The 10 Roles of a Winning Thought Leadership Team

I will, however, offer what group of roles is more important than the others in the sections below. It’s not to diminish any role; they’re all important for a thought leadership group to have an outsized impact. But some roles are more important than others. 

I’ll briefly describe each role, why it’s important, and the top skills for mastering it.

Developing Powerful Ideas

In baseball, many experts believe that positions of catcher, shortstop and center field are the most important defensively. (I’d argue that the pitcher is even more important, because he can prevent hitters from even hitting the ball if he throws three strikes past them. But that argument is for another day.)

In thought leadership, I believe the three most important positions are all about developing and codifying the ideas that fill the research reports, white papers, articles, blog posts, conference and seminar presentations, books and other forms of thought leadership content. Here are those roles:

1. Big-idea thought leadership researcher  

This is the most important role in any thought leadership group. The reason is that the success of a company’s thought leadership program ultimately hinges on breakthrough ideas for solving acute business problems. This role is equivalent to the role of a research scientist in a pharmaceutical company – the people in charge of creating blockbuster new drugs. The big-idea researcher in a professional services firm has a similar impact. This is not to diminish the roles of the marketers who must get the target audience aware of the idea, or of the business developers who must sell the service that commercializes the idea. Mastering research methods requires these skills: qualitative (to collect and connect the dots of best practices) and quantitative (to gauge the extent of a problem that a topic addresses, and shed light on the best solution). More specifically, outstanding big-idea researchers know how to design topics: how to bound the inquiry (to determine what issues can and can’t be explored given the limitations of time and budget); formulate the initial hypotheses; prove or disprove them through case study interviews that reveal what best practice companies did differently than worst-practice companies; and determine the most important prescription (which becomes the “big,” unifying idea). I explored this thought leadership research process in-depth in a February 2025 article, which you can find here. These skills, as you might imagine, are hard to find. In a 2025 study we did on thought leadership in the IT services sector, the skill that the best firms said they needed to improve the most was strategic ideation. We defined this as developing unique, forward-thinking perspectives. Asked which skill was the most critical to program success, the highest percentage (55%) said research design and analysis.

2. Narrative developer  

Also known as idea developer and argument crafter, this role is distinct from the big-idea researcher. Yes, big-idea people also can be good narrative developers. But B2B companies need excellent narrative developers – and not just to explain their research findings, but also to craft messages from their non-research-based content. This is the thought leadership content they can create from their company’s field experience – the work of the lawyers in a law firm, the consultants in a consulting firm, or the software implementers in an IT services firm. The role of the narrative developers is to push the thinking of those experts hard: to turn typically insufficiently developed ideas into robust ideas. They must also structure those ideas in an order that makes it easy for the audience to understand them. For example, the first thing is to focus on the audience and its problem that the authors are addressing – not the solution. Too many authors want to jump rapidly to their solution. But that results in showing insufficient evidence and understanding of the problem. Please note that narrative development – the construction of an inarguable outline of a problem in the world and a superior way to solve it – is not at all the same as ghostwriting. The latter skill is about clearly communicating an argument that may or not be persuasive. Great ghostwriters are far more commonplace (often coming from journalism) than narrative developers. In this early stage of the thought leadership profession, great narrative developers are still rare.

3. AI case study generator

This is the newest role in a thought leadership group but one that will become important. While Role #1 — best-practice researcher — is at the center of big ideas, people who can use generative AI tools like ChatGPT and Google Gemini  to collect case study details will gain stature in thought leadership. (I’ll have an upcoming article about this.) In my own experience, AI tools have been amazing collectors of hard-to-find but publicly available details that are necessary to write case studies about companies and their initiatives. Generative AI tools can rapidly comb the vast recesses of the Internet and find details that companies are leaving on the Web about how they accomplished this or that – public company quarterly analyst meeting transcripts, white papers, conference presentation transcripts, book passages, and more. Of course, all the facts, as well as the analyses that generative AI tools spin, need to be verified. (Ask these tools to include sources.) I believe that one of generative AI’s most profound impacts on thought leadership research will be to scale case study research. Of course, none of this replaces interviewing companies about their practices. But I predict AI-generated case studies will become a crucial thought leadership research stream.

Packaging Powerful Ideas

I see these next three roles as the least important of the nine. But before you fire off an angry email to me, again please realize I still see them as indispensable to a high-powered thought leadership team.

