The Four Elements of Thought Leadership | Bill Sherman | 467

I've spoken with and worked alongside thousands of thought leadership practitioners over my career, and there's one question that I get asked again and again: Is this thought leadership any good? I've heard this question from endowed chairs at top-tier business schools, seasoned C-suite executives running billion-dollar businesses, and heads of thought leadership for global nonprofit organizations. People wanna know if their ideas are good, if they're going to create impact, and what can they do to make their insights better and even more useful. These are tough questions because in the field of thought leadership, we lack a common language and frameworks. Few of us ever took a graduate school course on thought leadership. And even fewer had mentors as we got into the field of thought leadership. So today, I want to share a framework that I've built and refined over the past 20 years. As a consultant, I've had the privilege of working with thought leadership practitioners. They've shared their ideas and work product with me, and I've been given the keys to explore their unpublished intellectual addicts., and I've had to, as a consultant, provide answers to several questions. Is this thought leadership any good? How does it compare to others' work? And how can I make my thought leadership better? In this episode, I introduce the 4 elements of thought leadership. I'm Bill Sherman, and you're listening to Leveraging Thought Leadership. Ready? Let's begin. What is thought leadership? Let's start there. If you type that question into Google, you'll get a number of spectacularly bad answers. One answer in a Helpy McHelperson sort of way says, thought leadership is what thought leaders do. Okay, sure, but that doesn't help me become a better thought leadership practitioner. Another answer says, thought leadership is your smartest content marketing. Again, I'm left at a loss if I want to evaluate thought leadership quality or sharpen my skills. The Four Elements of Thought Leadership is a practitioner-based framework. The work of thought leadership is to turn good ideas into better ideas, to package them in ways that appeal to the right target audiences, and then get them out to the world. So before I begin, A short clarification. The 4 elements do not answer the question, what makes a good thought leader? That's a skills-based question, and there's some really good frameworks out there to answer that question. The 4 elements also does not answer the question, how do I produce impact? Impact is about taking an idea to scale once it's solid, and that's a different conversation. Our focus today is around sharpening the thinking and communicating an idea effectively. The 4 elements of thought leadership are ideas, content, offerings, and platform. The first element of thought leadership are the ideas. Ideas are the atoms of thought leadership, if you will. If you don't have a useful idea, then you're probably not ever gonna create Thought Leadership. So what's an idea? In the Four Elements framework, an idea is a short, provocative statement which catches your target's attention and gets them to say, hmm, that's interesting, tell me more. An idea is simple and brief. It's not an entire book or a white paper. It's not even a paragraph. It's often a simple sentence Maybe two. So what does an idea sound like? Let's turn to the Agile Manifesto, the short document which in many ways was the spark that transformed software development in the early 2000s. Written and signed in 2000, it's worth reading the Agile Manifesto in full. In quote, we are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it. Through this work, we have come to value individuals and interactions over processes and tools, working software over comprehensive documentation, customer collaboration over contract negotiation, responding to change over following a plan. That is, while there is value in the second terms in the set, we value the items in the first set even more. That's the entire Agile Manifesto. 67 words. If you listened carefully, you'd hear 4 core ideas, which they call values. Each idea was provocative: individuals and interactions over processes and tools. They're meant to spark discussion as well as guide behavior. Imagine yourself hearing that the developers value working software over comprehensive documentation. The first time you hear that idea, you might raise an eyebrow, or you might say, "That's interesting. Tell me more." What the Agile Manifesto does clearly is frame ideas in a provocative way through its ideas. Now, over 20 years later, these ideas may feel that they've become the established norm, but in their day, they were ideas voiced by 17 people who crafted and signed the document, and then they invited other developers to sign it as well. These are ideas that created a movement and transformed how software has been developed. So let's move on from the world of ideas into the second of the four elements. Content. Here, I like to think of a content library. An idea can't go off on its own into the world and make an impact. The idea needs support to be persuasive. A content library is the entire collection of stories, data, anecdotes, examples, case studies that support the idea. If an idea's purpose is to provoke discussion, the Hmm, tell me more, then the purpose of content is persuasion. When you practice thought leadership for yourself or your organization, you share your ideas again and again. But if you're good at your work, you tailor your persuasive content to the needs of your audience. Let's say you're sharing the Agile Manifesto in 2000 with two different groups. First, a group of software developers and also a group of CFOs. If you're smart, you'll use different stories, data, and examples to make your case persuasively. When you present one of your ideas to an audience, you go into your content library and ask, what will help me persuade this audience? Here's the key. All of the elements in your content library They're kind of like Legos, infinitely repurposable and reusable. The data you use for a white paper can be put into a speech or even an infographic. And that's a subtle point. Don't confuse content, the stories, data, and examples that you use to persuade with the format that you're delivering the content in. The purpose of content is persuasion and influence, regardless of what format you put it in. I've had a chance to explore many different content libraries, and a few are well organized and fully documented. They've been curated with the love of a librarian caring for a collection. But for most of us who practice thought leadership, the content library is a bit of a clutter, an intellectual attic. Or perhaps even more, the cavernous government warehouse scene at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Many people undervalue well-organized content. They'll tell themselves, well, it's all in my head or on my hard drive. But there's a big risk here. If content isn't documented and organized, then it becomes a barrier for the ideas to reach scale. I've seen situations where social media teams were dependent on the thought leadership expert because the best content was undocumented. The social media team had to go back and ask for stories, data, and examples again and again. Incredibly inefficient and a massive barrier to scale. 