How to Rise Above the Crowd with Thought Leadership

As you establish yourself in middle management, it becomes increasingly important to establish yourself as a thought leader in order to stand out and gain influence. But what does this really mean?

Being a thought leader is all about understanding the issues and challenges that are top of mind for your audience. This might be your team, external or internal clients, or maybe the organization as a whole. It requires talking to people outside of your day-to-day circle, listening to feedback, staying up to date on industry trends and spending enough time in silence to hear your own voice.

When you don’t see this as part of your role, it can create several problems:

You may struggle to innovate and keep up with industry trends, resulting in a lack of new ideas and approaches. This can stifle growth and limit your organization’s ability to adapt to changing conditions.

If you aren’t recognized as a thought leader, you may struggle to influence your team and other stakeholders within the organization. This can make it difficult to influence change and achieve your organization’s objectives.

During times of rapid change, failing to stay up-to-date with the latest developments can result in your ideas becoming irrelevant and losing credibility.

Being a thought leader often involves sharing insights and ideas with a broader audience. If you aren’t willing to share your thoughts, you may miss out on opportunities to collaborate with others.

In today’s competitive job market, talented employees are in high demand. Top talent seek out organizations with dynamic and innovative leadership and if they aren’t seeing that, they won’t be attracted to working on your team.

It’s not atypical for someone new to middle management to struggle with this. You fear that sharing your ideas and opinions will be met with negative feedback or criticism. Maybe you hold yourself back because you don’t feel that you can come up with high quality ideas consistently or maybe you just aren’t in the rooms where ideas are presented and decisions are made yet.

That doesn’t mean you should give up. Yes, it might be challenging, but it is not impossible.

Here are some steps you can take:

1. Look for opportunities to expand your knowledge through professional development, training, and staying up-to-date with the latest industry trends. Consider how you can turn this knowledge to wisdom by using it to address problems within the company. 
2. Start sharing your insights in comfortable audiences and expand over time. You don’t have to jump to the C-suite immediately, but expand your circle over time. 
3. As part of expanding your circle, seek out opportunities to get to know and collaborate with others in your organization that you don’t always work with. Getting curious about what they do and how they see things will help expand your perspectives.
4. Get clear on your values and act consistently from these. That consistency builds trust among loyal followers throughout the organization. 
5. Set aside time to get really conscious about your own thoughts. Having 60-90 minutes set aside at least once a week to dissect challenges in your mind and gather your conscious and original thoughts will make thought leadership a no-brainer. And if your mind just told you, I can’t afford that kind of time for such foolishness, I’m here to tell you, you can’t afford not to. This IS the job of a leader. 

As you step into this version of yourself as a leader, the most important step is having compassion for yourself. Some of your ideas are going to be met with resistance. Maybe the idea was a bad one or maybe it was a good one but the audience wasn’t ready. Who is to say what is good and bad anyway? And none of that means anything about you, your intelligence or your worth. So go into this with the willingness to be wrong. Fall in love with being able to listen, understand and change your mind or on the flipside, fight for an idea that you truly believe in.

Be willing to show up for all of it. That is thought leadership. 

I can’t wait to hear how it goes.