Why Every Thought Leader Needs a Plan Before They Publish Writing a book isn’t just…
Thought Leadership in the Content Playground | Ashley Faus
How frameworks and content marketing connect to thought leadership.
An interview with Ashley Faus about using frameworks to create repeatable outcomes, verifiable insights, and a stronger sense of trust.
Have you ever had to onboard a new hire, or explain a complex task to a colleague not in your field? How can you get a novice up to speed without giving them a doctoral-level lecture?
Today’s guest is Ashley Faus, Content Strategy Lead for Software Teams at Atlassian. Atlassian is a software development company that creates tools which are used worldwide to unlock the potential of high-functioning teams in the workplace.
We start our conversation by discussing frameworks for thought leadership, content, and broad ideas, and how building a content framework can make even complex ideas accessible to learners of all levels. Ashley goes on to share the four pillars of her framework: Credibility, Profile, Prolific, and Strong Depth of Ideas. She explains how frameworks can be a tool to assess areas of specific challenge or difficulty, and how to use them to create a stronger focus to improve. In addition to her four pillars,
Ashley shares how she arrived at the idea of the “Content Playground,” and how she builds on her experience in content marketing to turn ideas and inspiration into learning journeys. An audience can be engaged by allowing them to choose their own path through content, discover insights that speak to their personal perspective, and grow through the novelty of play.
Ashley explains that trust is an essential quality of thought leadership, and that to be a great leader, you must be open, honest, and vulnerable. Organizations, too, need to manifest those traits, remaining consistent and authentic in their actions and messaging, so that audiences understand and believe in the brand’.
Three Key Takeaways:
- A well-built framework can be a great way for others to more easily grasp the core of your thought leadership.
- Thought Leadership can be used for content marketing, but that should not be it’s main goal.
- Thought Leadership is a long-term play, unlike most marketing, and should be constructed and utilized to withstand the rigors of time.
Join the Organizational Thought Leadership Newsletter to learn more about expanding thought leadership within your organization! This monthly newsletter is full of practical information, advice, and ideas to help you reach your organization’s thought leadership goals.
And if you need help scaling organizational thought leadership, contact Thought Leadership Leverage!
Transcript
Bill Sherman How do you help experts within your organization become skilled thought leadership practitioners? Well, that’s a tough question. And today, I’d like to tackle it in two ways, looking both at a framework as well as on an applied level. I’ve asked Ashley Faus to help me explore this question. She’s a content strategy lead and like me, she’s a fan of models. So we’ll compare models, including her four pillars of thought leadership and my four elements. We’ll talk about developing thought leadership as an organizational competency, and we’ll explore the intersection of demand gen and thought leadership. Today, we journey into the content playground in this episode of Leveraging Thought Leadership. I’m Bill Sherman. Ready? Let’s begin. Welcome to the show, Ashley.
Ashley Faus Good to be here, Bill. I know we caught up a little on LinkedIn, so I’m super excited to catch up in Zoom life.
Bill Sherman Absolutely. And this is a conversation you and I have been having in LinkedIn for a while. And so I like recording this one so that people can sort of eavesdrop a little bit and also then hopefully jump into the conversation. One of the things that I enjoy and that I think you and I have sparked on together is thought leadership plus creating frameworks, right? And so We practice thought leadership and content strategy by day, but I think we’re both working on frameworks by night.
Ashley Faus Exactly. Well, and I think it’s interesting because in a lot of cases, and I’m sure people who are doing this on a daily basis, they don’t have time to go into how they arrived at their smart ideas. I’ve been doing this for over 10 years. I have an education in it, you know, I’ve Been practicing it. And so if somebody asked me, Oh, what do you know about this? Or how do you do this? In theory, I should have a quippy short thing to share with them and be like, oh, here’s a one pager. And so frameworks are an easy way to do that. They give you a shorthand, they give you a common language, they gave you definitions. And it’s an easy thing for somebody to be able to say, okay, are we on the same page? Are we not on the on the page? Because the likelihood that I can download all of my years of experience and all the experiences that I had during that time that led me to this is not really happening. So yeah, frameworks are a great way to shortcut that.
