is easier to create than ever is so many Tolles check it page API, things like that that are actually, you know, I don’t think that they’ll replace content creators, but they’ll certainly change the way that it works. And so the fact that our focus now is on how do we help people involve their thinking and make their ideas as strong as possible. I’m really grateful that we’ve kind of already been on that journey. And we’re yeah, we’re on that on that path already.

Bill Sherman And you allude to the challenges and also the benefits of AI for content generation. Right? And we’ve seen some of those things in the news as we were recording, where even the current cutting edge systems by Microsoft and Google and Chad, GPT, all of them are either struggling with things or confidently proclaiming information that may or may not be accurate. Right. And so there’s a validity question. And there’s also then how do you create new knowledge when it’s a synthesis of what has been said before on the Internet? Right. Now, you could argue that some of the leadership there’s an echo to the past and there always is. You build on the past, but if you’re advancing the conversation, you’ve got to advance it.

Verity Craft Yeah, and that’s exactly how I see it is. You know, those things, all the AI and everything they tolls and they can be used really effectively, but they can’t replace thought leadership because what thought leadership is, is it’s creativity and it’s innovation and it’s experience, you know, possibilities. So it’s all of those things and those are the things that are unique to humans that I think we can see them as tools to be used, but they certainly not going to come through and replace the role of thought leaders and experts in the field.

Bill Sherman Absolutely. So as we begin to wrap up, I have one question that I want to ask you, which is my standard closing question. Given where you are now, what advice would you give a younger verity going into the world of thought leadership?

Verity Craft I would probably tell myself to Oh, that’s a really good question. But that. I would probably tell myself. To. Learn more but share more often. So I think when I was younger, I definitely had a feeling that I needed to know the answers if I wanted to be respected. You know, we both pretty young starting out in the US and it was definitely a feel of, Oh, well, they’re not going to trust me because I’m young. And so I think I would occasionally overcompensate with pretending that I knew things, but I didn’t and then trying to figure them out later. Whereas what I’ve learned getting older is that actually being open about what I don’t know is one of the most powerful things that I can do, both with clients. Because actually, if I don’t know something, the audience possibly doesn’t know it as well. And that’s a really powerful way to test out what they’re talking about. But also with our audience, you know, showing some vulnerability and being upfront about what I don’t know or what I’m not doing well has been incredibly powerful because I get so much more knowledge from other people and glean so much wisdom from other people.

Bill Sherman I think a lot of people who haven’t been in the field of thought leadership or haven’t been for long expect that you have to be the smartest person in the room. And I would flip that and I’d say it’s often being the most curious person in the room and ask good questions.

Verity Craft Yes. 100%, I think good questions at the cornerstone of every thought leaders talk. If you can ask good questions, you will be able to build the leadership.

Bill Sherman And it takes such. And I’m just riffing here with you, but it takes such a load off. And I remember that sort of desire to prove yourself by proving you were smart. Once you can let go and exhale from that and go, Yeah, I’m never going to know everything. I’m not even going to know a lot about most things. So I’m here to learn.

Verity Craft Yeah, exactly. And that’s definitely the case of I think the best thought leaders in the world are the ones who still seek out opportunities to learn and get really excited about talking to other thought leaders or to other people who have expertise or wisdom because that strengthens their own ideas as well and helps them think of things in new ways and find new perspectives.

Bill Sherman All right, Verity, we could continue this conversation for a long time, and you and I are very much kindred spirits in trying to figure out how thought leadership works and frameworks and models. But I want to thank you for joining me today. This has been a delightful conversation.

Verity Craft Thank you so much for having me. I’m thrilled that we could have this chat.

Bill Sherman Oh, absolutely. And we’ll talk more soon.

Verity Craft Thanks, Bill.

Bill Sherman If you’re interested in organizational thought leadership, then I invite you to subscribe to the RTL newsletter. Each month we talk about the people who create, curate and deploy thought leadership on behalf of their organizations. Go to the website OrgTL.com and choose ‘Join our newsletter’. I’ll leave a link to the website as well as my LinkedIn profile in the show notes. Thanks for listening and I look forward to hearing what you thought of the show.