I watched a thought leadership program implode in real time.
The CEO issued an edict: “Let’s get more thought leadership out there.” To make it stick, the company tied participation to bonuses and promotions.
A slow-motion disaster followed. Team members cranked out generic GPT content to hit their goals. Leadership skimmed it, nodded, and approved. None of the content stuck with sales prospects. Real opportunities stayed locked in the organization.
That’s what happens when you treat thought leadership like a compliance exercise instead of a strategic process. Before green-lighting thought leadership content, create an ideation system that filters for quality, not volume, and where expertise isn’t the qualifier, but clarity, timing, and point of view are.
Think journey, not destination
Thought leadership isn’t a goal. It’s a byproduct of sharing valuable insight. Your brand earns that recognition by consistently publishing relevant, hard-won perspectives for an audience you’re uniquely qualified to help. It involves real-world experience and a point of view packaged in a way your audience finds interesting.
Your job isn’t to turn every subject matter expert into a thought leader. It’s to create a system that surfaces great thinking, shapes it into something useful, and ships it consistently.
Do that long enough, and the “thought leadership” label takes care of itself.
Create your thought leadership sprint
To cultivate consistent, high-leverage content from your subject matter experts, don’t wait until the draft stage. The biggest return comes from building an idea system as we do with our clients.
Step 1: Use a public submission channel that’s not email
Develop a single channel where all content ideas are submitted and reviewed openly within your organization. Slack, Microsoft Teams, or a shared Google Doc all work. Avoid email because it isn’t visible to all.
A transparent forum allows all thought leadership stakeholders to:
See what’s been submitted or rejected
Avoid duplicating topics
Learn from feedback and improve over time.
Step 2: Create and enforce a submission framework
Every content idea must follow the same structure. No free-form pitches. No “I-had-a-cool-idea-in-the-shower" pitch. That chaos produces fluff and wastes time.
Customize the framework for your organization, but ensure the base includes the answers to these questions that address business and audience purposes:
What is the working title of the piece?
What will it cover?
What is the business goal of publishing this?
Which service line does this support?
Who is the audience? (specific role, vertical, pain point)
Why will the audience care to read this content now?
What will the audience take away after consuming the content?
What recent customer story supports this idea?
Does any first-party data in our organization strengthen this idea?
This isn’t just bureaucracy. It’s a stress test. If the idea can’t survive this list, it won’t survive publishing.
Step 3: Assign a gatekeeper who rejects fast and loud
A senior-level marketer must own the review process. Their job isn’t just to approve good ideas, it’s to kill bad ones quickly and publicly.
Common rejection reasons include:
Didn’t follow the framework
Already covered this angle
Not tied to a service line or business goal
No customer story to anchor the piece
Insight is too vague or underdeveloped
You can use boilerplate responses to speed up the process, but always include a short explanation in the channel so others can learn. Rejection with context is how to raise the bar for thought leadership idea submissions.
TIP: Thought leadership content that moves the needle comes from experience, not theory. If the idea can’t be traced to a customer story, it’s probably not ready.
Step 4: Run a content calibration call
Once the marketing leader approves the idea, it doesn’t go straight to the writing stage. First, run a content calibration call, a 30-minute session to sharpen the angle, extract the story, and prep for production.
In this call, you turn generic ideas into strategic assets. You and the idea originator should:
Clarify the submission: Make sure the plan details the submitted idea.
Extract the story: Dig into relevant client examples or lived experiences.
Pressure test the POV: Is the point of view sharp? Contrarian? Worth publishing?
To gain productive answers to address those three points, ask questions such as:
Can you walk me through your idea in plain English?
What’s the core message here, and who needs to hear it?
What trends or conversations does this respond to?
What about this take would others challenge?
What story backs this up? What happened, what changed, what mattered?
Where could this content fall flat or go too generic?
Push hard. Ask why. Ask again. Most SMEs will default to safe, obvious answers. Your job is to drag the story out of them.
By the end of the call, enough clarity should exist to write a detailed outline and draft interview questions.
Step 5: Close the loop and optimize relentlessly
Even the best systems decay without feedback.
Once your thought leadership engine is running, schedule regular checkpoints (quarterly works best) to audit what works and what wastes time. Among the questions to answer:
Are ideas approved quickly or stuck in limbo?
Do published pieces align with the company's service lines and sales goals?
Do repeatable signals (formats, topics, voices) perform better than others?
Are SMEs improving their clarity and strengthening their point of view over time?
Don’t just reflect on the answers. Use them to refine your thought leadership idea process. Kill the parts that aren’t pulling their weight. Double down on what drives clarity, speed, and sales relevance.
Improving a repeatable system shapes the thinking of the thought leadership stakeholders over time. The stronger the process, the better the people get — and the more impactful the thought leadership content becomes.
You don’t need more ideas; you need a better process
Most brands don’t fail at thought leadership because they lack insight. They fail because they lack a process to shape it. Marketing teams ask for ideas, get a flood of fluff, and end up publishing safe, forgettable content if they publish anything at all.
A clear ideation process gives thought leadership contributors a system to surface sharp ideas, vet them quickly, extract the story, and publish content that actually moves the needle for the brand's marketing and sales.
If you want real thought leadership, stop winging it. Build this system first.
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