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Organizational Thought Leadership Anthology
Listen to a Anthology of our Organizational Thought Leadership Minutes.
Today, we make a small departure from our usual format of interviewing a thought leader. Instead, we shed a light on the series of short videos Bill Sherman has been producing over the last year. These videos focus on specific issues related to Organizational Thought Leadership. Bill offers some key advice for organizational thought leaders. So, we invite you to listen in as we explore these short clips from the Org TL Minutes!
First, we look at the many varied paths that professionals travel to land in a thought leadership role.
Second, we examine the skills thought leaders need to be successful. While there are many that are useful we discuss the three key ones: analytical thinking, storytelling, and empathy.
Third, we look at the four primary ways that ideas emerge in thought leadership: forge, sharpen, weld, and transport.
Fourth, we discuss the benefits of narrowcasting, which might seem counterintuitive given the constant hype we hear around clicks, likes, and shares. But do those metrics really hold value?
Three Key Takeaways
- Thought leaders with empathy are able to break through the distractions of what interests themselves to focus on what their clients truly need.
- Many believe new ideas in thought leadership are brand new, but in fact, most are rooted in evolving and combing existing ideas.
- Narrowcasting allows thought leaders to speak more directly to the audience that is most important to them.
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Transcript
Bill Sherman Hello, You’re listening to Leveraging Thought Leadership. I’m your host, Bill Sherman. And today we’re going to do something a little bit different. Instead of a guest interview, I want to take a few minutes to focus on topics specific to organizational thought leadership. Each week I record a short video about the leadership and posted to the Or to your website as well as on LinkedIn. And I’ve chosen for the most popular episodes from this series over the last year and putting them together in a short anthology. We begin with the investigation of a question How did you land in a thought leadership role? Next, we turn our attention to three essential skills for thought leadership practitioners. And then we look at four ways to create ideas for thought leadership. Finally, we talk about a topic that’s dear to my heart narrow casting of thought leadership. Each of these topics is just a few minutes long. I invite you to listen and consider how they might impact your work as a thought leadership practitioner. Ready? Let’s begin.
So how did you land a role in thought leadership at your organization?
You may find yourself drifting into thought leadership from another department. Or you may find yourself tapped by a senior leader to figure this out for us. And then suddenly, bam, the words thought leadership appear in your title. Much like the line in the classic talking head song, you may ask yourself, Well, how did I get here? If you’re shaking your head in surprise, you aren’t alone. We come here from many different roles content marketers, B2B marketers, brand strategy, journalism, research analysts, even business unit line leaders. Some of us have even found our way here from strategy H.R. And public policy teams and our previous roles, whatever. They were deeply shaped how we approach our work in organizational thought leadership. We draw upon different mental models, processes and even measures of success. That means we have an opportunity to discover new ways of working and thought leadership by listening to colleagues in other organizations. Each week on the Leveraging Thought Leadership podcast, I shine the spotlight on someone who’s doing thought leadership work for an organization. We talk about their journey and the insights they’ve gained along the way. There’s a lot we can learn from each other.
What skills to thought leadership practitioners need to be successful?
Well, I think there are many skills that are useful, but three that are absolutely essential. And they are analytical thinking, storytelling and empathy. Analytical thinking helps us see around corners into a potential future. It allows us to identify risks and opportunities that will be relevant and actionable. Storytelling is how we bring these insights back and share them with people. Storytelling helps us communicate what’s at stake, what actions need to be taken, and what success looks like. And finally, empathy keeps us grounded without empathy. It’s easy for us to chase down intellectual rabbit holes, finding things that are interesting to us but not relevant to the people we’re trying to reach and serve. And so empathy allows us to focus on what matters to our audience rather than things that are curious or interesting to us. Over my career, I’ve worked with a number of thought leadership practitioners. Almost all of them have had a strength in one of these three areas analytical thinking, storytelling or empathy. Many have been strong in two areas, but the very best have been strong in all three. Where are your strengths and what do you need to work on to be more effective as a thought leadership practitioner?
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Where do thought leadership ideas come from?
Over my career I’ve worked on hundreds of thought leadership projects and platforms, and here’s a framework that I find useful. There are four primary ways that new ideas emerge and thought leadership. I call them Forge, Sharpen, Weld and Transport. Let’s start with Forge. This process, I think, is how many people assume thought leadership ideas emerge. An individual or a team starts with a raw insight and then they hammer away at it like a blacksmith at a forge until the new idea has been crafted. But here’s the problem. New ideas, truly original thinking is relatively rare. So while people think it’s the norm, it’s actually not. Sharpen is a much more common way of developing ideas. In this process, an individual or a team takes an existing idea from their field and they put a new edge on it. The idea isn’t new, but after you sharpen the idea, it becomes more relevant or effective for a challenge within your field. Weld is a pretty fascinating concept within thought leadership. You take ideas from two or more fields and then you bring them together. New ideas emerge at the seams where the fields intersect. You weld them together to make these insights visible to other people. Finally, the fourth process is transport. And in this process, what you do is you take an idea that’s common and well proven in one field and transported to another field. For example, you might take an idea that’s very common in professional theater and bring it to an environment of agile software development. The idea isn’t new, but the context is that’s the framework for ideas. Forge, sharpen weld and transport.
Which ways do you use to create new thought leadership ideas?
When it comes to thought leadership, I’m a big believer in Narrowcasting. Social media draws us towards a broadcasting mindset. We start chasing big metrics, views, likes, reach and impressions. And while those numbers can be satisfying for the ego, they’re actually pretty lousy ways to measure relevance to our target audience. In narrow casting, we assume that our thought leadership will be uninteresting or irrelevant to 99.99% of the world. And rather than fearing that metric, we embrace it. We create content which will be highly targeted to a very small number of people. Narrow casting focuses on key decision makers and influencers. It helps open doors and creates opportunities for conversations. And when we do narrow casting right, our target audiences will feel like we’re in the room already with them, talking to them about subjects they care about deeply. They become more likely to listen to what we have to say, adopt our way of thinking, and even become buyers. Now, I’m not suggesting that we abandon broadcasting strategies. What I’m saying is when we chase mass audiences and big metrics, we dilute the relevance and quality of our thought leadership. Therefore, it’s important to also set aside time to narrow cast our thought leadership to the most important members of our target audience.
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