Bill Sherman And that mental model, that ability to explain to a colleague or a peer who may not be doing thought leadership, but is trying to understand what you’re doing. Or if you’re onboarding additional people and saying, Hey, I need your help here. You have to be able to explain success somehow.
Ashley Faus Yeah. Well, and in a way that doesn’t require, um, I, I work with a lot of non marketers or non, non storytellers, non communicators, whatever bucket you want to put them in where this is not their day job. This is not how they think. And they don’t have time or desire to become an expert in that thing. They’re already focusing their efforts to become an expert in something else. And so at the point where they’re starting to partner with me, we got get on the same page really fast, and it can’t be, okay, let me. you know, educate you about all the reasons how and why and when and all the things. It’s like, no, here’s the highlights. Happy to dive into more detail if you need it. But you’re an expert. I’m an expert let’s pair our expertise to really make something better than either of us could alone.
Bill Sherman So let’s dive into that as an example and as sort of a way. So you talked about pulling in technical experts, people who know their area intensely well. And your responsibility is to help curate some of that knowledge and get it out into the world in the right places, right? But they’re coming to you and I can imagine some of them say, so someone told me I should work with you because I need to do thought leadership. What do you say in response?
Ashley Faus Yep. Yep. So the good news is, and we can dive into my framework, it’s got four pillars. Usually what I do is I show them, because in a lot of cases, they don’t know what the elements are. They don’t how we would measure it. In their minds, maybe they have some inkling of like, oh, apparently I’m supposed to write something or I’m suppose to do a webinar or something, I guess. And so when you actually dig in and you say it’s more holistic. In my case, my framework is four things. It’s credibility. It’s profile, it’s being prolific, and it’s having strong depth of ideas. And you have to have all of those. And frequently at the point where somebody ends up in my Slack DMs or on my calendar, they’re lacking in one or more of those areas. And so assessing them at the beginning to understand where are you lacking most can help us hone where we need to focus our efforts. And so it also helps break it down into a bite-size thing where people might say, you know, oh, I’m supposed to do this one conference. And so now I’m a thought leader. And it’s like, well, no, technically they also are trying to prep you for doing press briefings or having you write more so that you can be kind of the face of this particular narrative. Or you have really strong credibility because you’re, you know you’re a practitioner or you have a fancy title but you never write, you never speak. You have no social media followings. And so.
Bill Sherman However, LinkedIn says last posted somewhere in 2010.
Ashley Faus Exactly, exactly. Or you just don’t, you basically don’t exist on the internet very well. And so then when we try to go pitch you to speak to analysts, or we try pitch you for higher level conferences, immediately the press or the analyst or the conference organizer looks for you and it’s like, I don’t know who you are. Like, how do I know that you’re smart or that you are capable? right? So that’s.
Bill Sherman You don’t want that analyst or member of the media to say, were they in the witness protection program for some period of time?
Ashley Faus Well, especially in this day and age, like, how can you not be on the internet? If you want to be found, you got to be on the internet if you don’t want to be found then that’s fine. But it’s really bad if people think you were in witness protection. It’s a weird thing.
Bill Sherman Well, and with that, and I think this is sort of an evolving thing both from a workplace as well as generationally, the assumption of what you do through technology and what is personal versus professional and that sense of image, I think if you look at generations that are coming up and are fully digital native, they’re like, yeah, I get this. I have to have an online presence. where you look at some axers and you even look at boomers and they’re going, eh, that’s optional. That’s a nice to have, right? That’s like, no, you’re invisible.
Ashley Faus Well, and it’s interesting too, because there is definitely still a place for that word of mouth or peer to peer connections, or, oh, I worked with you a few years ago and maybe I have your phone number or your personal email address or something like that. Some way to get ahold of you or people that you run into when you attend conferences, for example. But when you start talking about scalability, and this is something that really tends to resonate with the more technical engineering folks that I work with. They want their software to scale. They build their software for reach and repeatability. Why wouldn’t you build your message house in the same way for reach and repeat ability? And so if you like, you wouldn’t take your software and build this beautiful thing and then stick it in a drawer, why would you do that with the expertise that you’ve curated and built and all the experience and knowledge that you have? Why would you just put that in a draw? You wouldn’t do that with your software. Why would you do that with your mind?
