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Leveraging Thought Leadership With Peter Winick – Episode 23 – Erica Dhawan
Your content model is the skeleton, and the great ideas you hang on it are like the flesh and muscle of your thought leadership business. Are you ready to see where a content model can take you?
Our guest this week is Erica Dhawan, leading authority on 21st century Collaboration and Connectional Intelligence, and the Founder & CEO of Cotential, a global consultancy that helps organizations transform by improving collaboration across teams.
In this episode, Erica joins Peter to discuss model building, content development, and business growth. She explains how she shaped her assessment tools with a data driven mindset, and then translated that data into targeted sales strategy.
If you are looking for strategies to establish a lean and powerful sales funnel, check out this episode. Erica’s strategy and tips can have a powerful impact on any thought leadership business!
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.
Transcript
Peter Winick Welcome, welcome, welcome. This is Peter Winick. I’m the founder and CEO of Thought Leadership Leverage. And today, you’re joining me on our podcast. Leveraging Thought Leadership with Erica Dhawan. So say hello, Erica.
Erica Dhawan Hello. Great to be here.
Peter Winick Thanks so much. It’s good to have you on. Let me give everybody your introduction, because I sometimes forget how well I know folks that are on and other people doing. So let me make sure I can be the proper deduction. So Erica is a world leading authority on contextual intelligence and the founder and CEO of Potential through speaking, training and consulting, she teaches business leaders innovative strategies that increase value for clients, deliver, deliver results and ensure competitiveness. She’s the coauthor of a bestselling book, Get Big Things Done. She’s got a podcast, an award winning podcast, Masters of Leadership. She’s a classic underachiever. She only speaks at places like Davos World Economic Forum, works with companies like FedEx, PepsiCo, McGraw-Hill, rate for Harvard Business Review, and then just put some icing on the cake and make her and her folks proud. MBA from Harvard, MBA from M.I.T. Sloan did a B.S. in economics from the Wharton School. So. Well, that’s good.
Erica Dhawan And I really need to prove myself. What’s it? I guess I’m constantly trying to prove myself.
Peter Winick Exactly. Aren’t we? All right. So, anyway, I’m so glad that you joined us today. We have had the opportunity to work together several years ago where you were getting the book out. And you’re pretty creative in terms of things that you’re doing to get things out there in the right way. So maybe. Tell me a little bit first around what is correctional intelligence and what is potential do. Let’s start there and then we’ll move it to how we get that after.
Erica Dhawan Yeah, sure. So I’ll start with a little bit of background. So I in my 20s decade, I worked on Wall Street as an investment banker. I worked at the Lehman Brothers crash. Then I completely switch gears and did my graduate work at Harvard and M.I.T. and stayed on as a researcher. And my guiding principle and research question during that journey was how do we work in a radically different way today? I work through the bankruptcy and really realize that the Lehman bankruptcy really realize that it’s not what teens do, it’s how teams work. That leads to greatness. And it was also at a time about 10 years ago when we were seeing this great multi-generational shift with motley wealth rising in the workplace. And I began to really ask, what do millennials want? Why? Why do we see this major disconnect in the workplace in all of these consultants talking about generational change? And what I found when I dug into the research was that asking what millennials, what was actually the wrong research question, because we all often want the same things instead. What I really saw was that there was a new mindset here to stay a connected mindset around how we leverage teams and networks outside of traditional silos. That was actually key and different to our 21st century connected era. And that key skill set was what I called and coined with my coauthor called Connections All Intelligence. So if you think about what emotional intelligence was in the 90s as a key trait connection, all intelligence, modern day skill, it’s how effectively and strategically we leverage all the networks we have access to you to create value. So this is not about networking. It’s not about quantity. This is about leveraging the quality of connections we already have to create value. And what I did through my research is develop a framework and a methodology for leaders and companies in universities and hospitals and beyond to be able to build the skill of correctional intelligence within their people to assess themselves on their connection. And just like you. And also to design initiatives that allow people to be rewarded and recognized for their connection or intelligence, which wasn’t always part of the performance review, but is often very critical to those that need arise as leaders of today’s organizations.
