What Thought Leadership Means (For You)
Everybody wants it, everybody needs it – but thought leadership is a notoriously difficult concept to nail down.
At its simplest, thought leadership is about standing out, setting the terms for the debate, and being the one everybody thinks of first and foremost when it comes to your industry. It’s about being the go-to person in your field, a trusted source with a heads up on where the future is going.
Most of the time, it’s a buzzword, something people toss around without a firm grasp on what it means or how to establish it. But there’s a very real and very powerful idea behind that loosey-goosey buzzword: it’s about being an authority by consistently answering the questions relevant to your audience.
And that’s the key thing here. Your audience sets the agenda, not you. They’re the ones with questions. They’re the ones with worries. They’re the ones setting out to solve a problem – and you earn your authority by being the best possible answer. It doesn’t depend on a unique point of view or an exciting new take. It just means that, when it counts, the guidance you provide delivers results.
What Thought Leadership Isn’t
When trying to explain the concept, people will usually reach for the easiest example out there: Steve Jobs. Jobs was definitely a thought leader. But too often, exactly the wrong lesson is drawn from his experience.
The spiel is easy to replicate on demand: thought leadership is about being the best of the best, setting the agenda and transforming the conversation. It’s about being on the cutting edge, offering revolutionary new ideas, and redefining your industry. That’s what will set you apart from all your competitors. All you have to be is Steve Jobs.
And it’s true. If you had all of that, yeah, you’d be your industry’s Steve Jobs. Jobs defined an entire market segment with the iPhone and radically changed how the world interacts with technology on a basic, day-to-day level. But it’s absolutely insane to expect that of yourself or any business, especially because thought leadership is a real thing that your business can develop without unveiling the industrial lubricant industry’s equivalent of the iPhone. It’s not that complicated. It never has been.
No one is asking anyone to be the Steve Jobs of real estate, of pest control, or craft supply distribution. What they are asking is for someone to provide meaningful idea-focused solutions to simple, day-to-day problems.
What Thought Leadership Is
Thought leadership is about being consistently at the top of your field. It’s not about offering an innovative new way to think about an industry, or a game-changing new solution to an everyday problem. It is, at its core, about reliability when it comes to meeting the needs and answering the questions of your audience.
In other words, it’s less about blazing a path into the future than it is about being useful here and now, where people actually live. The goal isn’t constant product differentiation, but about being what your industry needs – and the best differentiation, after all, is being reliably helpful by offering the best content and ideas you can. Less flash, more meat-and-potatoes.
Really, meat and potatoes is where most businesses thrive. If you’re good at what you do, you already have the most important tool in place to establish (and benefit from) thought leadership. Everything it has to offer – brand affinity, industry pace-setting, a healthier stream of leads – are all within your grasp as long as you have the core asset of industry expertise.
And you do! If you’re already doing well in your field, expertise is already yours. So it’s time to leverage that asset and to put the pieces into place to turn that experience and expertise into the kind of thought leadership your industry needs.
Who You’re Leading
So let’s get practical. What does that actually mean for you? Well, that’s hard to pin down, because thought leadership is going to look different in every industry. Jeff Bezos built up his thought leadership by introducing volume and logistics to online retail on a truly massive scale, so “success” for his field had dimension. Steve Jobs, too, working in the fast-changing digital space, needed to release something profoundly disruptive to win his thought leadership – and then maintained it by constantly keeping ahead of the competition.
In each case, leadership differed depending on the local context of the market segment they were operating in. And that’s true for you too.
The important thing to remember is who you’re trying to lead. Your agenda, as we said above, is dictated by your audience, but in order to lead, you have to anticipate where they need to go – and then beat them there, because that demonstrates that you’re ahead of the game and that they can trust you to take care of them, providing them with the direction and expertise they need to accomplish their goals. That’s how the Steve Jobses of the world actually provide thought leadership.
And not everyone is looking for bleeding-edge content that’s going to upend the entire industry. And the fact is that you can’t generate the stuff on the fly; nobody can sit down, say to themselves “hmm, let’s have some thought leadership,” and bang out a transformative blog post that will change the industry forever. It’s not about what’s trending on Google.
It’s not any idea you happen to have. Honest-to-goodness capital-T Thought Leadership is ultimately about why you are successful and other people aren’t. That is what your audience is after. That’s what they need.
That’s where thought leadership comes from, and it’s something any business in any industry can establish for itself.
