The “Graceful” Approach to Thought Leadership
Thought leadership is a challenge. Both people and companies get lost when trying to find meaningful ideas, focus on making them relevant, and figure out how to share them in compelling ways. It becomes awkward and uncoordinated.
To overcome the challenge, you can approach thought leadership with ease and GRACE.
But what does thought leadership have to do with grace in the first place?
Thought leadership grace is:
- An elegance and ease of thinking and communicating
- A generosity in sharing ideas, giving them and grateful for them
- An inherent inner power of efficacy and influence in one’s industry
- An ability to respond and adjust to one’s milieu with dignity and decency
GRACE is also a methodology for developing a thought leadership strategy that changes how decision-makers and influencers think about your industry.
It gives you the tools to help your audience look at the world through the lens of your insights and products.
Here’s how it works:
- Generate ideas and insights by going deep into your own insights and differentiators. Cross-check your ideas against what other companies are saying about your industry. Focus on the insights that represent change, solutions, and trends.
- Reorient what you do by making sure everything aligns to your insights. Your messaging, the way you talk about your products in sales and marketing materials, and even the way you deliver client value should all express your fundamental thinking.
- Act on what you say by building products and delivering work for clients that shows your ideas in practice. Focus on clear before and after in terms of costs, efficiency, satisfaction, employee engagement, and other core areas that resonate with senior decision-makers.
- Communicate with purpose by dropping the obsession with vanity metrics. Clicks, likes, and comments mean nothing. Center everything you publish or say on changing the way decision-makers think about their needs and possible solutions.
- Expand your market by making new ideas and insights a part of how you do strategic planning. As you accumulate experience, explore new services, and reach customer segments, your thought leadership helps you test out your ideas and find new ways to continue to redefine your industry for the better. In other words, it helps clear the path for what’s next.
If you follow each step of this process with your ideas and readers top-of-mind, and with a focus on what decisions you ultimately want people to make, you will achieve enormous thought leadership impact—with GRACE.
