Internal skepticism, resistance and ownership conflicts are the biggest challenges in our field today.
Viewing thought leadership as vital today, a company hires someone to launch a thought leadership group or turn around one viewed as ineffective. The excitement is as high as the expectations.
However, months or even a year goes by and there’s not much to show. Under budget scrutiny, a series of research studies start and stop. Marketing shifts the promotion budget to other content. Salespeople, expected to pry open client doors with research insights, ignore the findings. One groundbreaking study, which points to a big market need the company could fill, is dismissed at the top. Tired of the lack of progress, the heads of marketing, strategy, sales and service delivery vigorously debate who should control the thought leadership budget and run the program. The CFO questions whether there should be a thought leadership budget at all.
This is a thought leadership group in crisis, and I see this as the biggest challenge in our field today. Although I’ve seen versions of this crisis play out since the 1990s, they seem to be more frequent and severe this decade. Why? Perhaps it’s that thought leadership has become a serious endeavor in B2B companies everywhere. While their circumstances vary, these crises share a fundamental trait: The people running thought leadership did not manage the insidious internal politics their programs stir up.
Why? They didn’t anticipate where thought leadership would raise internal skepticism, resistance and ownership conflicts. Understanding those issues, viewing them as quite natural to surface – and quite avoidable if addressed – is key to managing the nasty internal politics of thought leadership.
Organizational politics has been under the academic research microscope since the 1970s, although its intellectual roots go back at least to the 1930s. In the last 55 years, academics such as Gerald R. Ferris (Florida State), Jeffrey Pfeffer (Stanford) and Henry Mintzberg (McGill) have led the way.
To understand the internal politics of thought leadership initiatives, I find Mintzberg’s insights most helpful. He described politics as one of several “systems of influence” in an organization, including authority, ideology and expertise. He termed politics as illegitimate or “alegitimate” influence – behavior that is not officially blessed from the top. “As a result,” he wrote in a 1985 article for the Journal of Management Studies, “political behavior is typically divisive and conflictive, often pitting individuals or groups against formal authority, accepted ideology, and/or certified expertise, or else against each other.” In short, Mintzberg said, organizational politics is typically described as “games.”
For decades but especially the last five years, I’ve seen deadly organizational politics congeal around thought leadership initiatives. What leads to this? Mintzberg’s writings provide a strong clue. He pointed to other theorists who believe a key precipitator is a big change in the organization’s state – such as “the emergence of a new, critical body of expertise, a major innovation, or a serious reduction in the resources available to the organization.”
The rise of a new body of expertise in a company is what thought leadership should be about.
In this article, I’ll explain the biggest political issues of thought leadership and what precipitates them, based on swimming in them for the last 38 years. Then I’ll recommend ways to head off the politics – or, at least, reduce them so they don’t derail a solid thought leadership program.
Thought leadership chiefs who navigate these politics can build a powerful internal coalition of thought leadership champions, participants and partners. As such, this coalition will be “in sync” about their roles in helping their organization compete on thought leadership. That understanding is essential for turning superior expertise into a considerable competitive advantage and a generator of immense client value.
How Great Expectations Turn into Turf Wars
Many new improvement programs in a company are welcomed by some with open arms and excitement. Whether quality improvement, radical business process change, business model innovation, cultural shifts and so on, excitement fills the air. But these programs can also be met with closed minds and defiance, often unstated.
A thought leadership program is no exception. Because a central goal of thought leadership is producing new expertise in an organization, it squarely explains why programs to create and capitalize on those ideas can be kneecapped by organizational politics. New expertise can threaten a company’s existing expertise. The developers, marketers, sellers and deliverers of the old expertise have a product that is now obsolete. Quite naturally, they can feel their careers are at risk.
When they do, they can slow walk approvals that should be made in minutes, not months. They can shoot down or kneecap promising ideas for unstated reasons. Salespeople can merely go through the motions in trying to sell new expertise.
Of course, this creates is a big problem for thought leadership professionals. Their activities are stuck. When that happens, they can lose ambitious and valuable talent – people who want to leave a mark. Ultimately, the internal politics that can engulf thought leadership puts its chief proponents at risk. They also put at risk a company’s ability to differentiate itself through proprietary expertise.
What, then, is the answer? Water down the insights from thought leadership research so they don’t offend a firm’s most influential people? Hold back on publishing provocative arguments, even those backed by inarguable evidence, because they threaten the company’s power structure?
