The Long and The Short Of It

Episode 397 - Thought Leadership

Transcript:

Pete: Hey, Jen.

Jen: Hey, Pete.

Pete: I was having a coffee with a very smart senior executive last week. And he posed a question that I want to pose to you, to get your thoughts. And the question was...I'll paraphrase it. It was essentially, "Is thought leadership a teachable skill? And if so, how might one teach it?"

Jen: This is The Long and The Short Of It.

Pete: Oh listeners, Jen has an excited and almost cheeky look on her face, like she's got something to say.

Jen: Well, I have a lot of things to say.

Pete: Great. Did you want some more context, or did you want to just say them?

Jen: I feel like I just want to first respond with a question, which is not going to surprise you. What is thought leadership?

Pete: Oh, yeah. That is a very, very, very good question. And what it is to me maybe is different to what it is to the executive that asked me the question, and probably what it is to you might be different. So when I hear the term "thought leadership", I immediately think about, for better or worse, people in my orbit that I admire for their assertions, for their ideas, for their books, for the things they put into the world that challenge my thinking. And so, in that sense, I think of them as thought or idea provokers, i.e. leaders. That's my interpretation of a thought leader. What about yours?

Jen: Well, Pete, this is where the waters get a little muddy for me. Because I would say a thought leader is someone who is able to share useful ideas in a way that helps other people to understand them. But the thought leaders I have interest in following are people who share useful ideas in a way that help other people understand and implement them. And this, to me, is like a big issue in the thought leadership world, is that the thinking is where it stops.

Pete: Hmm. Wait, say more about that.

Jen: Well, so many people have great ideas. And when ideas just stay ideas, they don't really change things that much. But the great thought leaders I'm thinking of (Adam Grant, Brené Brown, Seth Godin) help you not only understand what the idea is, but also see how it relates to your own life, world, work, etc., and take action on the idea, rather than just keeping it in your head.

Pete: Hmm. I love it. I totally agree. There's a difference between, "Here's a sort of pithy philosophical idea that I sound intelligent saying," versus, "Here's a practical way to implement this less pithy idea that actually has, you know, grounding in the real world."

Jen: Mmm-hmm.

Pete: Okay. So, related to that...I think we did an episode about this, once upon a time. If not, let's talk about it now. I remember having a conversation with you about the idea of reversing, "Practice what you preach." And the common saying is, "You need to practice what you preach," which suggests that you are preaching something. In the thought leadership context we're talking about, you're putting something out there and only then, once you've told people like, "This is how to do blah," then you go, "Oh, I need to practice it. I should do that myself," which is one way of thinking about thought leadership or making these things practical. But the other way, which we have observed (and I've observed Seth Godin, for example, do extremely well), which is, "Preach what you've practiced already." So it's like, "Here are all the things I've built or done or learned in my process of building a company or managing a team or starting a business. Let me tell you about those." And in that context, "preach" is probably not even the right word. But it's more like, "I'm building things in my little studio here." This is how I've always thought about Seth, having seen him in action. "I'm building things in my studio. And every now and then, I like come into a public space, like at a conference, and I'll talk about the things that I'm building in my studio that I've actually done and I actually know have impact somewhere."

Jen: Right. And Seth is someone who literally works with his hands, in addition to all the great thinking he does. He makes things. But there are also wonderful thought leaders out there who are rooted in a future they're trying to help us build, like the great thought leaders who are helping us change our own daily habits, who envision a world where climate change has been corrected or at least improved, or a world where peace is possible, whatever the grand visions are. But because of the way they talk about the future they envision, we are able to look at our lives right now and see how we could contribute, rather than like a, "Someday, maybe...".

Pete: Yeah. So, it feels actionable and practical. It feels accessible. That feels like an important call out.

Jen: But I also feel like I usurped this conversation. So to go back to the original question, "Is thought leadership a teachable skill?" Yes.

