Workshops to Get Leaders Aligned on Thought Leadership

Too many outstanding thought leadership initiatives get stuck. Groundbreaking research is ignored by sales and other employees who work with clients. Bestselling book authors leave after frustrating attempts to scale a service around their ideas. Company-bylined articles are accepted by prestigious publications but then get little promotional support. Marketing groups launch thought leadership periodicals but feature few “thoughts” from their firms’ professionals.

While now highly popular in professional services and other B2B sectors, thought leadership is nonetheless a relatively new discipline. As a result, in any company, many individuals want to play a role, and each person can have their own ideas on what though leadership is about.

That’s where organizational politics can set in and derail promising thought leadership initiatives. We’ve written about that here. Few understand how to manage the internal politics that erode the returns on thought leadership investments.

We have a new workshop — SYNC — to rein in the internal politics that can engulf corporate thought leadership programs. SYNC stands for “Shared Yearning to Narrow the Competition”:

• “Shared” is about building the same understanding among your firm’s functional executives, thought leaders and thought leadership professionals about what it means to compete on thought leadership.
• “Yearning” is about building a huge desire to compete on thought leadership — i.e., to develop superior expertise, effective ways to market and sell that expertise, and the ability to deliver it at scale and with consistently high quality.
• “Narrow” is about using thought leadership to reduce the list of companies that prospective clients turn to, and get our clients on those shorter short lists.
• “Competition” means viewing thought leadership as a competitive strategy of differentiating a firm through superior expertise — not just a marketing tactic.

We design the SYNC workshop to unite a company’s leaders on the best path to turning thought leadership into market leadership. This work typically extends over four to six months, organized in four steps: 1) understanding how key stakeholders’ define thought leadership, 2) revealing and harmonizing the differences, 3) demonstrating the value of thought leadership through a narrow study, and 4) discussing the findings and each stakeholder’s role in generating market interest and leads from it.

Even with that structure in mind, we nonetheless customize our SYNC workshops to the special needs of each client.

When leaders are in sync on thought leadership, they end stalemates and propel progress. Reach out to Bob Buday for more information (bob@budaytlp.com).