Bill Sherman Well, and doing that with software would be the equivalent of deploying it once in one use case and never building something that can be redeployed, repurposed, et cetera, for a large enough addressable audience. And so that reaching scale has been one of the things that I’ve always been interested in. How do ideas propagate? How do they reach scale? after all, even what is an idea and the ability to distill that down. whether it’s like your assessment, which between credibility, profile, prolific, and depth of ideas, you can sketch that on a napkin to someone either at a cocktail party or you can sketch it in a Zoom meeting and they get it. How do you distill down what is an idea in the same way so that people go, okay, what do you mean by thought leadership? Because I’ve heard some ridiculous definitions. It’s like thought leadership is your smartest content marketing? No. Thought leadership is what thought leaders do. Okay, great. How do I do that?
Ashley Faus Yeah, it’s a nice little circular. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Well, and it’s interesting too, this concept. I mean, this is kind of a semantic rabbit hole that we can go down, but I think about this stuff a lot. Talking about when someone asks you, what is thought leadership? They are rarely asking for the literal definition of it. They’re asking, how do you build it? How do you recognize it? How do measure it? How do the thing? And I had come up, I was being kind of spitballing Quipy one day and I was like, thought leader. It’s like I need a I need some the four pillar framework doesn’t roll off the tongue the way that the three S’s of thought leadership do. Right. Right, right. Art, it’s shaping and it’s dang it. What was the third one? Smart shaping and sharing. And I was saying, basically, if you look at the anatomy of the words thought and leader thought, OK, you have thoughts. This is my depth of ideas piece. It probably means you’re smart. you’ve got some sort of expertise. leader means that you have people who follow you, which would be something kind of around the prolific and profile that people follow you. And then bridging those two is sharing that you’ve got to…not only do you have to have the thoughts and you have to have followers who want to hear them, you actually have to put those thoughts out into the world. And this is where a lot of people get tripped up, especially in kind of that depth of ideas pillar, is they don’t codify the knowledge. They’re smart. They’re making a ton of money for themselves or their company, but if they’re not codifying those ideas in a way that somebody can follow them and pick them up, and to your point with your kind of idea of this platform of ideas and how ideas propagate, they have to be able to spread. And so that’s a big piece when I talk to people that have that expertise, and it’s like, well, they’re really smart, so they must be a thought leader. And it’s, like, okay, but if, if they are missing that leader part because they don’t have any followers, then all they have is thoughts. and they’re just smart. And being good at your job or being smart does not make you a thought leader. It makes you good at job and it makes you very smart, doesn’t make you the thought leader
Bill Sherman Absolutely. And going to one of the things that you said in terms of people come and they ask the question, what is it? How do I do it? I think another question often that comes is, what can we use it for? Right. And so they know it’s a tool and toolbox. Many organizations are even looking now and saying, okay, thought leadership is a distinct function. Maybe it in marketing, maybe it sits in strategy or research or comms. can place in different places, but I’ve got this tool. What do I use it for at the end of the day? I’d love to hear some of what you’ve been using it for, Atlassian, as well as sort of the range that you think is possible, and maybe a story or two example.
Ashley Faus So we have a couple of key storylines or narratives, and this gets at some of the things where you talk about people are saying, oh, thought leadership is your best content marketing. And I’m like, no, content marketing is your best content marketing. Thought leadership can be a type of content marketing, but it’s not, that’s not the goal.
Bill Sherman It’s almost a drinking game when someone says thought leadership equals content marketing. It’s like, yeah, take a shot. Okay. Yeah.