The three “packaging roles” are for people who present the ideas of company experts visually and make them more meaningful for viewers. You may think books are an exception to this – that they are merely pages of prose that will captivate readers if they’re well written. Yet even the best business books are graphically designed to please the book reader’s eye and stamina. Thought leadership content that is far shorter than book length needs an engaging graphic treatment, too, to increase the odds that impatient viewers appreciate the beauty of the ideas.

Here are three important packaging roles:

4. Thought leadership graphic designer

I’ve come to believe that the graphic presentation of thought leadership content is a special graphic skill, different from those required for designing brochures, advertisements and other content that sells an audience on a brand image or a product. Thought leadership research reports, articles, white papers, conference presentations and other content must persuade an audience of a different approach to a complex problem. It is content that must educate – not directly sell. This requires designs that subtly communicate “education,” not “promotion.” They need graphics that help people comprehend complex concepts. Heavy use of white space, sparse copy that can fit on one page or one screen, and photographs of people chosen from a modeling catalog might be fine for selling simpler solutions to simpler problems: soap, cereal, clothes, travel destinations, and sports cars. But none of these graphic elements helps experts set the right tone for selling a sophisticated audience on a complex solution to a complex problem. What suits thought leadership much better is a lot of text, mixed with graphic devices that enhance the meaning of the text far better than prose can do alone. That includes charts and graphics that show trends, and two-by-two tables and other frameworks that isolate important variables. It also includes illustrations that give an artist’s touch to spice up an otherwise dry topic.  Graphic designers can also use photographs of real scenes that depict the organizational impacts of a business problem (e.g., shuttered shopping malls to explain the negative impacts of e-commerce) and their solutions.

5. Concept and data visualizer  

If the thought leadership graphic designer’s task is to create an overall visual style for a B2B company’s publications, conference presentations and other content that expresses its expertise, the concept and data visualizer’s role is much more graphic-specific. It’s to work within a larger graphic style theme but to take key ideas expressed in a company’s publications and presentations and make them easy to comprehend. Examples are interactive charts and so-called scrolly-telling that unveils images, graphics, and videos as viewers scroll down a web page. These and other devices that can be done on a web page but not on a print page have given concept and data visualizers a great medium to ply their trade. Turning one-dimensional frameworks (think Michael Porter’s value chain) into multidimensional frameworks is the ultimate prize here.

6. Intriguing podcast producer

Podcasting is a relatively new marketing channel for thought leadership. Podcasts are another outlet for a firm’s thought leaders – just like a thought leadership journal (e.g., McKinsey Quarterly), webinars and seminars, and books. But why do I put a podcaster under the “packaging” category, you might be asking? It’s because I view the main role of thought leadership podcasts as humanizing a firm’s thought leaders – making them appear not only smart but also approachable and appealing to the target audience. In my view, that makes podcasts a packaging – not a content development — role. Podcasts simulate being in the company of a smart person, and suggest what it might be like to bring them into client organizations. That said, today it’s very difficult to keep executives’ attention, so a thought leadership podcast CAN’T be one or two talking heads anymore. It can’t be 40 minutes of an author, in effect, reading their article. This is where the word “intriguing” comes in before “podcast producer.” The people in this role must help company experts be seen and heard for their ideas. But an equal part of their role is keeping the audience enthralled. This requires podcasters who know how to use the many visual and audio tools that bring discussions to life: provocative images, engaging videos and sounds that add to the discussion, digressions that stop and that explain unclear concepts that can’t be glossed over, music and other podcasting techniques.

Attracting the Right Audiences to Powerful Ideas

Three audience acquisition roles that I’ll describe are more important than the three packaging roles. You can create big ideas and package them for enjoyable consumption. But if your target audience isn’t consuming your ideas in sufficient quantities, your thought leadership group will fail. You will have built a costly thought leadership function that isn’t earning its keep. Without skilled thought leadership marketing professionals to get the audiences that high-quality content deserves, thought leadership becomes an academic exercise.

That would be a shame, because building a big-idea generation machine is immensely difficult. You need a competent thought leadership marketing capability. Three roles are essential here:

7. Audience attractor

This person has several jobs. The first is to help a B2B firm define the audience that needs to hear each big idea. That audience includes the people in client organizations that “own” the problem that an idea solves; market influencers who can spread the idea (the media, influential bloggers, etc.), and channel partners. The contact details of these people (especially email addresses, since email is a primary way to send content and invite people to marketing events) are important for the audience attractor to collect and continually update. (People can change companies frequently.) The second core task of an audience attractor is planning marketing and sales campaigns that bring the audience to the big-idea content. I wrote about this in my book “Competing on Thought Leadership”: what I called the “ripples in the pond” approach to thought leadership marketing. A big idea is like throwing a huge rock in a lake. But getting the ripples to keep going – akin to making an idea go viral — requires knowing what mix of earned, owned, and paid media channels to use, and using them well. (Excellent promotional writing is a core skill here as well.) The audience attractor’s role here is to plan that marketing and sales campaign – and manage the people who will execute it. They include people occupying the next two roles.