Peter Winick There’s a lot there. So let me unpack that a bit, because a couple of things that I look at were here maybe a little bit differently, right? So research base that always makes life a lot easier for when you’re looking could move at scale. Right. This isn’t, you know, based on your energy or your charisma, although you have plenty of that. This is research based. Right. And then I heard loud and clear methodology and framework. So you could obviously consider a video that brings a smile to my nerdy face. And the reason it brings us a big glow to my nerdy face is when you have a methodology and a framework that’s based on research, it is so much easier to develop almost anything in terms of. Offering solutions to make it teachable. Right. Because of you. If you were just to come out to me as a keynoter, let’s say I’ve got this concept on contextual intelligence and I believe this is the way people react today and this is the way millennials are making relating to. Look at that. Yeah, sort of. That’s sort of cool. And then, you know, your 60 Minutes is up and I’d probably applaud and I might buy your book and read it. But then I go on and continue to, you know, not do anything differently. But the fact that you’ve invested in a methodology and a framework means that you can break that apart and they’ll teach it. So if you touch one sort of huddle from just a business efficiency standpoint, because this is a business, how the model and framework have helped you as you you’ve moved so that you know, what I found very quickly is that the best way to scale connection?
Erica Dhawan All intelligence was actually by studying other models that actually scaled. And you as well. Peter. But I did add models like Six Sigma and studied how it rolled out at GM and why it was so effective, because there was a model that you could measure and it was tangible. And then I looked at emotional intelligence and Myers-Briggs, how they really tough the assessment path and use the assessment as the hub to drive, train the trainers and certification programs. And as I really first took a step back and study those models, that was what guided me thinking about what’s the methodology and framework that makes the most sense or connection?
Peter Winick Well, what’s fascinating to me about that is the spectrum. Right. So typically almost as a stereotype, if you will, you have the Six Sigma folks on one side process, folks, engineering folks, supply chain, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And then you have the EAI people on the other side of the house and you just looked at both of those, regardless of the essence of the content, and pulled something important from both and blended it into how you run your business. And really, really, really interesting stuff there. Thank you for sharing that. Tell me what a typical month in the life of Erica looks like?
Erica Dhawan Great question. Always changing, but often I’ll give an example. So I know the majority of my work over the last three to four years since the my book on Conexion, all intelligence came out has really been about educating the market on what connection all intelligence is. So to give you a sense, Wal-Mart, the brand just rolled out unconscious bias in personal intelligence training and the last two years. Now, those two thought leadership topics have been around for 20 years, but it took them 20 years to really build that credibility and an engagement model. So what I do.
Peter Winick But let me let me let me just unpack something you said there, because I there’s so many nuggets that you’re putting out. I don’t want to rush by them. The good news about something having something totally new in the marketplace and your stuff is quite different, innovative. This isn’t, you know, yet another take on leadership or management or agility. You know, when someone said it’s contextual intelligence, the first thing someone has to respond is, what the heck is that? Right. I know. It doesn’t immediately resonate to me as leadership management skills or requires an explanation. And that’s a good thing and a bad thing. It’s a good thing in that it’s unique and it’s different and it’s based on a model like we talked about. But it’s a it was a bad thing. But the burden that you’ve now put on yourself and you sort of alluded to this is you have to now educate the market and you don’t get paid to educate them on what it is you get paid when they deploy your solution. So can you unpack that little guy?
Erica Dhawan Absolutely. And so, you know, I chose the path of I’m creating a new market just like Goldman did in the 80s. And, you know, I’ve. Which is a commitment, of course. And so as part of that, I have understood that the first five years of that, I have a set of solutions from assessments and training, training occasions that people can use. But really, what people are buying right now at this initial phase are you’re buying keynotes and workshop gage. It’s where they can learn about this topic and be introduced to this topic. And they’re also buying assessments. So I developed with a cycle of attrition, a connection, all intelligence assessment. Think of it as the modern day Myers-Briggs or collaboration. And I always use parallels of similar past assessments that helped my clients understand it.
Peter Winick So let me just touch on the business side of that. So right now, I’m trying to figure out how easy have you made it for me? Your target market to bring you on board and spend money with you so I can buy a book that’s 20 bucks or whatever I could bring you to speak, whatever that’s going to be right. You can be workshopped. But tell me about these assessments, because I’m a big assessment fan, because it’s a classic build it once and sell it multiple times and know given that you have it validated model, it’s real. This isn’t a walk into Bloomingdales in Europe parallel with Apple or something like that. Tell me about the sell side of an assessment, how that sort of changes the perception of you in the marketplace.
