Thought leadership as opposed to traditional leadership

Traditionally speaking, leadership has always been a top-down process with those higher up the pecking order giving the orders and those lower down the hierarchy scurrying to get things down. It’s a bit like the relationship between a puppet master and a puppet. But thought leadership is just drastically different to traditional leadership. It has nothing to do with the position you hold or whether you manage people. It doesn’t even matter if you are low down the organizational hierarchy. Thought leadership is no one’s monopoly either and while coming up with the idea is one thing, its implementation still rests with the managerial ranks.

So just what is thought leadership? Whenever you champion the cause of a new idea either with your colleagues or your superiors, you are displaying what is known as thought leadership. You don’t need to be inspirational or a great influence on opinions. That is something senior executives need since they need to win over the organization and inspire people to fall in line with their organizational goals and vision. In order to bring about organizational change, it certainly helps to be an inspirational figure. But thought leaders are focused on bring about ideas under the spotlight. Thought leaders help win support for an idea or a prototype of a product.

To be a part of the movement of thought leadership, you need to be fully involved in your profession and organization and you need to zero in on things that add a lot of value to your organization. Top-down leadership depends on the figure being inspirational since they need employees to join them on their journey to the promised land and they should have a great deal of sway over those below them. That is not something that is needed for thought leadership. You could be a meek figure and a poor social communicator, but it doesn’t matter how eccentric and cut off they are. All that matters is whether they can express their idea well and whether that idea is credible in itself. You need to be convinced by the idea, you don’t need to be an inspirational tour de force in order to be a thought leader.

In a way, thought leadership can be said to not that different from youthful rebellion. Just as the youth does not fear rejection as he puts forward his ideas, so too a thought leader must not be afraid to put his idea up forward even if he runs the risk of it being rejected. And like leadership, thought leadership cannot be taught to anyone. You can learn about the field to do with your thought leadership, but not leadership itself. Thought leadership is also very competitive. It is a way of saying “I know a better way of doing something than you do, and I know this to be true”. Championing an idea is thought leadership, and getting it done is management. You need to have both in ample supply for an organization to further its cause.