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 5-star review at ratethispodcast.com/LTL and share it with your friends. We're available on Apple Podcasts and on all major listening apps, as well as thoughtleadershipleverage.com/podcast. Once you have defined your big ideas and developed your most persuasive content, Well, then it's time to package them up and deliver them to your target audience. That's the role of offerings. The third element of thought leadership. I like to think of offerings as kind of the box that you package your ideas and content inside, much like Amazon packs your orders in a cardboard box for shipping. So what forms of offerings do you use? Podcasts, speeches, presentations, LinkedIn posts, white papers, infographics, short-form videos, webinars. The list is pretty much endless and only limited by your creativity and your audience's preferences. If I'm trying to reach people in Gen Z and Gen Alpha, I'm probably not creating white papers for them today. I'm creating short-form videos of snackable content. And if I'm trying to reach HBR readers, then I'm writing a data-rich article that based on original research. Much like Amazon has to deliver packages to the right house, you have to deliver your thought leadership to places where your audiences will find it. Because even when you give away thought leadership for free, there's always a transaction cost, and that cost is time. Every offering, whether it's the teaser to a blog post, a 90-second video, or 20-page white paper requires your audience's time. Imagine someone skimming through LinkedIn. They're scrolling through their feed, deciding which posts seem interesting enough to click see more, and that decision is made in a fraction of a second. So you have to think about which offerings will you create. Just because the list of potential offerings is endless doesn't mean that your audience has endless interest. You need to think about how you'll package and deliver these ideas so that they'll give you some fraction of their time and attention. You have to lead with value quickly and signal relevance to your audience, knowing that you'll also at the same time be signaling to a lot of other people that your thought leadership is deeply irrelevant to them. Offerings are our primary way to educate, persuade, and drive action. And that's why I prefer a dozen small experiments rather than one big tentpole asset that takes up massive time and budget to produce and comes with a big time ask of your audience. Nobody has time for that. And now we come to the fourth element of thought leadership. The platform. It's time to put your thought leadership on stage and shine a spotlight on it. So what's a platform? It's best thought of as the brand for your insights. Organizations invest a lot of time in brand building and measuring the health of their brand among their customers. Individuals also build personal brands. Their personal brand is the reputation. Maybe they're a good collaborator, timely, a hard worker, etc. Ideas need their own brands too. The marketplace for ideas is an incredibly noisy place, and without a strong platform, your ideas will get lost in the noise. Platform, typically the most neglected part of thought leadership. And it quickly leads to a problem of scale because ideas need a brand. And if they don't have one of their own, they will either latch on to the personal brand of their creator or their organization's brand, if there is one. In that way, ideas are kind of like toddlers learning to walk. They'll scamper a couple steps away from you, and then they turn, look back over their shoulder, and giggle, and they rush back to you and latch on to your knee and hold on for dear life. If you want your thought leadership to stand on its own in the world, then you need to develop a platform. A good platform answers the following questions: How will people know what the ideas are about? What problems do they solve? And who should use them? When you have a strong platform, your ideas spread without you having to be present in the room or the Zoom. Imagine, if you will, two people are meeting for coffee. One has already heard about your ideas and the other person needs your ideas. You're not in the room, and as they talk, will your ideas come to mind for Person A? Will they connect the problem that they're hearing about from person B with the solution that you've offered? That's a function of a strong brand and platform. And then how will person A explain your ideas to person B? Can they get someone to say, huh, never thought about it that way before. I need to check that out. Ideas reach scale when other people can remember them at the right time and can explain them effectively to their friends and colleagues. That's the power of a good platform. So there you go. Those are the 4 elements of thought leadership: ideas, content, offerings, and platform. As I said earlier, this is a practitioner's framework for developing and deploying thought leadership. It helps you look with a critical eye at your work product and identify what's working well, and what parts need to be even better. It's one of the core frameworks that I use every day to help individuals and organizations make impact through thought leadership. If you want to learn more about the 4 elements of thought leadership, you'll find a white paper on my LinkedIn profile in the featured section. It dives deeper into the framework and it'll give you ways to evaluate the quality of each element, as well as applied tips on how to make improvements. Thanks for joining me today for the deep dive into the 4 elements of thought leadership. 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. Tl.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.