Thought leadership should be fun, fast, and fearless. You tap into excitement about new ideas and advocate for something better. That’s the mindset behind The Idea Sled. Projects glide forward gracefully. It’s the momentum of commitment. This newsletter shows you how.
What should you look for when hiring a writer who can develop premium thought leadership?
More than anything, you need someone who can help thought leaders challenge their thinking to make it stronger and more relevant.
This writing relationship should be a partnership.
In other words, you need a writer who can also play the role of thinking partner. But that’s tough to find. It’s hard to know what qualifications you want or what questions to ask.
If you look around for input, you’ll find a lot of generic advice and loud truisms. The content industrial complex excels at making noise. It’s rife with generalists pretending that their content dogma makes them into specialists.
Under the surface of “content,”, there’s nothing. The content mentality turns the exchange of meaning between humans into generic, interchangeable stuff that only exists to fill a container. It’s a cult of emptiness.
To help cut through the content industrial noise, I want to share some guidance for the ten things clients should look for when seeking a writer who can develop thought leadership on complex, nuanced topics for an audience of senior decision-makers.
Aside: thought leadership that helps decision making is the only thought leadership that matters or deserves the name.
The Ten Things That Matter in a Writing Relationship
Personality Traits
Openness: One of the “Big 5” personality traits identified by psychologists. Openness is a positive, curious attitude towards new experiences, ideas, and solutions. Thought leadership writers should be ready to explore ideas with as few preconceived notions as possible. Similarly, they should have a wide range of interests across business, the arts, philosophy, and more
Humility: Knowing and admitting what you don’t know. A true thinking partner has nothing to prove. They don’t need to flex their muscles by making you feel inept, labeling your ideas as jargon, dismissing your thinking as complicated in a way that only they can simplify, or making any of the other moves insecure writers use to assert dominance.
Empathy: Writers must take a client’s thinking seriously if they offer to help plan or produce their thought leadership. They take it on as something that means something to them as much as their client. After all, a thought leadership writer is a provider of professional services. Providing a service implies a duty to care.
Experience and Skills
Fluency: A deep and intuitive understanding of a particular field or topic. Writers who don’t already have the knowledge or understand a thought leader’s language simply need to do the work and get up to speed. Past topic experience and research allow them to navigate complex concepts and communicate ideas with ease and confidence.
Writing Excellence: Mastery of voice, tone, rhythm, word choice, and persuasion. These skills should be foundational for writers, but experience in using them to create thought leadership is essential. Other forms of writing, such as copywriting or journalism, don’t translate as well as they might seem to on the surface. Writers should also have a preferred style guide, such as the AP Stylebook or Chicago Manual of Style, a grammatical reference, such as The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, and a preferred dictionary. My view: the only dictionary that matters is the OED.
Interviewing: Thought leadership interactions should flow more like conversations than interviews. A thinking partner explores with you rather than transcribing your responses to canned questions. The way writers behave when clients screen them often echoes the way they conduct conversations. Canned questions or staccato question-answer pacing should be a red flag.
Approach
Preparation: It’s either lazy or cynical to use the mystical aura of “writing” as an excuse to waste clients’ time. Writers should exhaustively research the main angles of a topic before having a discovery conversation with thought leaders. For example, in institutional finance, they should understand the whole ecosystem of stakeholders, counterparties, and providers. They should know about relevant regulations, industry trends, and supporting technology—asking thought leaders rudimentary questions shows a lack of respect and seriousness.
Co-Creation: The difference between co-creation and mere writing can surprise many clients. Any competent writer should be able to capture and accurately restate what a thought leader says. In 2024, generative AI can do that, too. By contrast, a thinking partner creates a point of view collaboratively, discussing the thought leader’s insights, inspiring them to elaborate the implications and why they matter, and even challenging them to surpass conventional wisdom. The final output captures the thought leader’s insights while also strengthening and elevating them.
Audience Mindset: A thought leadership writer should see the intended audience for a particular piece in terms of decision-making. Relevant thought leadership provides input that helps people make high-stakes decisions. In institutional finance, these decisions can involve trillions of dollars of assets in aggregate. Marketers may see this audience as targets or pursue engagement numbers such as views or opens. But those numbers mean nothing if they capture the behavior of people who can’t make or influence buying decisions. Thought leaders see their audience as decision-making humans.
Workflow: How a writer gets from a glimmer of an idea to a final, publication-ready article. Clients should focus on the initial and final steps of a writer’s process before engaging them. Writers should communicate and validate their concept for the piece before writing it. When that happens, clients don’t need to worry about the drafting process—just let the writer write. For final steps, clients should understand how a writer compiles and responds to feedback. Ideally, writers are savvy enough to address the underlying intent of reviewers’ input, which means creative thinking rather than accepting tracked edits.
My process is a brief discovery conversation, followed by creating a hypothesis, key messages, and outline. The discovery conversation, written feedback on the hypothesis and messaging, and industry research fuel the writing from there, ideally with minimal time expended by subject matter experts to fill in details. I typically provide a first draft that’s around 90% finished before reengaging thought leaders.
The Difference Lies in the Outcomes
The best way to find out about these ten things is to ask. It’s worth the trouble, even if a committed thinking partner is a rare find. But the impact of a thinking partner can be almost magical. It helps clients prevent missteps with poorly conceived thought leadership. It also circumvents the risk of producing superficial ‘content’ instead of thought leadership, which happens when writers imagine a generic, mass-audience reader rather than a strategic decision maker.
Finally, a relationship with a thinking partner is more sustainable. When writing projects miss the mark, frustrated thought leaders tend to pull back from thought leadership entirely because they find it too messy and difficult. With a thinking partner, thought leaders welcome participation. They even feed their thought leadership back into the business to inspire product development, new relationships, and ongoing innovation, closing the loop between thought leadership articles and new business.
Three Grace Notes
“Morality is mostly about how you pay attention to others. Moral behavior happens continuously throughout the day, even during the seemingly uneventful and everyday moments.” —David Brooks, How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen
“The persistent use of the idea of unnaturalness by people who insist there is only nature suggests that their model of reality is too constricted to permit even its own elaboration. This is true because it is first of all — as premise, not as conclusion — a rejection of things demonstrably present in the world, for example, human fellow-feeling.” —Marilynn Robinson, The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought
“Most of us like to consider any brilliance we may possess, and the accomplishments that have sprung from it, as being solely our own. In our egotism, we have long remained blind to the communal infrastructure that undergirds our own eureka moments.” —Robert Moor, On Trails: An Exploration
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