Ashley Faus Yeah, yeah. We got our bingo cards. Yeah, exactly. Get a blackout. So there are a couple of ways to do this. I think the first thing that differentiates thought leadership from other types of initiatives is the time horizon. So if you look at something like Demangen or advertising or sales, those are very specific looking for kind of a one-to-one conversion in call it a quarterly Horizon. If you look at things like talent brand or recruiting or strategic partnerships, that’s an ongoing initiative. That’s not something that you’re going to solve in one month or one quarter. That’s something that your going to be building over time. Now you may have hiring goals or partnership goals that you want to achieve over the next one to three years. So if you think about your time horizon for thought leadership, again, a thought leadership piece is unlikely to convert someone to buy or convert someone. to apply online. It’s a reputation thing, it’s a relationship building, it is community, it’s conversation. This is a long-term play. And as I just mentioned, you see it as a long term play beyond just selling a product or service. So we obviously have a couple of initiatives, thought leadership initiatives around product focused stories. So for example, we tell a lot of stories around agile ways of working, agile methodologies. and how to use our tools in tandem with agile ways of working. So that is that we are trying to be a thought leader in the agile space. On the flip side of that, we also, given that we’re a SaaS company, we are, like everyone else, struggling to hire for engineers. It’s the war on talent, if you want to call it that, or the seller’s market. It’s a talent market. It’s really hard. to hire really good quality engineers. And so we need to open up our pipeline of engineers to have people apply and to increase the quality of the applicant, to increase that throughput, the diversity of the applicants, etc. And we want to manage our engineering reputation. We want to talk about our engineering culture. We wanna have a thought leadership position about how modern software gets built, how modern software teams run, and how to have a healthy engineering team at scale. And so those are two different elements that we talk about. And then obviously kind of at the brand level and thought leadership level, we talk about teamwork, collaboration, ways of working, the future of work. We have a variety of kind of thought leadership platforms in that vein as well. And they’re all connected. If you listen to them, you start to see like, okay, collaboration. Okay. Agile ways of Working, teamwork, okay, engineering. Engineering at scale, okay, it goes into collaboration. Okay, it tends to be, you know, agile has been widely adopted among software teams. So they all relate to each other. They’re not coming out of left field, but they are distinct narratives. In some cases, they have distinct places where those stories are told. In other cases, we have kind of a specific person or group of people who are telling those stories.
Bill Sherman And this is where the need for someone to be overseeing the storytelling and really the curation of thought leadership, right? Because it becomes easy, especially when you get into an organization that you have multiple voices with different perspectives, but how do you tell a consistent story either for a brand building perspective or an employer of choice perspective, or even if you’ve got. B2B sales cycles that are long sales cycles, and you have a buyer that’s just not in a buying cycle at this point. You can use thought leadership that way, or you could be trying to influence media analysts, public policy makers, but you can’t just say, here, we’re gonna pitch you. You’ve got to reach the way that they’re interested in information and make it relevant to them. And that’s a much more difficult challenges to segment out those audiences and to know how to be relevant to each of them.
Ashley Faus Well, and it’s interesting, I think, I would say that Lassie and we work together across a number of teams. Um, so whenever I’ve talked about this and kind of a more formal presentation, I actually have a slide that’s got all of these different areas of ownership. And it could be an editorial team. It could be a PR team. It could. A social media team. It could, be admins who help schedule and all of this stuff. The thing that I highlight in that very overwhelming slide is the and that the person has to genuinely believe. understand and want to share the information. I would say this is not a marketing exercise. Yes, it can be a shaping exercise from a messaging standpoint with the PR team for a specific press outlet, or it can again be a honing exercise with a marketer for a conference or for a narrative that you want to live for 18 to 24 months. I do think there is a shelf life for about leadership, I think that you do need to consider how it evolves, even if there’s an underlying premise where it’s something that’s very broad, something like agile ways of working. Obviously, that is evergreen, but the conversation is going to shift as time goes on, right? So you may need to do some exercises about how do we talk about this? How do we write about it? Do we need to? Oh, we see the live stream video is becoming a new thing. Should we create a weekly series? There’s tactical. elements of that that are more of a marketing or a comms exercise. But at the end of the day, the individual has to be adding novel elements to it. And they have to be coming up with new things to share. And if they’re not bought in, and if they are not having those unique thoughts, if they aren’t actually really close to that work, it’s unlikely that they’re going to be able to evolve those thoughts in a way that actually points to thought leadership, depth of ideas, credibility, etc.
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. So one of the things and I think you get to it is there is a degree of passion you need to practice thought leadership and that passion cannot be manufactured, it cannot be imposed. You have to align the person who’s being the voice of thought leadership for whatever topic in the organization to something they actually care about and that it will be even away from their sort of noodling on the idea. whether it’s a 2 a.m. sort of, you know, a-ha moment or, you now, they’re a softball game or whatever, but it’s gotta be something that will come up in conversation naturally for them. Otherwise, I don’t think it works.