Erica Dhawan So, you know, since my book came out, I have never left to the room of a speaking engagement panel session. Now actually offering access to the connection all into to a teaser connection, all intelligence assessment, my audience. So through my keynotes over the past few years and I do about know anywhere between three to six months, what I’ve built is a community of about twenty five thousand people that have offered into my list to take the assessment and learn from the assessment.
Peter Winick Let me again, there’s brilliance in what you’re talking about. So three to six a month is a lot of keynotes for most people. Right. But you’re building community and you’re building your followership. There are systems and processes underneath that. What I see all too often is people speaking three to six times a month, but speaking is jump on a plane, get to Phenix, do my thing, do a great job, go home. And they don’t have the right systems and processes there to make their job easier to support them, because obviously if you’re building followership, there will be another book and there’ll be other things that you do. Those are your peeps. That’s your tribe. So tell me the systems and processes that you’ve developed and deployed to grow and leverage this.
Erica Dhawan Yes. So the first system I use is in I’ll give you a couple of examples I use will call joined by text in one of my keynotes. Have you heard of it? Yes, I have. Yeah. So it’s a simple texting app that allows anyone in my audience to sign up to get access to information from me. And I always offer our assessment as an initial tool that they can use individually. And so, you know, it a PR blitz. Let’s try it out now. What? Can we use it now that if you are in the United States, you can get access to it through your mobile phone if you’re not? You can go to my website. But if you’re on your mobile phone, you can text the number 6 6 8 6 6 and type in my first name Erica. E E-R İcra in the text message and instantly you’ll get a response. And all you have to do is typing your email address and you’ll get an instant link to access to my assessment where it takes about 10 minutes to help you better understand your own profile of correctional intelligence. What was this instantly has done? After every single kino is allowed me to gain and build a relationship with anywhere between 50 to 70 percent of my audience. I mean, the engagement level has been astronomical because it’s so easy and it’s by their phones. It’s not the thing they do after the room. It’s when they’re excited. They have the high momentum.
The second thing that I also do your let me just show let me quantitative. You probably growing your listed seven hundred twelve hundred people a month depending on the size of the audience. Yes, that’s right.
So there you go. By the way, for your next publishing deal, if you chose to go through traditional publisher. Guess what, that’s going to stack the odds in your favor. And even if you self-published it, there’s nothing wrong with that. Yes. Those are the people that are there. What are your exact words exactly?
The engagement rate, once they’ve also signed up, is incredibly high. It’s up to 30 percent and the average open rate is 2 percent for four newsletter emails.
Peter Winick And so you’re delivering value. So let me begin the assessment. It’s not something I’ve seen before. It’s not something you’ve taken before. It’s highly relevant because I’ve seen you speak.
Erica Dhawan It’s giving me the personal information about me. One of my favorite topics. Right. You’re not just giving them an article from some journal from 70 years ago that you didn’t like. I mean, it’s small. If you put the effort into that. So that’s what you’re getting these within reach of this year’s budget. And so what? What that does is it helps me acquire a set of interested leads. It offers value to them. But from there, what I begin to offer them is a set of opportunities to buy other solutions from me. So what I have from them now is their email address. But I also have people that have taken me assessment. Typically what happens from there are people that have taken the assessment, want to know what their profiles look like across their team or they want to know what a 360 would look like. So immediately I have a base of leads that I can follow up with additional solutions to understand how to use the assessment. So, you know, oftentimes people might take an assessment, but they won’t know what to do with it without that, without hiring us for additional service or worse, giving away the proverbial razor right here in the black. And I really learned over time this took me time to learn that if you don’t collect any data from them, it’s very difficult to be able to offer them real value. Sure. So, you know, one of the most powerful things thought leaders can do is bring new ideas to the table. But I also think is providing our audiences with data that allows them to make sense of their own experiences and to structure it in that way. And so that’s the journey. The other few things I do are, you know, when I’m with an audience and I have a list of the audience names, I work with my sister. We often LinkedIn connect with every single one. It doesn’t take that long. If I get business cards, they instantly go into my league prospect system called contractually where I am speaking prospects, active prospects, long term prospects and continually review that on a monthly and quarterly basis. For me, I keep in touch and follow up strategy. So again, we’re going through this quickly here. Maybe percent of author speakers involved leaders that I deal with. I get with them all around the globe. Don’t have this level of sophistication, discipline, systems and processes.
