Full Plate

Dear Full Plate,

The Doctor feels how overflowing your platters are with goodness. You’ve got a bench of overachievers who are buried up to their frickin’ eyeballs in client work, and now you’re telling them they also need to spend more time running around telling everyone how great they are. Good luck with that (smile). But come over here and open your mouth and say ahhhh. Ok, everything looks pretty normal in there. So now you can just sit back and let The Doctor make this a lot less painful for you and your colleagues than you think.

But before we get into how you go about doing this, the Doctor wants to clear up what it actually is that you’re asking your leaders to do. You’re not asking your principals to sell themselves. You’re asking them to share their thinking about the problems that their clients are losing sleep over. This is what we in industry jargon call thought leadership. 

The Doctor’s got a little sneaking suspicion that you may not know exactly what that is, even though you know you need to do it. And that may be the reason why you’re getting some resistance. Here’s the thing. Thought leadership is not chest beating. That went out decades ago with Godzilla. 

On the other hand, thought leadership is even better, because it’s sharing your big ideas and expertise that matter to your clients. But let’s be clear, F-Plate: when The Doctor says big ideas, she does not mean pitching your latest project, or talking about the services on your website, or writing about the flooring material you spec’d for that new commercial project. Instead, you want your principals to focus on the tough questions that your clients are trying to answer. Like, for example, if your firm just did a multifamily residential building, thought leadership isn’t “look at our pretty building!” but it is a point of view about future housing trends. 

And guess what, Full Plate, your principals are already doing this. They’re sharing their expertise in project meetings, over lunch with clients, and at pin-ups in the office when they might say, “To meet XYZ client’s goals and anticipate future needs, we need to approach this project completely differently.” Your job is to run around with a giant butterfly net, capture those shiny pearls of wisdom that are pouring out of your colleagues’ pretty little heads and putting that juicy information in a place where clients can find it. 

Okay, now that we got all that out of the way – phew! – let’s address your original question, which is: how do you do this without adding “find 10 extra hours this week to work on thought leadership” to their already-scary to-do lists.

The Doctor’s prescription for you, Full Plate, is short and sweet: baby steps. Look, your principals don’t have the time to do any one giant heroic thing, and they don’t need to. Consistency matters more than massive leaps. The small, consistent, bite-sized actions — a little bit here, a little bit there — all add up over time. Just like you eat potato chips one by one and then the bag is gone and you’re like, what??!! Ok, the Doctor does not encourage you to eat a bag of potato chips. Here’s a healthier analogy: it’s like watching a building rise floor by floor. You don’t notice it day to day, but then suddenly you look up and, wow, there it is.

So, here’s how you start: pick one principal and ask him or her what your clients’ biggest challenges are. Then you (or your writer, or a ghostwriter, hello!) turn that answer into a 600-word LinkedIn post or a short bylined piece. Just let them talk and somebody else can do the heavy lifting. That’s thought leadership with a 30-minute time investment from a principal. 

And here’s the Doctor’s greatest trick from her giant bag of the same: Fit the format to the person, not the other way around. If there is someone who hates to write but loves to talk, make her your podcast and panel person. If another one has perpetual wobbly knees in front of an audience but sends thoughtfully detailed emails, he’s your LinkedIn and bylined article guy. Trying to make your introverted principal into a keynote speaker is how programs die on the proverbial vine, Full Plate. But if you follow this prescription, by the end of the year, you’ll have built a whole library of content, a handful of speaking credits, and a growing reputation.

The whole idea, FP, is to connect your thought leadership activities to specific business development goals. If you do that, and do that well, you’ll be killing it in no time. Boom chock-a-locka-boom.

Now go find the most opinionated principal and ask him or her what trends that person is seeing in X industry and what clients keep asking but not solving. That’s your first chess move and certainly not your last. You gotta start somewhere! 

So go forth and lead thoughtfully (see what I did there?). The Doctor believes in you!

–The Doctor