The thought leadership trap

Executives have confused visibility with influence, and their communications teams are helping them do it.

Spend five minutes on LinkedIn or in the pages of any trade publication, and you will encounter it: a steady tide of executive commentary about disruption, resilience and the transformative power of artificial intelligence. It is fluent, neatly formatted and instantly forgettable.

We call it thought leadership. In most cases it contains very little thought and no leadership at all. I have come to think of this as the thought leadership trap, and a great many otherwise sophisticated companies are caught in it.

The trap closes when executives and their communications teams confuse visibility with influence. Under pressure to ‘be part of the conversation’, leaders publish whatever is safest, and their advisers (my own profession among them) help them do this. Every article is on time, on message and on brand. Almost none is read.

This is not a marginal problem. Successive editions of the Edelman-LinkedIn B2B Thought Leadership Impact Report have found that a clear majority of senior decision-makers read this material. More than seven in 10, by some counts. But only a small minority, in some years fewer than one in five, rate what they read as genuinely insightful. The rest cite jargon, recycled ideas and a lack of original perspective.

 The anatomy of the trap

The trap takes three recognisable forms. The first is the echo chamber: a summary of the latest consultancy report or news cycle with no operational insight added. The reader learns nothing they could not have found in the original.

The second is what I call the “ice cream is good” position: an argument no rational person could disagree with. “Innovation is key to surviving the digital age” is not an opinion. It is a greeting card.

The third is the scrub, in which a sharp view is passed through so many layers of legal and corporate approval that it emerges with its teeth removed. The executive said something interesting in the interview. Nobody will ever know.

The result is the same in each case: invisible content. In a market now saturated with machine-generated prose, invisibility has a price. Safe is no longer safe. Safe is a line in the marketing budget that might as well not have been spent.

Springing the trap

Escaping requires those of us in communications to rethink our job. We are not transcribers of our executives’ least controversial ideas. We are meant to build their authority, and authority cannot be built without risk.

Four disciplines help, and the first is a disagreement test.

Genuine thought leadership requires tension. If an informed peer cannot disagree with what an executive has written, the result is not an argument but a brochure. Karl Popper observed that a claim that cannot, in principle, be falsified tells us nothing about the world; the same is true of a corporate one.

Peter Thiel’s question in Zero to One is a useful editorial tool. Sharper still, for a subject-matter expert: which widely accepted best practice in our industry do you believe is simply wrong? The answer is usually the headline.

The second discipline is to share the scars, not only the trophies. Corporate audiences are deeply cynical, and with reason. They have read enough retrospectives on flawless product launches and seamless mergers to know that no such things exist.

What they have not read, because almost nobody writes it, is the post-mortem: the failure that taught the executive how to win the second time. Brené Brown’s work on vulnerability is much quoted and rather less often applied, but the principle holds: trust is earned through candour about what went wrong. For every piece celebrating a success, commission one dissecting a misstep.

The third is to move from “what” to “so what” and “now what”. Too many executives spend 800 words explaining a trend their readers already understand. Nobody needs a chief executive to define generative AI or describe economic headwinds.

The value lies in application. How does this change the operating model of a mid-sized retailer? Which roles disappear, and which appear? What are our competitors getting wrong right now? These are uncomfortable questions, which is precisely why they are worth answering in public. 

The courage to be bold

The fourth discipline is to narrow the pedestal. Executives are often tempted to hold forth on everything from macroeconomics to hybrid working. They should resist. The most influential business voices are known for one or two specific intersections of expertise, and they return to them relentlessly.

Wes Kao, the executive coach and co-founder of Maven, calls this a “spiky point of view”: a defensible, deeply informed position that people can genuinely disagree with. Breadth reads as expertise only to the person speaking. To everyone else it reads as noise.

None of this is difficult to write. The hard part is managing the anxiety of the person whose name sits at the top of the page. Stepping out of the sea of sameness feels dangerous, and communications teams have spent decades reinforcing that instinct. That is what keeps the trap shut.

Our task now is to prise it open. The real risk is not being disagreed with. It is blending in so completely that nobody notices you were there.

Taking a position, admitting a failure and challenging industry consensus all require a certain courage. But that is what leadership has always looked like. And that is the only version worth publishing.

Nkateko Khosa brings over 25 years of experience in public relations and strategic communications. A trusted practitioner who has operated at senior management, EXCO, and Board levels, Khosa has advised a broad spectrum of clients across banking, energy, telecommunications, and government. At BOLD, Khosa leverages her core strengths in crisis management, stakeholder relations, and integrated marketing to serve a growing client list that includes African Bank, GEPF (Government Employee Pension Fund), AECI,  Dermopal, Peermont and Accenture.