Pete: Great. And then, the follow-up was, "How might we start to think about it?" But before we get there, what I am thinking about is maybe what we've been talking about is Thought Leadership with a capital T and a capital L, which are the people we've mentioned that are out there writing books and professing things on stage. What I was talking about with this executive was his particular team within a very large business, a team of about three hundred, and trying to get them to think and act and communicate more like thought leaders. And I feel like what he was perhaps suggesting was thought leadership with a lowercase T and a lowercase L. I don't think he was saying, "I want all three hundred and fifty people on my team to be writing books and speaking on conference stages." But I do think that there's a set of skills or capabilities that he was hoping to hone in this particular team, which is where I was interested in the follow-up question of like, "Okay. So if it is a teachable skill (which, I agree with you), how might we start to think about it? What are the skills, attributes, practices that thought leadership, with a capital or a lowercase T and L, have?"

Jen: I feel like I keep not answering the question you're asking me directly, but I feel like I have to address something else first. Which is, when someone has a title like "Thought Leader" on their business card or on the chyron when you see them on the television, it immediately changes the power dynamic. So I'm thinking that in a team, you want the attributes of a great thought leader. And I'm just going to keep going back to this definition that I wrote down, which I feel like might be accurate to how I think about this: "Someone who is able to share useful ideas in a way that helps other people to understand them and implement them or take action on them." So it seems like the skills we're talking about are clear communication, storytelling, empathy...all the things that you teach, by the way, Pete. But the second you say to someone, "I want you to be a thought leader on this team," it changes the dynamic of the team. So we probably, for lowercase thought leader, need a different word.

Pete: I think you're right. I think we need a different word. And I think you might be right about the skills, too. I also wonder if there's a step before your definition. So we've got, "Share useful ideas in a way that people can understand them and then hopefully implement them." But I almost feel like, if I'm thinking about employees in a giant company who are working in a specific way, before sharing useful ideas, I also think there's a permission to generate useful ideas. The actual coming up with the ideas in the first place. Rather than what is very common (sometimes for good reason, not always), is people are waiting for someone to tell them what to do. And then, they just do the thing that they were told to do. And that's not generating any new ideas. That's just executing someone else's idea. And I think what he was getting at was, "I want my people to be generating useful ideas, then sharing them in a way that is actually practical and understandable and useful." And so, I agree with you that there's the clear communication, there's the storytelling, there's the empathy, there's the humility to go, "Well, I don't know if this is a great idea, but I'm going to share it anyway, or I'm going to have the willingness to generate this idea." But I also wonder, what's the skill of generating ideas? Is it creativity? Is it back to your amazing idea, that we did an episode on...and by the way, Simon Sinek and Adam Grant and Brené Brown talked about this idea, of first pancakes. Speaking of thought leaders.

Jen: Yeah, first pancakes.

Pete: So, is it back to first pancakes? What do you think? The generation of ideas, as a skill.

Jen: Well, it depends.

Pete: This is so fun.

Jen: It depends. Because as we have said on many an episode, context is everything. When someone brings a specific problem to the table and says, "Let's generate a lot of ideas around this," I'm not sure that that's what we would be calling thought leadership. That would be a scenario where a really useful container for brainstorming and a container that has a lot of trust in it, that would be really helpful in that scenario. But whatever comes out of the brainstorm, if it needs to be communicated, maybe that's where the thought leadership skill comes in.

Pete: I love it. I love it. Because what you stumbled upon is the second part of the conversation, which I didn't share with you, which was the other skill or idea that this executive was focused on was what he called "empowerment". And we ended up having this conversation about where the two intersect and how they're related. Because I think it's difficult to have a team of...whatever, we're going to use the term for now, that we think we might need to come up with a different one. It's difficult to encourage more thought leadership in a team, if they're not empowered to generate ideas or come up with ideas in the first place. So this idea of coaching and empowering and creating those conditions that are psychologically safe for people to even have a brainstorming session is almost table stakes, for you to then enter the world of, "Okay. Now that you feel like you can generate ideas and now you are empowered to come up with new ideas, we also want to extend that into effectively communicating them and sharing them and making them practical."

