Your silence is a competitor’s thought leadership opportunity

When you wait to comment on an industry challenge until everyone else is already talking about it, you've lost twice.

First, you're behind in the conversation. Someone already said what you were going to say.

Second, you missed the intelligence. The people who spoke first got feedback you'll never see. They can respond, iterate, move the conversation forward. They can take it back to their business units, elevating their positioning and building authority.

By the time you show up, they have real-world experience dealing with and talking about the challenge.

Meanwhile, you're just beginning to comment.

The competitive cost is measurable. 75% of decision-makers and C-suite executives say a piece of thought leadership has led them to research a product or service they weren't previously considering. So your silence is someone else's opportunity to poach your customers.

But being first isn't just about protecting your customer base. It's about capturing intelligence that makes everything you do next more effective.

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When you publish a take on an industry challenge, you're opening an intelligence channel. You use that channel to measure how audiences react. You're listening for validation, challenges to your points, takes you hadn't considered, and real-world experiences from others.

But here's where most teams miss everything: their executive isn't in the mix — specifically, they’re not in comment sections.

Sure, they receive feedback from people in their orbit — partners, customers, prospects, peers. That's valuable, but incomplete. Usually, marketers and PR folks manage everything. The executive delegates the entire feedback loop.

That's the gap.

And closing that gap requires more than just publishing. It requires the executive to show up where the conversation is happening.

Whether you're the executive or the team supporting them, there are specific reasons the executive needs to be in the comments.

For LinkedIn, content visibility is amplified when the original poster is in the comments. If there's conversation happening — especially in the first few minutes after publishing — the algorithm rewards them and pushes it into more feeds.

It's also free, instant feedback that drives follow-up content. The words sometimes do write themselves.

And internal conversations shift. Instead of "[person who is a big deal] liked what we said," you get conversations about how your message has been received and what that means for your customers and prospects dealing with this challenge.

The executive needs specific directions. Engagement should be focused — LinkedIn only, not everywhere their name appears. And they should be taking notes from board meetings, sales calls, challenges that emerged that week.

It's all opportunity for content.

But before you start generating content from every challenge that surfaces, you need to know which ones are actually worth your platform.

So how do you distinguish between a challenge that's just internal noise versus an industry-wide problem worth building thought leadership around?

You vet it.

Ask the people you already communicate with. Other executives. Customers. Partners. Board members. Mentors. Analysts. Investors.

This new thing you're investigating might be something someone from that network has experience with. That's how strategic intelligence actually works.

Once you've vetted that a challenge is real and widespread, the next question is whether you have the credibility to speak on it.

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Identifying a problem publicly isn't enough.

You have to understand the problem, have experience dealing with it, and come away with a POV before going to market with a take.

That's where authority comes from.

You can't comment on everything right away. Start with topics that are relevant now.

For example, I've supported content from executives who lead companies focused on shopping and checkout experiences. They can speak with authority on what a product page looks like and how to get a customer from product detail page to cart to checkout.

That's their arena. That level of nuance can only come from companies and executives working on solving those problems every day.

But even that doesn't make you unique. There could be hundreds of companies who could talk about the same things as their competitors.

The differentiator is how your people think and operate. How your customers think and operate. The personality traits — curiosity, analytical thinking, appetite for experimenting — that can't be replicated.

Authority is layered.

You have to know what you're talking about. You have to have walked the walk. You have to know how to articulate your thoughts in a palatable way. And you have to have the distribution down.

Knowledge, style, and presentation.

So you've identified a challenge. You've vetted it. You have the authority to speak on it. Now comes the hardest part: figuring out what you actually think.

The most common mistake when framing an industry challenge: getting stuck on granular things. The weeds.

Wanting to say everything. Obsessing over the title, the hook, the lede. Thinking first about how it will be received.

These are all mistakes.

The priority is to clearly articulate the POV. You need to know what you think before you speak in thought leadership.

When you know what it is and it's unique and it makes sense, then you're ready.

The sequence is this: problem first, then the POV follows, and then everything else follows that.

As a writer, I probably don’t have an expert-level understanding of what an executive is talking about, so I ask for a lot of background. I need to understand why this is a problem.

Then I investigate. Why hasn't this problem been solved? I get a deeper understanding of the complexity of the issue.

That gives me all the background and understanding I need. Then we assemble the subject matter experts. The team — writers, marketers, comms professionals, and the executive — gets more details and weighs ideas for how the audience should address this challenge.

That, along with the background and context of the issue, helps lead to a first draft.

But a draft is just words on a page. What matters is whether those words actually help someone do something different.

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Solutions have to be logical and attainable.

Sometimes they can be lofty and impossible to some, but if it's a big swing, that gets people buzzing. It excites people. Gets more people to talk about the challenge.

The solution is where most thought leadership falls apart.

Identifying problems is easy. Offering something actionable is hard.

But 99% of buyers say thought leadership is important or critical in their decision-making. They're judging you by the ideas you share about industry challenges.

Your silence isn't protecting you. It's costing you the conversation, intelligence, and authority.

Someone else is building their platform on the challenge you're ignoring.

Let’s change that. Start by making a short list of challenges you’re seeing in the market and that you’re helping solve internally. From there, build out your POV, prepare your evidence / points (data + anecdotes are powerful), get input from subject-matter experts, see what else is out there, and then you have the makings of a great thought leadership piece.