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Expect to face diverse opinions on the value of thought leadership. Stakeholders with a negative opinion of thought leadership have likely seen material that falls into one of several traps.

What is new: Thought leadership is well-defined, but the wide use of the label for any future-looking material means quality varies substantially.

Why it matters: False friends erode the trust in your tangible thought leadership assets when you attach the label broadly without a clear quality definition.

What makes thought leadership attractive: The average CEO trusts thought leadership from ~5 sources. In return, you can expect a 156% ROI compared to 8-9% for classic marketing programs—source: IBM IBV.

Delivering exciting executive pieces with bigger impact requires excellence in all process aspects to become one of the five trusted sources. Your biggest enemy is setting the quality bar too low or operating without a clear quality ambition.

Original definition: It is worthwhile for a thought leadership professional to revisit the three-decade-old original definition.

“Thought Leaders are those people who possess a distinctively original idea, a unique point of view, or an unprecedented insight into their industry.” Joel Kurtzman, 1994

™️ A popular label: Most professionals are familiar with the term thought leadership and have an opinion about its value. The challenge with too many interpretations of it means some material are watered-down and fluffy.

Understanding common traps and pitfalls allows you to recognize content masquerading as thought leadership and avoid delivering low-quality content.

😇 Your thoughts and your leadership: The first trap is to emphasize yourself, your thoughts, and your leadership too much. You are eager to show your expertise and want to come across as the leader in your industry. By starting here, you have skipped the most important step.

Thought leadership doesn’t start with who you are and what you can do; it starts with a superior understanding of your customers and their problems. Great thought leaders understand their customers’ problems as well as, if not better than, their customers do. The ticket to playing in the thought leadership arena is for customers who feel you understand them exceptionally well and help them see their problems differently.

🔁 Inside-out thinking: The risk of choosing the wrong approach is close to the trap above. Inside-out thinking tends to generate solutions that search for a problem. Lack of clarity on the issues you address is a strong signal that you face an inside-out case.

Thought leadership builds on outside-in thinking regarding markets, opportunities, and identified problems, as well as outside-in thinking in which numbers play a vital role in demonstrating a profound opportunity understanding.

🧠 Thinking is not enough: The third trap concerns thinking and a tendency to overthink situations, a reality driven by the false assumption that the more you think, the better the result. Thinking is essential, but thought leadership is an art that goes further than that.

Collaborating with others is more important than thinking alone. Collaborate with subject matter experts to sharpen your thoughts, with writers to sharpen your sentences, and with data scientists to find the necessary data points. Thought leadership is a team sport, so “Collaboration Leadership” would be a more relevant expression if coined today.

#️⃣ Thinking without proof: Trap number four concerns the importance of data and proof points. Thought leadership requires both quantitative and qualitative dimensions to be complete.

In the early phases of new opportunities, taking a broad brush approach and limiting yourself to level and top-down numbers as proof can be tempting. Such “Thought Leadership,” standing on shaky evidence, makes it hard to earn credibility and motivate your customers to take action.

One crucial aspect to address early is the outcomes you target to change and the numbers you start from. Clarity on what outcomes you see as relevant is part of your insights. Actual proof can come later and evolve from the current outcome via a hypothesis of expected improvements to validated outcomes.

🗣 Sell before you help: The nature of thought leadership is more about helping than selling to your customers. Educating your customers to see realities differently plays a significant role.

Thought leadership does not end with customers understanding a new phenomenon; it goes one step further, where the most valuable insights provide options for which actions to take.

Excellent thought leadership does give you a reputation label such as guide, coach, advisor, teacher, and partner rather than “leader.”

🎤 Publishing before presenting and validating: The final trap concerns finding the correct number of iterations before publishing—your points of view benefit from being presented and refined in multiple iterations before publication.

It is easier to refine your thoughts through interactions with the target audiences than relying purely on internal working groups, ideally in face-to-face settings in small groups.

Finding the correct number of iterations required before your stories become stable can be challenging. Allow yourself to experiment initially, and after a few projects, you will develop a good feeling for when it is good enough to publish.

A modular approach, where different aspects of your points of view come to life, is a great way to achieve high quality without taking forever to complete.

The bottom line is to restrict the use of the thought leadership label to content and work methods geared toward high quality.

Additional reading suggestions

• Quality thought leadership, more critical than ever [BLOGPOST] – by Emma Carroll
• 10 reasons why people hate thought leadership [ARICLE] – by Yogesh Shah, Forbes
• By the numbers: This is the impact thought leadership has on prospects – and current customers [BLOGPOST] – by Allison Carter
• Thought leader or misinformer? How companies are ruining the Internet [BLOGPOST] – by Sarah Hamid
• Why a thought leader? And why is everybody becoming one? [ARTICLE] – by Noah Lekas, Bm
• Own your expertise-13 ways to elevate your thought leadership [BLOGPOST] – by Wensdy Shore, Entrepreneur