This question was asked by Hashim, a member of our AddVenture community.
How to showcase leadership skill in a the corporate world?
A lot of us think that we need to “work harder” to be better leader.
You don’t need to work harder to be a better leader.
You need to become a key person of influence.
We need to build your influence.
I will be sharing three areas you can focus on immediately.
The first one I have gone into most detail, knowing that it is the most long-term play you can make.
The other two ideas are very practical and may end up yielding more of that “leadership capital” for you especially in the short term.
You need to have a three step approach to be better a leader:
- Own the Thought
- Own the Signal
- Own the Ugly
Own the Thought
How to be a thought leader in your space?
Think about any “expert” in your field. Why do you consider him/her an expert?
You probably read something they wrote (even a LinkedIn post), that you thought was insightful. Or you saw them on a podcast. Or you saw them on a podcast sharing that insight that you found insightful haha…
Now we make the mistake of thinking that we remembered them because they said something memorable. No, we remembered because they first said “something” and then they ended up saying something that to you was “memorable”.
Your Publishing Schedule (Proof of Work)
You need a Publishing Schedule. We call it PubSche here at Momekh. It’s central to practice Influence Mastery
Thought leaders publish something useful on a schedule. They build a body of work over time.
Here’s a simple 3-step Publishing Schedule (PubSche) you can start this week:
- Publish one article per week on LinkedIn (distribution of thought). Keep it practical. Answer one real question from your day job: something your peers ask you, or something they wish they asked you!
- Archive the best pieces on your website (proof of work). This is your asset being built, your body of work. No one remembers what you posted on LinkedIn two days ago, but you control the website.
- Turn that same post into a short talking-head video (authority). This as you can imagine, is the most powerful way of “displaying” thought leadership. As long as your ideas are not heretical, most people don’t remember what you said in the videos, they just remember that you make videos about a topic, which makes you the de facto expert in that subject.
A Note About Your Own Name Website
Most people resist the idea of getting a website.
“LinkedIn will do just fine!”
“A website is overkill”
“Maybe later”
In corporate, influence is mostly perception plus proof. Your website is the “proof archive” of sorts. This is where your “body of work” resides. A single link you can share internally that instantly tells the other person that “o ok, this guy knows his stuff”.
Highly recommended is that you get your own website (with a domain like yourfullname.com for example). You have taken the decision to be a thought leader and a website simply adds to that:
- You can send articles/posts from your website to stakeholders after you ship something: “Here’s the write-up”
- Use it in performance reviews / promo packs: “Here’s my body of work”.
- People will perceive your expertise differently if they also know that you publish your insights on your newsletter/blog.
- Put the website address in your email signatures and Slack/Teams profile
A minimum investment in your professional digital footprint will go a very, very, verrry long way inshAllah in helping you become that thought leader.
This website can be a single-page site with: your role + 3 best articles + 1 case study + a short ‘What I’m known for’ paragraph and that’s that.
Contact me if you need a website from us.
Super Tip on Being The Knowledgeable Thought Leader
To really understand any field deeply, order the top three best-sellers from Amazon on that field. Read them. It takes a maximum of 15 days to read three books (and yes, take your time a bit with this, don’t GPT it or read just the summaries – take some time at least to let ideas settle in).
Once you have done that over 15 days or so, you now know more than 98 percent of the people in your field. You may think, “but it can’t be that simple,” but it is. No one reads books about the job they’re doing. No one. Those who do, become what we set out to become: thought leaders. It is what it is.
Own the Signal
By signal I mean your communication with your “stakeholders”. This usually means your immediate boss, then your peers.
Owning the signal is a “boss move” that not many people would be doing.
Once a week, sit down and send a 3-bullet “strategic update” to your lead/boss:
- The Win. What was shipped (with proof)
- What bottlenecks you’ve already identified a fix for (only share the fixes for the bottlenecks, not just the bottlenecks)
- An insight from the previous week that adds value to the team that you boss is leading.
You see, once you’ll actually sit down to do the above three, you will have to become a better leader to identify and then articulate these insights.
You own the signal by creating the most useful signal yourself within your team.
Own the Ugly
This I don’t know how it would apply directly to your banking sector, but here’s the idea in essence.
Leadership is the art of solving problems that don’t have an “owner” yet. In different groups, there are usually some issue or challenge between teams that no one from either team really wants to touch.
Can you identify that issue? Can you carry conversations, make small talk with your peers, and others from other departments, so that you start getting a sense of what is the “cross-functional” issue?
And then you communicate that in your weekly update to your lead, you may talk about that in your weekly article or video as well. Identifying such challenges are usually enough to solve them.
Essentially, to show your leadership skills, you need to exercise leadership skills. Who would’ve thought right? 🙂
- Have a website where you share your industry insights.
- Have a direct line to your stakeholders where you share your team insights.
- Serve your team by identifying, articulating and solving for the orphaned cross-functional challenges (this is a mouthful, but I hope you see how this works).
Bonus tip: Leadership and Networks
I can talk for days on how to create useful, powerful networks in general.
MRT. Get ****your MRT going The Monthly Round Table. Whatever your job role is, identify others in your area/city with similar job titles. Invite them once a month to dinner. Discuss your insights, ask them questions what insights they found. Be the connector/organizer. The person who brings the experts together is perceived as the Chief Expert.
Internal Coach. Another tip is to make your higher-up your coach.
Find a coach within your chain of command. Go to someone whom you don’t directly report to, ask for their 15 minutes of guidance. Then tell them that you are eager to learn, and want to design your career like they have done it (they are higher up the chain so that should be true for you). And then ask them if they would be kind to guide you in your career and if they are OK with sharing coffee with you once a week, as you may have a question or two only they can answer.
And then you make sure you have questions that only they can best answer. You will learn a tremendous amount by just trying to articulate those questions!
Hope you are able to increase your influence in a meaningful way.
I wish you all the best and I look forward to your success.