Ashley Faus No, it’s funny as part of, so I have basically, we’ve got the overarching framework, which is the pillars, we do a baseline and then we start to measure as people are progressing through. And I have some markers of how you know you’ve progressed and some tactics to help you progress. So there’s the overall framework. Within that, I have a narrative framework that kind of spans the mix of content strategy and thought leadership. And then I’ve got an additional kind of, I call it a personal branding worksheet. Thank you for watching. Bye! And one of the questions that I ask is, how do you speak? What is your tone? How do you write? Are you formal? Are you sarcastic? Do you curse? Do you not curse? And then I also talk about, what do you wear? Are you, again, are you formal, are casual? Do you have a specific look? And usually when I first come to people who kind of don’t, this is the first time doing this work, they’re like, well, I’ll just say whatever you want me to say. I’ll wear whatever you what me to wear. And I’m like, no, no. I’m not here to tell you how to sound or how to look. because they bite. If I give you a script or if you’re wearing a costume, that credibility pillar is gonna suffer.
Bill Sherman All of a sudden everybody’s wearing matching polo shirts and it feels like we’re at a conference and it’s like wind up and give delivery speech number three.
Ashley Faus Yes. And it doesn’t build that trust because now you’re not authentic and so nobody believes you and it just comes across as this spammy sales pitch. And so I’ve seen this too, where people think that the way to open every speech is, I am excited to be here. I’m like, are you though? Because you seem slightly terrified or the flip side is, I’m very excited to here today. And you’re like, Are you though? Because if the answer is actually, you’re nervous, maybe just say that, just say, I gotta be honest guys. I feel a bit overwhelmed standing here. I am in front of very smart peers and I’m excited and humbled to be here that you’re gonna listen to what I have to say about this. That’s much more authentic than either of the two extremes of being the most energetic or. You’ve read this script that says you’re supposed to tell the audience you’re excited, you know?
Bill Sherman Right, right, and you know where your joke points are.
Ashley Faus Exactly, exactly. And pause for, you know, I’ve even done that myself a few times where I’ve spoken and I thought, okay, this is a great joke. It’s going to land. And it doesn’t land. And then I’m like, awkwardly like, okay. Well, let’s move on from that. Because if I had taken the full pause, then I am going to be standing there on stage in very awkward silence because I didn’t read the room effectively. So that’s the other the other reason that people have to be passionate and bought in on this. is so that they’re not so in their own heads that they can’t read the room.
Bill Sherman Well, and with that of the focus and being in the moment, you also have to, I think, embrace the concept that you’ll fail more than once. And it might be the joke that doesn’t land, which is a small little, you know, ding. It’s not the whole speech didn’t land. It wasn’t the idea, but you have to get out there. You have to put the idea in multiple formats and say, okay, maybe I didn’t have the right audience. Maybe I didn’t have the right lead or the right story. keep reshaping it. I think of thought leadership often similar to a writer and they’ll write, you know, page upon page for a novel and maybe only keep a paragraph.
Ashley Faus Well, and that gets at that prolific pillar. When you start to think about how do you find the right message for the right person at the right time in the right place, you tend to have to test a lot of messages in a lot places at a lot times on a lot people. And then you start home down and figure out, okay, this is how these things connect. The other thing is, and this contributes to the depth of ideas, if you’re not constantly testing those ideas and figuring out which message resonates so that somebody else can take them forward, you don’t know if you’ve effectively codified it in a way that someone else could follow it. And so I, again, I’ve tested some of this stuff myself where I’ve put stuff out there and I’m like, I’m so smart. I figured it out. I’ve said it perfectly. And I put it out there. and it’s just like.
Bill Sherman Right. Right.