Not if you have an elevated view of thought leadership. The aspiration of people who work in the field should be to make thought leadership the fuel of service innovation. I devoted an entire chapter to this in my book, “Competing on Thought Leadership.” Big ideas should lead to differentiated services that help clients institute those ideas. When extensive best-practice research is behind a company’s new ideas, that thought leadership should lead to new services, not just marketing content. It doesn’t matter whether you are selling legal advice, consulting services, architecture and design expertise or accounting knowhow.
Thought leadership professionals must be able to anticipate the organizational politics their work can surface. New expertise produced by a thought leadership research group can threaten the interests of several other functions in different ways.
Six Primary Sources of Poisonous Politics
I’ve seen six main sources of poisonous politics that can engulf thought leadership, in order of frequency (Exhibit 1):
- Marketing: Believing they are responsible for creating all content the firm communicates broadly to the marketplace, the marketing team can view an autonomous thought leadership group as stepping on their toes.
- Sales: Selling new expertise requires two things: buying into it and then understanding how to sell it. This isn’t easy. Selling expertise that’s proven to sell in the past is far easier.
- Company experts: These are the people generating the fees – a law firm’s lawyers, a consultancy’s consultants, an architecture firm’s architects, a tech services firm’s digital consultants and software developers, and so on. New expertise may make their expertise obsolete.
- Service innovation: In these times when artificial intelligence and other digital technologies enable their clients to make major productivity and other improvements, every professional services firm should have a service innovation group. It’s not easy for billable consultants, lawyers, architects and software engineers to come up with the next big service offering when they are busy addressing the client’s issue at hand. But when B2B firms form service innovation groups – the service industry equivalent to a manufacturer’s R&D function – they can become quite protective of their turf. That, of course, means that when a thought leadership research group identifies a new service opportunity, the group charged with service innovation can adopt a “not invented here” attitude.
- Service delivery: This group increases the odds that a firm’s current services and projects achieve clients’ goals profitably for the firm. In many firms, the service delivery group is also in charge of methodology development, or at least involved in it. The thought leadership group should be collaborating with them when best-practice research points to better ways of delivering the firm’s services. But the methodology overseers, the keepers of the firm’s crown jewels, can resent the intrusion.
- Strategic planning: Those charged with navigating the company’s future direction often don’t understand how thought leadership research can double as market research on emerging client needs. But like the keepers of the firm’s methodologies, strategic planners can be quite territorial when thought leadership research points to new, off-the-radar service opportunities.
If a thought leadership group doesn’t anticipate and head off such objections from these six groups, it should expect to find itself in the middle of nasty turf battles. Even worse, most of these skirmishes will be hidden; silent and fervent opposition will be working under the cover of friendly conversations. Yet some internal battles will display overt resistance.
Exhibit 1: Six Sources of Organizational Politics Around Thought Leadership
Let’s now look at each source and why a thought leadership group can get on their bad side.
Marketers Who Want to Own All Go-to-Market Content
If your marketing group believes every piece of content meant to improve the firm’s marketplace image must go through them, they are likely to see thought leadership content as part of their content-creation territory. They may even see it as the key piece, with an increasing number of studies showing thought leadership’s sizable influence over executives’ buying decisions.
But as I wrote in Chapter 9 of my book, the group(s) producing thought leadership content should understand that their work fulfills two internal purposes: demand creation (content for marketing and sales) and supply creation (content for new methods and new services). When a thought leadership content group reports to marketing, the firm’s fee-generating experts and managers in charge of service innovation and delivery will view these content producers as only there to help create demand, not create supply.
In their minds, thought leadership = thought leadership marketing. That’s a big opportunity lost, one that will diminish even the best thought leadership research. Instead of leading to new methods for the firm’s existing services or whole new services, groundbreaking ideas will never move beyond being ideas in marketing documents. Few company experts will be using them to open doors and deliver their expertise.
This is not to minimize the role of marketers in the thought leadership game. They are essential to getting a company’s powerful new insights on the minds of its target audience. People who create the content don’t have the time or expertise to stage and execute the marketing and sales campaigns that bring that talent to market. Thought leadership marketers are an essential component to competing on thought leadership.
Salespeople Successful at Selling Proven Services
A study with novel insights, and never-before-told real case study examples that name companies and validate the prescriptions, is a beautiful thing to behold. So are marketers who get prestigious media to publish those insights, stage seminars that attract dozens of buyers and are adept at generating social media buzz. Such marketers are of huge value.
But great content and great marketing can’t make up for business developers who can’t capably turn intrigued prospects into business. The so-called “last mile to the customer” (a phrase of Maria Boulden, B2B chief sales officer whisperer in her days at Gartner) is littered with salespeople who were unprepared or unwilling to hold productive conversations with client executives who wanted to know how their company could capitalize on the insights that amazed them in some piece of thought leadership.