Peter Winick Right. Because what they would do, what I’ll hear often as I come off stage and people love me. Five people give me their cards and then we’ll what they want. Depends on where I was going next. Maybe a photo. Maybe I did. I mean, you’ve got an airtight system, it seems like. Right. To delete the piece. Some would say, oh, my God, I don’t want all the. Many people afflicted, but then a lot of you connected all those people, but you’re filtering through that on a monthly basis. And money for gold. Right. Tell me about a little bit about the help that you have. Because doesn’t necessarily need to be you spending your days, probably not clicking away on LinkedIn. What is that system? The sort of the scarf look like to help you?
Erica Dhawan So I have a very lean, lean approach to pretty much everything test. So I you know, I don’t have any full time staff. I have a set of contractors. I have a an assistant through virtual. A virtual assistant. Yes. Why pay for 16 hours a month? And that pretty much covers it. It’s pretty simple. I do have other interns and other free stuff that I work with, but it’s really lean. And what I’ve done now that I have a community of about twenty five thousand or so by email, I have about 11000, over 11000 followers on LinkedIn. I thought at this point and it took me about two years to build that through speaking, through offering. Sure. Truth is, I’ve focused on how can I repurpose my content and offer new sources of value to community and drive and engagement and follow up sales.
Peter Winick And so what you said. But my favorite words. So. Yes, which would probably not most people’s favorite word, but repurpose. I’m a big fan and advocate for me always being on the repurposing drum. Tell me tell me what that means.
Erica Dhawan You know you know, what I’ve really tried to do is take elements from my book, which I really wrote in 2014 and help make them actionable in different ways. So, you know, I have a podcast called Masters of Leadership where I interview other people, but I also speak about innovative and toilets. So I I’m often repurposing a lot from there. I have a column in Forbes and I write in each we are and I’m often pulling praise from my book for those different cases. I’ve done video series for companies where I’m constantly reusing that content. And most recently, just this week, actually, I’m launching a video series on LinkedIn where I directly speaking to my audience on videos, check me out on LinkedIn and join the community there where I enjoy videos of insights and tools for individuals to become better masters of leadership. And so a lot of the content over the years, the ones that are resonating, most are being repurposed and shared and repurposing is this is sort of the exact same way that I define it.
Peter Winick What it means is that you don’t need to constantly create a new concept in new ideas. You know what the market. What has resonated with folks, it’s really a translation issue, issue across modalities, rates that you do a piece on HP or that takes off. Mm hmm. Interesting. Now you can do a video based on it. Now you can do, you know, use some of the questions or whatever that was in there in your podcast.
Erica Dhawan You don’t always need to carry the burden of creating that new thing, moving it into multiple modalities, because it’s amazing world that we live in today that people have so many options on how they consume and prefer to consume their content. And a little bit of creativity goes a long way. There’s a, I’ve you know, it’s been through this journey of actually understanding what’s worked with connection intelligence that has actually helped me think about smarter strategies as I’m working on my next big thought leadership and how I might do that differently so that the next area of research that I delved into over the last year, which I have a book in the making. But it will be out this year, is on rules of digital communication. And the new subtext of how we understand what people really need went up to 80 is virtual communication. And instead of just, you know, writing, why write whitepaper and doing one webinar and then just writing the book, which is what I did last time? I take an approach where I wrote a whitepaper. I’ve started to run workshops on this concept before the book is out in and in keynotes. I have I launched this Masters of Leadership video series to scan what my audience resonates with most. And I’m gonna really use those findings and insights to make sure that I’m designing the book that my audience really wants.
Peter Winick Right. So the world is you ought to do that, right? Because once a book is out, it’s out. So I love that you’re methodical about testing concepts. So if you had a concept, the easy one of easy ways to sort of test if it resonates is to put it out of chemo. And if it went over like, that’s so good, then you go, OK. Glad I didn’t spend, you know, 60 pages writing about that one. How do we tweak it a little bit? Almost like a comedian working there said. You can constantly test it, tweak it, refine it until you sort of nail the essence of it. And again, a lot of people are afraid to sort of preview the new thing. My opinion is that a bit silly?
Erica Dhawan How would you know? I don’t think we need to preview to tell everyone our book’s coming out if the book is going to take two years. Right. But using the ideas is really powerful. I just published an article about the ideas and H we are just two weeks ago and now engagement from them. I’m so I’m testing now what people really resonate with. And so it’s these simple. But I really think that this reverse way of doing it now is actually even better. But I would say that I couldn’t have done that, not without an audience. And I needed my first book to build the audience so I actually could work with my audience to shape the next big idea.