Ashley Faus Okay, great. Now I’ve learned something. What did I learn? Where did I go wrong? How did this not land? Is it that the core of the idea is not good? Well, let me try rephrasing it and putting it out there. And if the idea gets rephrased three or four times and consistently gets rejected, then the idea it’s probably not great. But if it gets adopted or it resonates or gets engagement in a different format, then I know, okay, I had just packaged it incorrectly. in this particular way, and this style of message doesn’t resonate. I would never know that, or I would feel crushed if I only put out one idea and it doesn’t resonate and then I’m like, well, I guess I’m just done, I have no good ideas, I’m just terrible. It’s like, how crushing to only have one or two chances to resonate instead of having multiple chances. And then it’s like you know, oh, okay, cool, this one, this went tanked, good, And now I’ve learned something.
Bill Sherman Well, and you can take ideas and distill them down, and it’s difficult to distill them down for beginner because if you’ve had it in your head for months or years, you’re at the graduate school level and you’ve got to take it down to someone who hasn’t been renting space in your head for six months, right? But one of the things that I really love about that is that prolific sense. It can be small p prolific. Because you think of the author who’s written 30 books or the person who’s, you know, 150 patents or whatever, right? That’s big P prolific. Posting on LinkedIn on a more frequent basis is a small P prolfic act. And if it doesn’t go over, you’ve got instant feedback rather than you write a book manuscript. You spend 18 months of your life on that, right. You can only do So many big P. investments for prolific, right?
Ashley Faus Well, and if you look at all of the people in history who are considered luminaries or the most innovative or, you know, the greatest thinkers or sharers or shapers of their time, and you look at how much of their work they threw away and stuff that we’ve discovered after their death or that was shared after they became big names and you realize that they, again, this gets back to comment about passion. They were just cranking on this stuff all the time. And so in theory, sure, they had one brilliant idea one day. No, that’s not how it works. You’re not going to have this flash of brilliance. That’s a complete myth. You have to, things run in the background, you process them, you get new inputs, you fiddle, and suddenly your flash of brilliant is actually five, 10, 20 years in the making. And so again, if you’re not passionate and you don’t have that deep expertise and passion for this, element, of course, it’s going to feel like a chore to be prolific. And of course it’s gonna feel hard to actually codify those ideas because you don’t actually like them.
Bill Sherman Well, and that’s the difference between treating a thought leadership activity as a project versus looking at it as a practitioner, where you say, I am going to be on this journey for a longer period of time. Might be a couple of years, could be my entire career, but I approach it with a practitioner’s mindset. You wake up and you say how do I weave this in? One of the places that I want to turn is you started out in the world of marketing and with content marketing, right? And then have evolved into thought leadership. Would you talk a little bit about how you sort of made that shift and how you fell into the world? Thought leadership.
Ashley Faus Sure. So I would say that I am still kind of squarely in the world of marketing. I think that the focus has changed a bit. One of the things where I really thrive is at the intersection. I’m really good at connecting the dots. So, I see kind of all of the things and I’m like, oh, this goes up here, that goes over there, and these things, right? So there’s an element of it where when we talk about connecting things across different elements, there’s a massive thought leadership opportunity to connect those stories and those tactics because they do go across multiple things and they are longer term. For example, I have run traditional kind of inbound MQL, DemandGen, Legion, whatever word we’re using to describe that discipline under the marketing umbrella. I was fine at that. I would say that I did not excel at that as much. because I kept wanting to color outside the lines. I kept saying like, this is stupid. Nobody, just because somebody filled out a form does not mean that they wanna buy something. And just because someone doesn’t wanna buy something today doesn’t mean they’re not worth my time. Like, they could be a candidate, they could a strategic partner, they could become a buyer in the future, they could became a brand champion that refers 10 other clients to us. So why, why am I supposed to just focus on this one transaction right now? That makes no sense. And so that kind of led me to say, okay, we need a new model. If it’s not a linear funnel and it’s not a looping decision journey, because these things are not linear and they don’t go in a nice little circle. That led me into thinking about the content playground. And so, that is this mindset of create a journey that’s so smart and so delightful that your audience can choose their own path and end up. at a great result. And in some cases, that result is buying your service. In other cases, that might be applying for a job or referring you, et cetera. And so then as I started to think about the content playground, I started to realize, okay, if we pop that up a level, and what we’re really talking about is educating and empowering people and matching problems with solutions, not selling something to someone that they don’t need, not tricking them into buying something that they didn’t need. but educating and empowering and matching problems and solutions, that is actually more thought leadership. That’s pushing things forward. That’s push the solution space forward. That’s educating about the problem space. That’s helping people do their own research and solve problems in a smarter way. And that’s actually thought leadership and so it’s almost, it’s kind of funny that you say, oh, how did you evolve into this space? And I’m like, I would actually say that I haven’t actually left the space I was previously in. I think that they’re actually connected. And so. I am fortunate that at Atlassian I get to work with a bunch of other teams who contribute to this type of work. I wouldn’t say I’m starting to see a head of thought leadership or head of executive content or something, those types of titles. And we don’t have that specific role at Atlastian. There’s not one central function that is doing these things. But if you look at the way we’re telling stories in the world and you look the narratives that we’re associated with. you start to realize that they track all the way down to the different content depths. That’s the framework that I was saying is basically shared between kind of the playground model and the four pillar thought leaderships is this idea of content depths and matching problems and solutions, helping people to solve their own problems and find solutions in new ways. So I think I’m actually kind of bridging that gap between very specific disciplines under the marketing umbrella and this more abstract. brand or storytelling or long-term affinity and relationship building and trust that tends to be attributed more to thought leadership content.