But you can’t blame salespeople for being hesitant to peddle new expertise. Thought leadership represents a new concept and an associated set of services to sell. Merely reading their company’s research report doesn’t tell salespeople how to sell the services behind the insights – especially if no such service exists (yet). The insights are only nifty ideas in the heads of the authors.
Consider this: Would a car salesperson want to sell you on a concept car you saw at an auto show that may never come to market? Of course not. Thought leadership research that produces big ideas that have yet to be turned into services are just ideas. Salespeople don’t like to sell ideas. They prefer selling services that have steps, fees and deliverables articulated.
Company Experts Who Fear Obsolescence
Practice leaders who have mastered their well-tested methods won’t be fans of thought leadership research that aims to seek the truth about the latest best practices in the marketplace, or whether those practices are found in the firm’s own clients or at other firms (which should be the goal.) Consultants in a consulting firm, architects in an architecture firm, technologists in a tech services firm – none of them is likely to embrace a new way to do their work, or a whole new service.
Thought leadership research that births new expertise in a company will initially have a fan club of one: the people who did the research. The people who work with clients will soon recognize that their expertise is becoming obsolete.
Consider a corporate law firm that researched best practices in defending clients from class-action suits. If an internal study reveals that the firm’s class action defense group is not using the latest and greatest legal methods, its lawyers are not likely to admit their knowledge is dated. Similarly, think about a consulting or tech services firm with a lucrative call center practice that researches on how Fortune 500 companies are using generative AI. They won’t be happy if the study finds the highest-payback initiatives are in sales, not customer service, which in fact ranks, say, sixth on the list.
This is likely to set off conflicts about who in the firm possesses the best expertise: the professionals who work with clients daily or a thought leadership research group. Unless the thought leadership research group reports to the top of the company, the power is likely to be in the practices. Your experts will likely veto or water down studies perceived to harm their interests in the short term.
Territorial Service Innovation Groups
By far, marketing and sales groups are the two most frequent sources of debilitating politics around thought leadership. But even if those groups buy 100% into the value of such research and their respective roles in bringing it to market, that may not be enough.
If you’ve seen groundbreaking thought leadership research create new services (as I have), you know that turning new ideas into new services may not be easy. One reason is that the company’s practices don’t get behind it, as mentioned previously. But even when they do, thought leadership may not have an ally where it needs one: with a service innovation group.
Yet unless those in charge of service innovation see how thought leadership research can ignite new service offerings, they may ignore the findings of these studies.
Methodology-Protective Service Delivery Organizations
Professional services firms that bring dozens or hundreds of their staff onto the same large projects benefit from having a group that monitors the progress of those projects. People can easily go haywire on projects with so many moving parts. One way service delivery groups reduce the risk of projects going rogue is by being the keeper (and sometimes the creator) of methodologies, tools and other things that guide our project teams do their work.
This is a critical group in a professional services firm – particularly tech services and consultancies – for which certain projects can ring up invoices in the tens of millions of dollars. Continuing to hone the firm’s project methods can be crucial to maintaining quality. But this is where a thought leadership research group can run afoul of service delivery functions that are the keepers of the methodologies.
If a firm’s thought leadership research is generating new expertise to deliver to clients, the research should lead to whole new methodologies or enhancements to existing methodologies, right? Of course. But a service delivery organization that sees methodologies as its role may not welcome the new, new thing.
The Lords of Strategy Who Preside Over New Market Opportunities
“The Lords of Strategy” was the title of a 2010 book by business journalist Walter Kiechel III. He wrote about four titans of the strategy consulting industry and the impact of their ideas and their firms. For this article, I have a different meaning of the term: the people in a B2B company responsible for identifying client segments and regions of the world to cater to, acquisitions to target, and strategic alliances to strike (software companies and others). Heads of strategy can also run service innovation.
If a B2B organization doesn’t have a service innovation group, it may have a head of strategy, whose role includes identifying needs for new services. The management consulting industry has been the leader among professional services industries in incubating new services that sell expertise, some of which have become major segments of the global consulting business. Business reengineering is one (CSC Index, a firm I worked at for 10 years). Disruptive innovation is another (Innosight, co-founded by Harvard Business School Prof. Clayton Christensen). Managing a company for maximum shareholder returns is another (e.g., Marakon Associates’ value-based management services and Stern Stewart’s economic value added approach, famously known as EVA).
If a firm’s head of strategy is also in charge of service innovation, they will likely keep an eye out for new services that competitors are selling. They can also conduct surveys that ask clients about needs that their advisers are not addressing.