8. Event expert

A key piece of the marketing mix for high-priced expertise typically requires clients hearing you out in a room of their peers. It sounds like a jury of their peers, I know, and in some ways it is. You must argue your case to prospective clients in the “courtroom” of a marketing event. It helps to have clients presenting how you helped them, and other clients in the room who can say nice things about you when their fellow attendees ask. Marketing events, of course, can be live or online, but the latter makes it impossible to have clients in the room saying nice things about you to others there. Whether for in-person or live online marketing events, a winning thought leadership team needs event experts. They are the ones who get the company’s thought leaders visually in front of potential clients — literally in the same room. That allows prospects to kick the tires of your thought leaders and mingle with other prospects with similar business issues. The most important skills here are creating the overarching topic of the event, choosing the presenters and making sure they will be effective, creating the networking opportunities (you do want the audience members to talk to each other, at the very least, to recommend your firm), choosing the place, and getting prospects and your business developers there. The marketing event person is then responsible for follow-up, giving the attendees a summary of the content and your thought leaders’ contact information.

9. Media maven

This is a specialist public relations role that requires a unique PR professional to do it well. The core skill of the media maven is the ability to convince media people to write about complex concepts for business improvement, and to interview the concept creators. By the way, I use the term “media” in a more expansive way than usual. This goes beyond the reporters and editors from the business and general press, both old media (Fortune, Forbes, Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, still-existing trade publications like Adweek, AdAge, Computerworld, etc.) and new media (Business Insider, Axios, etc.) I also mean the hundreds of influencers, bloggers and social media stars.

The 10^th Skill: Thought Leadership Manager

Those nine roles are the foundation of a winning thought leadership group in a B2B organization. With energetic, talented and collaborative people in those roles, great things are destined to happen: big ideas, packaged well, that gain traction in the marketplace.

But you need a tenth person on the thought leadership team: a leader who acts as a baseball manager (to use that analogy) or a symphony conductor (to use another). The thought leadership manager must love managing creative, analytical people. They must be able to recognize great thought leadership content and not-so-great thought leadership content. (Being what I call a “content connoisseur” is the manager’s most important skill, as I wrote about here.) This person must institute rigorous research processes – how to design studies that unearth best practices, how to gather data, and how to analyze it. And they must have researchers who follow a structure in communicating their research findings – a narrative outline that makes it easy for their audiences to effortlessly comprehend the results of a study. (We teach a whole course on this, by the way.)

Your thought leadership manager must also be masterful in connecting the big ideas that emerge from their group to the demand-generation and supply-generation parts of the company. By demand-generation, I mean the marketing and sales professionals charged with building market interest in new ideas that your company issues. By supply-generation, I refer to the people in your company charged with ramping up new services (a service innovation function) and improving existing services (a service delivery function).

Doing This On a Limited Budget

If your company can’t afford to hire people for each of the 10 roles, what do you do? You combine the roles. For example, let’s say you have only five roles. The thought leadership chief/conductor could also double as the big-idea thought leadership researcher. The event expert and media maven’s roles could be woven into one person’s job. You could also weave the audience attractor’s role into this one job. But it will be difficult to be excellent at all three and keep a workable schedule – especially if events are a big part of your thought leadership marketing mix.

You will have to turn to generative AI for help: editing documents, suggesting better headlines and social media messages, and (for sure) conducting secondary case study research.

Even if your company can budget for at least one person in each of the 10 roles, you are likely to find it difficult to hire highly skilled individuals for each one. The thought leadership profession is relatively new, even if it has been practiced in places for 60 years or so. It is certainly not as evolved or as ubiquitous as, say, project management. If your company right now isn’t willing to pay what it takes to get premium talent for some thought leadership roles, it will have to recruit for raw but unproven talent and then mold it. That will require coaching and training these people – and getting them to learn from real experience.

Putting the right people in these positions will accelerate your company’s thought leadership progress. They will give you a winning thought leadership team. And that is a big competitive moat that will separate you from competitors with an incomplete team or a complete team with no stars.