Performative Thought Leadership

Make sure you can back it up

Do you really need to generate substantive, unique, interesting, and valuable content to be considered a thought leader?

Well, no. I mean, you should, but there’s a lot of people publishing a lot of fairly useless content that are considered by others to be “thought leaders.” They make a lot of noise, and because of that they’re fairly well-known and well-followed, even though the content they generate is thread-bare.

The content these people generate tends to be –

Short: They’re big on pithy, bite-sized, philosophic nuggets
Contrarian: Their posts tend to be contrarian to business philosophy – they’re known for “hot takes” and positions which set them apart from dogma
Dramatic: There are a lot of short sentences and irregular grammar as rhetorical flourishes
Enlightened: There’s usually an attempt to portray the creator as having transcended the typical difficulties of business and having reached some level of elevated enlightenment or perspective
Reductive: Nothing is ever complicated – to achieve Result D, just do A, B, and C (“like I did!”); it’s always just that simple

This is generally the province of social media, particular LinkedIn. That platform is an interesting intersection, because it’s not typical social media – there’s a professional veneer there which sets it apart from something like Twitter or Bluesky.

I struggle with how elitist this sounds, but I call this “performative thought leadership,” in that this person is literally performing – they’re acting like a thought leader, without the… investment of it. One imagines them responding to a reminder to post their “thought of the day” or whatever.

This raises an interesting question: does someone actually have to “lead thought”? If all someone posts are shallow hit-and-run bits and pieces, but they manage to amass a large following and it leads to business value, then are they… wrong?

No, probably not. If they’re publishing content and getting results, then they just found a new way of doing it. I can look down on it all I want, but in terms of publishing content for business value, they’ve certainly checked all the boxes.

I’m reminded of Kim Kardashian back in her earlier years, when she was just “famous for being famous.” She acted like a famous person, and so everyone accepted that she was a famous person, but for a long time, no one could tell you exactly why she was famous.

(Sure, sure, there was that thing. But most people didn’t know anything about her home movies. They just knew she…existed on the national stage for some unknown reason.)

Fast forward a decade or so, and she now has a legitimate body of work. So now she’s famous for “valid” reasons. But I think it’s fair to say she assumed the identity of someone who had a body of work before she had earned it, and then built it afterwards.

Is this wrong? …no, insofar as we can say anything in this field is “right” or “wrong.” You can complain (or be jealous) of the path she took, but you can’t argue with where she ended up.

But remember, thought leadership artifacts are a reference for the person who created them – they’re an indirect way establishing skill and experience. So while it might lead to business results, does the performative thought leader actually have the skill and experience they’re implying?

…maybe, I don’t know. I suppose some do and some don’t.

However, it’s hard to tell, and that’s the problem.

If I write a 5,000-word case study about a programming problem I solved, complete with a central narrative, code samples, and detailed explanations, then that’s a pretty good, credible referendum on my skill and experience. You could read that, and say with some confidence that I know what I’m talking about.

But if my output consists of nothing but pithy quotes, motivational bromides, random inside baseball, and name dropping, then you just have no way of knowing if I can back up the image I’m creating. Maybe I’m a genius who’s just pressed for time and has a quirky sense of humor. Or maybe I just want to have a greater standing in my professional community than I’m willing to put in the work for.

My advice here is that you need to be able to backstop your image with something substantive. Short bits on LinkedIn aren’t inherently bad, but often, they’re just so-called “personal brand building,” which is basically the process of creating a facade of something you don’t truly embody.