However, some strategy chiefs may not readily be aware of how the thought leadership group’s research on marketplace best practices can point to new service offerings. The thought leadership research that CSC Index and reengineering guru Michael Hammer did in the late 1980s and early 1990s helped the firm wander into new consulting territory: from helping chief information officers manage the IT function to redesigning major business processes. That helped turn a $40 million company into a $200 million company eight years later.
But if strategy leaders don’t understand how thought leadership can fuel new services, they aren’t likely to collaborate with the head of thought leadership on developing new services. In fact, they may believe that the thought leadership function needs to “stay in their lane” – publishing studies and leaving new service opportunities to someone else (i.e., the strategy function).
The six places cited above are where I’ve seen thought leadership groups, even with groundbreaking research, run into internal strife they didn’t expect. Less common but still important, even corporate legal departments may unwittingly upend thought leadership programs, ex-Gartner VP Boulden believes. Why? Fear of divulging high-value intellectual capital is one. Concerns over case studies broaching client confidentiality are another.
These are functional battles. And, for sure, they can be dwarfed by opposition at the top of company about thought leadership. Some B2B CEOs and CFOs may not think differentiated expertise will matter in getting and keeping customers. This is true only if their companies sell simple products and/or services that solve simple problems. Sellers of office stationery, for example, don’t need thought leadership to win over buyers. As I said in my book, the B2B sectors that compete on thought leadership sell complex offerings that address complex business problems.
Heads of thought leadership can avoid getting stuck in the proverbial quicksand on these six areas. But it requires that those functional heads have the same view on what thought leadership should be about: developing and creating demand for new expertise the marketplace needs and which their firm should deliver. It also requires those functional chiefs to understand deeply how they help their company capitalize on groundbreaking expertise.
Syncing the Stakeholders: Reducing the Politics of Thought Leadership
“Politics” in these areas will thwart the ambitions of even the most ambitious thought leadership chiefs. How can thought leadership chiefs minimize such politics? Is that at all possible to do? And, if so, can it be done quickly?
You won’t be able to resolve the politics of thought leadership if you take it on faith (like I have over many years) that outstanding content will automatically convert opponents into proponents. It’s an easy trap to fall into, especially for people like me who love groundbreaking ideas that work. However, believing that the six stakeholders will roll out the red carpet for big ideas can be a false hope.
I’ve seen it first-hand, from helping several clients conduct thought leadership studies from which we spun off article submissions that were published in some of the most prestigious management journals (Harvard Business Review, MIT Sloan Management Review and others). I’ve watched some clients do little more than post these articles and the study reports on their websites.
Big concepts born from exceptional thought leadership research can die from organizational neglect, ignorance and jealousy.
This, for sure, is not a revelation. Many great ideas in companies that sell expertise die from organizational apathy. Payroll services company founder Tom Golisano (Paychex) first tried in 1971 to sell his idea for handling small-business payroll processing to his employer, a midmarket payroll services company. They didn’t buy into it. He went on to launch what is now a $5 billion revenue public company worth more than $56 billion.
Many professional services firms have dropped the ball on the innovators in their midst – thought leaders and others. In the early 1960s, IBM ignored a star salesperson’s suggestion: provide IT outsourcing services. Perhaps you’ve heard of his name: Ross Perot. He went onto found Electronic Data Systems Corp., which General Motors would buy 22 years later for $2.5 billion.
Why should companies that sell high-priced advice to clients be immune from the poisonous organizational politics of innovation? They aren’t.
But how can they stop the organizational politics that can poison thought leadership programs? I propose four steps to get key stakeholders moving in the same direction on thought leadership – getting them “in sync,” as I put it.
Exhibit 2: Steps to Heading Off the Politics of Thought Leadership
Step 1: Understanding Stakeholders’ Differences
I’ve noticed for decades that few executives at the same firm have the same concept in mind when someone asks, “What is thought leadership?” Getting them in sync begins with understanding how each of the key stakeholders defines it. This would be best done through one-on-one in-person, phone or video interviews. You’ll want their takes on six issues:
- How they define thought leadership.
- The value: How important thought leadership is in clients’ choice of firms.
- The processes for developing content, gaining market attention to that content (what I call demand creation), and creating supply (turning new expertise into consistently high-quality services).
- The process owners: Who should own the process pieces of developing the content, creating demand for it, and creating supply?
- Key success factors: What do they think thought leadership programs must do to be highly effective?
- The resource requirements in investments, talent, and know-how. Best-practice benchmarks can enlighten leaders on the investments necessary to build a competitive program.
Stakeholders should be interviewed separately. Why? At this early step, you don’t want one stakeholder’s views on thought leadership shaping the others’. Ideally, these interviewers should be conducted by someone with whom each stakeholder can feel comfortable in expressing and keeping their opinions confidential. That might mean an outsider to your firm.
