CEO Thought Leadership

Let’s talk about thought leadership for your business as the CEO. There are actually two kinds of thought leadership. The the first one we’re all familiar with. It’s the idea of your business, putting its ideas out into the market, and actually influencing the thoughts of other people in the market. Your insights, your creative ideas advance the industry. They make your business get more known, and they actually attract the people that you can help to your business. So you don’t actually go out a have to go out and find everyone that’s somebody that you could work with. I like to call it idea marketing. It’s a powerful tool. What I want to talk about today is a different kind of CEO thought leadership. And it’s based on the idea that you as the leader of your business and the way you think about what your business does, and use your thoughts to drive the direction of your business and bring your team along with you as well as your customers and your prospects, is also a critical form of thought leadership.

Beliefs
Let me kind of peel that back. The way I like to think of it is there’s really a three step process going on in your brain and in your heart about how you use your ideas to lead the team. First, it needs to start with before the thoughts, with your beliefs, your values, your vision, your what does success look, why are you in this? And why is your business in this? That is, it’s not often verbalized and sometimes CEOs, kind of ignore it or deny it or leave it apart from their rational thoughts about their business. And that’s a mistake because beliefs are where the energy is, right? That’s the meaning. That’s the source of the meaning and the purpose for your business that pays off when times get tough or confusing, or even when they’re successful. So, my recommendation to you for, to use your thought leadership in your business, you need to mine those beliefs.

Thoughts

You need to start with those beliefs and then have your thoughts connected to those beliefs, help you to communicate with your team, with your market as you move forward. That communication is gonna be more consistent, more unifying for your team and your market. And almost unconsciously if it’s connected to your beliefs, ’cause your beliefs aren’t gonna change overnight, they might evolve. That meaning is that core of that meaning will stay solid, anchoring your thoughts and your communications and your ideas to your team, helps you or to your beliefs, helps you not be reactive, not be inconsistent, and helps them to trust that you’ve got a plan and that where you’re headed is, is a good place.

Actions

If you do that, then those thoughts will in turn drive the actions. They’ll drive your team’s priorities and efforts. It’ll drive your business programs over time to stay coherent. It drives your prospects to trust you and commit to working with you and stay longer. You retain more clients when your actions reflect the thoughts that are anchored in your beliefs. So this sequence of beliefs, driving, linking to thoughts, driving action is a really valuable way for you to think about thought leadership for yourself as the leader of your business.