Jen: This might be a total tangent. But I once did some work with a company that did a Lunch And Learn kind of series, where people from within the company were required to take turns presenting on something that was of interest to them, something they wanted to teach, something about the business. It could be something totally outside the business. But the skill was being generated in a completely no-stakes environment, because it was not related to really the projects they were working on. But just building the skill of being able to get up in front of people and share an idea and teach something and tell stories. I'm wondering if a very practical lab-like environment like that, like a Lunch And Learn kind of situation, is actually the way to teach this. Because...wow, this is meta. Thought leadership, in itself, is a useful idea that we understand. But to teach people to be thought leaders, asking them to just think is not enough. You've got to give them the opportunity to communicate the ideas.

Pete: I love that idea of a seemingly trivial but effective approach to getting people to share ideas with one another, like a Lunch And Learn. This is common in many companies. But actually, it's a bit like the Trojan Horse episode we recorded a few weeks ago, where it's like, "What are we Trojan Horsing into a Lunch And Learn? Well, actually, we're Trojan Horsing thought leadership. We want you to have ideas that are packaged up in a way that you can share them and make them practical and interesting and fun and engaging and resonant, and all the things that a good thought leader does, but in a low-stakes environment like a Lunch And Learn, where you're not presenting to the board or in front of five thousand people on a stage. You're able to get more reps, and probably hopefully get some feedback from the people in the room, so that you can get better at the skill of, essentially, thought leadership." That's good, Jen. I like that.

Jen: Now, Pete, I would be remiss if I left out The Big Ideas Lab, which is something you and I ran together and we've threatened to bring back. So listeners, if you're like, "I want in on that," you should definitely reach out to us and put the pressure on us to bring back The Big Ideas Lab. But basically, it was a thought leadership lab, where we helped people communicate their big ideas in a way that didn't feel so big and overwhelming to the people they were communicating them to.

Pete: True. Do you ever have this experience of forgetting some of the things that you've built and run over the years?

Jen: Yes. Every day.

Pete: The Big Ideas Lab is so that for me. I think because it was probably in the middle of COVID, maybe, when we came up with this brainchild that we came up with.

Jen: No, it was pre-COVID.

Pete: Maybe that's why. I don't know. It was so long ago that I forget that that's a thing that we did. And when I get asked questions like this, I forget to go, "Oh, yeah, that sounds exactly like the thing that we taught in The Big Ideas Lab." I really wish I remembered that for this conversation.

Jen: Well, you know what, Pete? What's so funny is the people who were in it didn't forget it. Because many of them are still communicating the idea that they were working on in The Big Ideas Lab. Some of them have gone on to form companies. Some of them have gone on to become very successful speakers or consultants or facilitators, because of The Big Ideas Lab. So, they definitely haven't forgotten about it.

Pete: Yeah. Yeah, more successful than we could have imagined. My god, shout out to The Big Ideas Lab grads.

Jen: Right?

Pete: So I mean, I guess we pretty clearly have answered the question, "Is thought leadership teachable?" Well, yeah, it can be. Just ask all the people that we worked with in The Big Ideas Lab. I didn't intend for this to be a self-promotion podcast, but here we are.

Jen: Well, we don't have any plans to run it again. We have dreams about it but it's not on the calendar, unless some listeners come out of the woodwork and want to encourage us to do so.

Pete: I guess, in that sense, we're really just preaching what we've practiced. We are sharing with you something that we built in the studio many years ago.

Jen: Yeah.

Pete: And I love this conversation. Because it's now reminding me that when you hear a term like "thought leadership", when someone asks you, "Can you teach thought leadership," it's easy to go, "Woah, can I teach you to be Brené Brown?" That's overwhelming. But I can break it down into, "Can I teach you to, you know, generate ideas in a brainstorming session, in the first place? Can I teach you to then get that idea and break it down in a way that's practical, accessible, interesting, sticky? Can I teach you to understand your audience when you're communicating your idea, so that you tell a story in a way that means something to the audience?" Yeah, I can do all those things. So, thought leadership is indeed a skill that can be taught. Excuse me, while I run to my inbox and write this executive an email, sharing some ideas with him on how we could structure this leadership program.

Jen: And that is The Long and The Short Of It.