Thought Leadership and Career Evolution

How does the stage of someone’s career affect their thought leadership? Are we more likely to engage in it earlier in our career, or later? And why is there a difference?

I think there are a number of factors –

Intention

Earlier in as career our goal might be to get ahead – find more sales, make a name for ourselves. Later in a career, it’s often about trying to define a body of work and even a genuinely altruistic desire to improve an industry.

As a 50-something guy who has spent close to 30 years in the same industry, there’s a genuine desire to help people avoid my mistakes. I’ve grown tired of running around in circles. At some level, I hope to “break the cycle”: move people past the same old issues and have them move forward to solving more interesting problems.

Time

Later in our careers, we might have more (or less?) time to engage in the content creation. Of course, the amount of time we can spend on something is inextricably related to the value it provides, and as that changes, so will the time we can devote to it.

We tend to have greater professional autonomy later in our careers. And many of us have achieved positions where we’re expecting to provide some promotional value to the company.

If you want to be given time to create content, you need to create content that provides value.

Experience

Later in a career, we can draw on so much more experience – we have more aggregate experience

I’ve read the book From Strength to Strength: Finding Success, Happiness, and Deep Purpose in the Second Half of Life which is how we need to evolve over time. Early in life, we have what the author calls “fluid intelligence,” which is the ability to think very creatively about a situation, without being encumbered – or cynical – by earlier experiences. We have “fresh eyes.”

Later in life, our strength morphs into what the author calls “crystallized intelligence.” We have a long history with our challenges – we know what works and what doesn’t, and we’re less likely to take risks to solve a problem, because we can see the next problem coming behind it, or understand the base problem that’s causing it.

Type

I think we move from Experiential and Investigatory to more Theoretical, Education, and Social thought leadership as we progress in our careers. Rather than looking at a single problem in isolation, we have a tendency to connect it to other ideas.

Additionally, our thinking becomes bigger picture. We often move out of specific tactical situations that lend themselves well to investigations and post-mortems, and we start to connect ideas at a much higher level.