Peter Winick Sure. So let me as we start to wind down here, there was there’s really a ton of this in terms of the systems and the processes and the technology and the repurposing. You’re also sort of eating your own dogfood, if you will. Right. So you booker the embodiment of contextual and code. And so tell me that normally I would say but I could fully ask you this. So you talk to the Arica of 20 years ago. But in our case, that would be probably too good given to put that out there. Today is somebody five years younger than you probably know, more than 10 years younger than you. That’s the sort of thinking about this or that sort of thinking, I’ve got something and I’ve got this kind of a gut. I want to explore this. What would you advise them to do? And maybe more importantly, what not to do as they. Because there is no sort of MBA involved leadership that’s given everybody. So that will be the Iraqis school of how to be a thought leader and.
Erica Dhawan Absolutely. Well, first. And this is completely unsolicited as call Peter and get advice. Follow whatever you say. Peter, because you have such great wisdom around how to really become a thought leader. And you helped me on that journey when I launched Get Big Things Done. A few other.
Peter Winick What are you going to do, you have me speechless. We got to limit those vetoes. That’s through.
Erica Dhawan Thank you. Thank you. And I very much enjoyed our work together, and I’m grateful and proud of watching what you’ve done. I just got off on a tangent here. You and I were both in London about a year ago at the Thinker’s could be. So I was invited and you were there and I felt like it was my child. And you’re not the age of my children’s ballet recital that you’ve got your recognized by the thinkers 50. And I was just so proud of you. And I know behind the scenes all the work that you’ve done. I mean, you’re making a difference and you’re being recognized for the hard work. And I know all the hard work it takes. It’s not this is not luck, your grinder. I mean, that’s the best way to do it. Back to our regularly scheduled program. We can resume the love fest. Yes, absolutely. I think it’s, you know, similar to what you said. I think it’s the key to being a thought leader is having idea you just can’t stop sharing. And I think that’s important. I think it starts with me focusing on writing, writing your ideas. I started in the millennial space and I realized that my research had nothing to do with age. It was really useful leadership skill set that’s critical to the 21st century. And so I think, you know, I think the key for someone other who wants to build their thought leadership is just start. Start writing. Right. And in a blog, create your own blog. Don’t wait for permission for any one. Work on your ideas over time. It doesn’t have to be perfect at the beginning. Share them. You don’t have to share them all online. You can share them with the community at a dinner table. The second thing I would say is, is the study from others. Those other wise people. I got a chance to study under amazing thought leaders like Peter Sandy and Otto Sherman. My graduate universities. But you know, that could be studying them through their blogs, through their books. You don’t have to be in the same office in them or at their keynote. There’s so many different ways you can sort of fuel your own mind. And then the last thing I want to say is like, this is great. This is not about I have never been interested in fame. I’ve never been interested in in being noticed. I’ve been interested in focusing on what I can’t. And when you focus on issues that you care about because you’ve seen the problem and you want to help other people deal with the problem. I worked with the Lehman collapse. I know how horrible that was, not only for that company, but for the world. I don’t want that to happen again. And I know that was a crisis of connection intelligence. And that’s why I do what I do now. And so really focus on what is the purpose behind what you do, because that will drive all the grit and and hard work that you need to succeed and don’t get lost in the flashy blogs or, you know, be, you know, being on stage. Because at the end of the day, that’s just a tool to help you reach a purpose.
Peter Winick Awesome advice. This has been amazing. I’m going to go back and listen to it because it’s so watch in here. I would have a Troy extract all the value from it. So how close did they find you? They just bring the buzzer to the door and lots of little.
Erica Dhawan Or do we find you people, you know, check me out. And Erica, Dolans.com, that’s my main Web site, my corporate website. If you want to work with us or check out our assessment as potential group dot com. So think of potential that this is Co Henschel. And I’m also on Twitter and LinkedIn. Check out our video series and our Internet and the Masters, the latest podcast, too. Thanks so much, Peter, for having me join.
Peter Winick So this has been awesome. Thank you. Thank you so much for sharing with us today. Thank you. To learn more about Thought Leadership Leverage, please visit our Web site at Thought Leadership Leverage dot com to reach me directly. Feel free to e-mail me at Peter at Thought Leadership Leverage dot com. And please subscribe to Leveraging Thought Leadership on i-Tunes or your favorite podcast app to get your weekly episode automatically.
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