For nearly a decade, I wrote perspectives and opinions for a CEO – what the business world calls thought leadership. This is what it looked like:
Each month, the CEO of a privately held services company gathered a hand-picked team of trusted professionals to discuss and debate issues – what’s trending, what’s around the corner, what’s being overlooked, what’s is being misrepresented, and what matters to her company’s audience.
One of us would be charged with drafting the perspective, and occasionally two of us would take a crack at the same topic to examine two different approaches.
We didn’t always agree but we never failed to uncover a truthful perspective, something to say with conviction that we hadn’t heard articulated. The process forced us to think more deeply about what was happening in and around our work, and what clients might find valuable as they wrestled with their own work.
Then we revised, edited, and edited some more before putting it into the world.
Always to an email list first, then to the social feeds.
What came next was the remarkable part.
“How do you know this works?”
It’s the question everyone asks. The response the CEO gave wasn’t what anyone on her team expected. It was atypical of the work-and-response rhythms of client work.
In that decade of writing, not once did anyone bring analytics to our meetings. Not. Once. And nobody asked for them. The extent of our group’s awareness of “effectiveness” was in the earliest days, confirming emails were sent, noticing an unopened rate to consider a second send, and then making adjustments to dead emails or unsubscribes, which we rare.
Instead, our time together was intentional, focused on mapping and pressure-testing the next set of ideas. That was the important thing – thinking through issues and perspectives that would benefit clients.
In time, it was as though the written content became a secondary byproduct of our robust dialogue, strengthening our perspectives and resolve on key issues.
Yet the questions from the outside persisted – how do you know this works? – the CEO’s answer was unexpected and refreshing. She said plainly – I don’t know.
And by I don’t know, she meant that she didn’t know what the analytics were, even though she could access them.
That data, if she chose to trust the numbers, easily could’ve killed our work early on.
So why did she persist for a decade?
It became personal
Here’s the thing — she experienced something more valuable than numbers and percentages could reveal.
Before we developed a cadence or monthly expectation among her audience, her peers in the c-suite we responding – first to the to the listserv email, and then to her personal inbox, providing affirming comments, their own thoughts, and occasional pushback, which she welcomed and responded to thoughtfully. At meetings, events, and galas, leaders would tell her they read her latest perspective.
She would share the written comments, unedited, with her hand-picked team. These were supposedly busy executives who didn’t have time to read monthly thought leadership, let alone respond to it.
It was the only metric that mattered, her tangible proof this was valuable to others, revealing itself in an email, a comment on a client call, a random encounter out in public. It became about personal engagement: her thoughts, their reactions, and ongoing dialogue.
She would openly admit there was no conclusive proof that any of it translated to a specific piece of new work. But she knew it put her top of mind among her audience, creating recall when they bumped into similar issues she’d already wrestled with and shared.
We didn’t check a thought leadership box with expectation of what would happen the following week or month. We were coming together to challenge ourselves, putting a stake in the ground on what we thought, and sharing our own wrestling match with others where she had the final say on what she believed and attached to her name.
This was true thought leadership — the kind that was never intended to become another cog inside a sales funnel.
Instead, we created authority through the candid and consistent work of thinking through hard issues so that when people needed perspective or expertise, they knew where to turn. She was adamant that we would not turn this exercise into a blatant sales pitch.
What I carry forward
I was an outsider this CEO trusted. I wish I could pinpoint the initial why of that trust, but I worked hard to maintain it, mainly by questioning, pushing, and presenting other perspectives. Sometimes my arguments could shift her lens. Often it galvanized her original thinking and views, spurring language for us in how to defend it.
In retrospect, that decade-long assignment was one of my favorites. And it led to opportunities to work with her and her team in other ways. That’s what trust does.
It also sharpened my thinking and counsel to clients on what I see as effective thought leadership. I believe it has four essential components.
1. Understand the commitment. I’ve worked on several multi-year campaigns with clients. I’ve also had just as many stall after a few months because they expected thought leadership to do their sales work for them. Knowing what you’re committing to – creating authority, not sales conversion – determines if you have the stamina for the work and its intent. Commit to showing up and see what emerges.
2. Make it a collaborate effort. Working in a small collaborative of trusted thinkers helps to pressure-test every angle and find your unique position. Even when you think you have great ideas, allowing others you trust to poke at it to see how it holds up before writing is essential. Find the people you trust with your ideas and ask them to challenge it and to show you other points of view over your own bias. This is perhaps the most valuable part of thought leadership.
3. Have courage. You must convey a distinctive point of view. Regurgitating what others have said is neither leadership, nor is it your unique thinking. Having courage to address hard things and experiences, with resolve and empathy, is what makes you memorable.
4. Play the long game. Authority and trust aren’t handed out freely. They are earned over time when reliability and relatability converge in the reader’s mind. That said, the practice of gathering for deep thinking and idea sparring forges discipline and defines a path forward, becoming as important as any written product. Give it six months to a year, minimum, and listen closely. Watch your trusted team grow in confidence.
That 10-year assignment didn’t feel like a decade of work. It felt like fun that went way too fast. And when the work is fun and valuable to others, you’re on to something.