There is a common misconception that if you want to be a thought leader, you need to have your whole content strategy mapped out from day one so that you can systematically build your thought leadership platform. What this misconception fails to acknowledge is that businesses and leaders evolve. 

I have yet to meet a thought leader who doesn’t have a story about making a major pivot, and that pivot often becomes an essential element of their thought leadership. While I confess I haven’t done extensive research into the origin stories of top thought leaders, I doubt that’s necessary to prove my point. 

Here’s what I know: Some of the most famous thought leaders of all time—folks like Brene Brown and Oprah Winfrey—discovered the core of their thought leadership messaging by connecting the dots. Until those dots fell into place, though, they felt their way along by putting out ideas, receiving feedback and using what they learned to create the next thing. 

Thought leadership evolves and grows over time. It doesn’t fall to Earth fully formed like a baby giraffe from the womb. For this reason, I think it’s often more useful to talk about cultivating a thought leadership ecosystem, rather than building a thought leadership platform. 

What is a Thought Leadership Ecosystem?

In science, an ecosystem is a biological community of interacting organisms and their physical environment. Likewise, a thought leadership ecosystem describes your living, breathing content and how each piece interacts with the others and the environment—in this case, your audience, positioning, the market, your industry, etc. 

Your thought leadership ecosystem encompasses all of your thought leadership. This could be your podcast, your blog articles, your social media posts, your email newsletters, your book, your courses, your talks, etc. 

It takes time for that ecosystem to come into focus, though. When you first start creating content (and this phase can last for many years), you may feel as if each piece of content you create comes from an isolated spark of an idea. Your writing feels spontaneous and very much “of the moment.” You may struggle to nail down the themes and core ideas you really want to become known for. 

And if you’re like me, you might feel a twinge of shame around this. Every marketer will tell you that you need a system and promise to help you build your thought leadership platform from the top down. There’s a sense that if you want to create from the bottom up, you’re doing it wrong. 

But there’s really no wrong way to create and no wrong way to develop thought leadership. It’s okay to let those big themes arise naturally. This is what I mean by cultivating a thought leadership ecosystem. Once you have a critical mass of content in front of you, those big ideas will float to the surface and you’ll suddenly see how each new piece of content interacts with the rest.

So if your thought leadership doesn’t feel systematic, that’s okay. You need not be good at predicting the future to become a thought leader. What is handy, however, is being able to connect dots in hindsight. And as a subject matter expert, I’m betting THIS is one of your strengths.

Action item: Connecting the dots you have requires reflection time, but not much else. You can even start RIGHT NOW. If you want to cultivate your thought leadership ecosystem, you simply need to be a smart gardener. Walk amongst your content. Read it and jot down 3-5 big themes that come to mind. Then map out your content wishlist for the next 90 days making sure to give each theme equal air time.

What are the Key Features of a Thought Leadership Ecosystem?

Now that you know how to begin cultivating your thought leadership ecosystem, what are the features to look for and how can you ensure you have a healthy ecosystem that will move you forward toward your goals?

1. The various pieces of content feed into each other.

One of the major advantages you have as a subject matter expert creating your own content, or working collaboratively with a skilled ghostwriter to create your thought leadership, is that you can see the big picture. Marketers working in-house for brands are often siloed from subject matter experts, which makes it hard to see how every piece of content interacts with the others.

When you’re building a comprehensive personal brand, though, you can see how your content feeds into itself. Take Mike Michalowicz, for example. He’s the author of Profit First and several other books all around the theme of making entrepreneurship simple. He’s continually building and creating new tools and content to grow his ecosystem. And while I can see, from the outside, how each piece of his content relates to his big theme, his brand doesn’t feel perfectly packaged. It has clearly evolved over the years.

2. Ecosystems are cyclical.

Growth in an ecosystem happens in a cyclical fashion. This means that you may have periods where you don’t want to write blog posts, but you lean into doing Instagram reels instead or that you deliberately decide to hold back on publishing some content because it’s not fully baked and you want to give it some extra time in the creative oven.

A healthy thought leadership ecosystem leaves room for ebbs and flows with your business. It’s important to remember that just as rest is part of productivity, having fallow periods with your content creation is part of developing your thought leadership.

During the times when you don’t have as much time to think about your content because you’re busy keeping up with client work or you’ve got some personal stuff going on, it’s natural to feel less creative. Don’t panic. You’re learning all kinds of lessons that you’re storing up to share with your audience when the time is right.

3. Ecosystems require a delicate balance, but are also resilient.

One challenge with maintaining a healthy ecosystem is not upsetting the delicate balance. When you find a flow that feels good with your thought leadership, adding in something new could be destabilizing. So consider how a new system, routine, or channel could affect everything else.

Just as important as maintaining that balance, though, is realizing that your ecosystem is resilient. You should always feel free to experiment with content that pushes you out of your comfort zone. 

A good place to experiment is wherever you see gaps in your coverage of key topics. Because you have a strong base of core thought leadership, adding in content that feels more on the periphery in order to bridge a gap is a good idea. For example, if you tend to shy away from creating personal posts, look at the items on your content wishlist and ask yourself whether you have a personal story to share related to one of those ideas.

I hope that thinking about your thought leadership as an ecosystem will help you to feel more free in the content you create. The advice that insists that we systematically build our thought leadership platform from the top down puts a lot of undue pressure on us. 

Thought leadership can and will evolve. Your content is living and breathing—let it.

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