After the last interview, send each of them an email thanking them for their views and explaining the next step: getting them to converge around a common view of thought leadership. But also tell all the stakeholders that you’d like them to read an outsider’s view on thought leadership (it must be one that you buy into), and before they attend the group workshop in Step 2.
Importantly, do not compel them to “buy into” the views of that document – only to think about how it jibes with their thinking. You want them to come to one converged view on thought leadership at their own speed. But you also need to tell them everyone must share one common view for the company to make real progress on it – and that “real progress” here means making the company’s thought leadership programs a revenue growth generator.
The outside viewpoint that you ask stakeholders to read should reflect a view on organizational thought leadership that you aspire to. You can easily find these definitions in books like mine, as several organizations have already done, or in dozens of essays and white papers on thought leadership today through generative AI and search engines. Tell the participants that you’d like their opinion on the outside viewpoint – even if they don’t agree with every aspect of it. The workshop will be where you begin to get their agreement on the most important aspects: the six items mentioned above.
Step 2: Explaining the Differences and Harmonizing Them Around a Singular View
This step is best done in a half-day workshop, onsite or online. The workshop invitation should explain that this will be their first opportunity to shape how thought leadership is conducted in the organization. In other words, don’t frame this as a “training session” – i.e., getting them to learn something you’ve already figured out. It’s a workshop in which you’ll ask everyone to come to a common understanding at a high level of what thought leadership is and how it should be done.
This is the first stage to getting the stakeholders “in sync” on thought leadership. But it most likely will be too early to get them entirely in sync – finishing each other’s sentences about the key success factors of thought leadership, for example. Getting fully in sync will require getting them to participate in a focused thought leadership study executed over a short period of time (3-5 months). The goal of this is deepening their understanding of the value of thought leadership and how to get that value.
In doing so, each will be able to contribute to shaping of a big idea from the research (if the research is designed well). And each will begin to understand their role in taking that content to market.
At the end of this workshop, bring a half-dozen or so topic ideas for a focused thought leadership study to the group and ask them to rank their interest in them. The topics must be of vital interest to the firm and some of its clients. (Note: They must be narrowly defined topics whose research can be executed in three months or so.) End the meeting with the vote count, and choose the winning topic.
Then remind them of their roles in bringing the research forward, once the study is complete.
Exhibit 3: Thought Leadership’s Stakeholders and Their Roles
Step 3: Conducting a Thought Leadership Study to Model the New Collaboration
I’ve found there’s nothing that turns thought leadership skeptics faster into huge advocates than personally seeing the impact of compelling thought leadership research in opening client doors and budgets. Ultimately, nothing other than “showing them the money” will get your stakeholders flying in the formation that’s required for your company to compete on thought leadership.
But in this third step, don’t go off and do the research on your own. Don’t exclude everyone but your research colleagues in the study. Allow stakeholders from marketing, sales, firm experts, service innovation, service delivery and strategy to participate in analyzing the findings — if they have the time and interest. Showing that this isn’t a closed exercise will help gain buy-in to the overall process. Nonetheless, they need to know that the research team won’t delay the project while waiting for their input.
This research project’s main goal is to move the stakeholders from being partially in sync to fully in sync on thought leadership. The project can’t drag on for seven or more months. The longer it takes, the greater the risk that interest and momentum will fade. But do, indeed, get them to participate in research analysis.
Step 4: Unveiling the Findings and Stakeholder Roles in Taking Them to Market
At this point, you will be four to six months along the path of getting the key stakeholders in sync on thought leadership. You will have developed your research findings, put them into a compelling internal presentation and be ready to take them to market.
Here you will convene the stakeholder team in a second workshop (half- or full day, virtual or in person). The interim goal of this session is to get each stakeholder to move on their parts of taking the study findings to market.
The larger goal is to show that this is how a thought leadership program needs to operate, study after study. When they agree to that, these responsibilities need be added to each stakeholder’s current roles (if they aren’t already doing them).
With these stakeholders’ blessing, the thought leadership chief can then draw up a longer-term and more detailed project plan of thought leadership research topics. The heads of marketing, sales, service innovation and delivery, and strategy should then be expected to add their activities to the plan. But one person needs to be the main driver: the head of thought leadership.
An organization’s ability to compete on thought leadership – i.e., to develop, deliver and create demand for superior expertise on the customer problems it chooses to solve – hinges on overcoming the internal politics that can strangle its efforts. The organizational politics around thought leadership are hard to see. But companies that get the key stakeholders of thought leadership rowing in sync and steering the boat in the same direction will be hard to beat.