(Part 1 of 2 posts)

What’s a thought leader?  It’s someone who understands a particular sliver of knowledge as well or better than everyone else.  It’s someone who has added to the world’s awareness of the possibilities that exist for a group of people so that they see themselves in a new way.  It’s someone who understands how to apply one kind of expertise to a field where it hasn’t been applied before.

That knowledge is usually developed over a decade or more, and it comes from a genuine passion, a desire to break open some locked mystery box that has puzzled everyone up until now.

Sometimes literally.  I once stood in front of an audience – a group of executives from a particular company in a particular industry – with a mystery box.  I told them that it contained the answer to the problem that had been eluding them for the past year:  how to crack open a new market for the company in order to increase its flatlining sales.

I told them I wasn’t going to open the box until someone told me what was in it, or at least close enough that their ideas and the words written on the piece of paper I had placed in the box were recognizably adjacent, allowing for jargon and verbal shorthand they knew that I didn’t. I explained that I had been hired by their CEO to help them work their way out of their slump, with the help of a superstar marketer in the industry who had worked with us to prepare the way forward, written on paper.

Most of that was true.

So they went to work, brainstorming a wide variety of ideas and checking anxiously with me after each one.  I let them run for about 45 minutes before finally saying, ‘Yes, that’s it!’  and congratulating them.  Their excitement was palpable.

When I opened the box to read what was on the piece of paper, they were astonished to find it blank.  I didn’t know anything about the industry or how to break open a new market.  I hadn’t met with any industry gurus.  I had been hired by their CEO to help jump-start their creativity.

I told them what they were starting to realize:  they already had all the expertise they needed.  I had just let them brainstorm until they came up with something that they were sufficiently confident about, and I could see their energy coalesce around it in their body language.

There were two kinds of thought leadership at work here.  One was centered on my ideas about communications, creativity, and storytelling.  The other was the shared expertise about an industry and a company’s products that could be applied to a new market. I didn’t know anything much beyond common sense about their industry, and the executives didn’t know much about my world of communications beyond common sense, but the combination was heady and fruitful.

In fact, the CEO of the company, frustrated by the impasse that the executive team had become mired in, had hired me to help them get unstuck creatively.  He trusted his team enough to believe that they had the answers they needed; they had just lost confidence in their current playbook — and themselves.  By asking them the question, “the answer is there in front of you – what is it?” in a different way, I helped them learn to trust themselves and their business again.

Thought leadership is expertise about something that you know as deeply as anyone – especially if you have a different perspective on it than most people, even other experts in the field.  How you share that knowledge is a secondary question, but one that is almost as important as the knowledge itself.  If I had simply stood up in front of that frustrated, overwhelmed, stuck team and told them they already knew what to do, they just had to have the courage to do it, they wouldn’t have had the mojo to get the job done – even though that was the case.

Thought leadership is expertise, and the ability to express that expertise to your chosen audience in ways that transform them into superstars in their worlds, improve their ability to get their job done, or show them new ways of thinking about what they’re doing.  Or all of those at once.

Are you a thought leader? Next time, I’ll talk about what you can do to make a career out of it.