Bill Sherman And you mentioned trust and I think that is such a powerful word that is often thrown around but is really hard to master in a way that it creates the results that everybody wants. As we begin to wrap up, do you have any advice around trust? How do you create it and how do you make it come to life?
Ashley Faus there’s two things and I think that they actually both go back to that credibility and passion that we’ve been talking about. And the first is you have to be open and honest and vulnerable. As a person who’s speaking, you have be open. And it’s a weird thing I know in kind of the social sciences and psychology, there are a lot of markers of do you make eye contact? How long do you make eye contact for? Do you? Hesitate, are you twitchy, right? There’s various markers in terms of tone and physicality that demonstrate openness. But most of us can feel if someone is being open and honest, and if they’re not. If they’re reading a script or they’re intentionally being inflammatory just to kick off a controversy, or if they are straight up lying. we can kind of inherently feel that. And so if you’re not genuinely saying things, people will feel that the second piece of that then is that as a brand being consistent and putting forward people who do kind of already exude that or giving people permission to be their open selves and to be vulnerable and to share in an authentic way as a and you have to deliver that consistently. And so if, for example, we take a bunch of different spokespeople, thought leaders, influencers from within a company and you get one person that’s just certainly over the top. And so they just feel fake because they’re being too enthusiastic. You get another person that feels forced or obligated because they are just flat and they have no energy. And then you get somebody in the middle who is authentic. It’s almost worse. because now you’ve got this huge inconsistency. And so it not only does it erode that trust in kind of across the board, it then erodes the trust in the brand because it’s like, okay, they can’t see the difference between these three. Like one of these things is not like the other and that’s a problem. So you’ve gotta have that consistency across the brand of who you put forward and that the experience people have. when someone says, oh, I’m from Atlassian or I’m from this brand, are you getting, it doesn’t have to be the same experience. It’s not about duplicating or copying, but it’s the general experience that you get that this person is open, they’re honest, they’re authentic, they are knowledgeable and they do inspire that trust. Is that coming from both the brand and the person?
Bill Sherman And I think that breaking it down into small manageable pieces is the challenge, especially when you’re trying to recruit across an organization to say, hey, come on with us on this journey. You can be part of it. It will help the organization. It will help you and help your career. We’ll show you the way, right? And I think that’s one of the pieces, especially when you’re working with people who are incredibly knowledgeable about their subject, but maybe a little bit more cautious and not ready to dive into thought leadership. Before we wrap, where does someone find more information about your four pillars?
Ashley Faus you can follow me or contact me on LinkedIn or Twitter at Ashley Faus. I talk about this stuff. I actually share the worksheets. I share the four pillars. I share the details on both of those platforms regularly.
Bill Sherman we’ll have to leave it here. I know that I’ll see you online and LinkedIn, and we’ll continue the conversation there. Thank you for joining us today, Ashley.
Ashley Faus Yeah, thank you for having me.
Bill Sherman If you’re interested in organizational thought leadership, then I invite you to subscribe to the OrgTL 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 web site, 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.
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