Thought Leadership in an Industry Where Everybody Knows Everybody

Almost everyone in this industry says they want to be a thought leader, and almost nobody can tell you what one actually is.

It’s become one of those phrases that gets used to mean “well known”, which is not the same thing at all, and the confusion matters because it sends people chasing the wrong behaviour entirely.

What thought leadership isn’t

It isn’t posting more, and it isn’t being the loudest account on the feed, because volume is a tactic rather than a position.

It also isn’t repackaging somebody else’s framework with your own colours on it, commentating on whatever happened in the industry this week without ever saying what you think, or manufacturing controversy because outrage travels. All of those things can grow an audience, and none of them will make anyone trust your judgement.

What it actually is

Thought leadership is having a point of view about where this industry is going, with something real underneath it, and being willing to be wrong about that in public.

The willingness matters as much as the point of view, because a position you’d abandon the moment somebody pushed back was never a position, it was a caption.

The four things that make it real

A position. Something you actually believe that not everyone in the room agrees with, because if every single person nods along you haven’t led a thought, you’ve repeated one.

Evidence. Your own years on the floor, the patterns you’ve seen across dozens of businesses, or data nobody else has bothered to gather, because a position without evidence underneath it is just a hot take.

Consistency. Leading a thought means staying in the same territory long enough that people know what you stand for, rather than commentating on whatever happened this week.

Usefulness. If it doesn’t change what somebody does on Monday morning, it was a nice paragraph and nothing more.

The hard part, in an industry this small

All of that is straightforward advice until you remember where we work.

Ours is a small, intimate industry where everybody knows everybody, and the person you disagree with will be standing at the stand next to yours at the next expo, or sitting two seats away at the awards. A real disagreement can land as an attack very quickly, which is exactly why so many people with truly good thinking say nothing at all, and why the ones who do speak up often overcorrect into something that reads as bitchy.

So the question isn’t whether you should have a point of view, it’s how you hold one without burning the relationships that make this industry worth being in.

Disagree with the practice, not the person

This is the rule that solves most of it.

There is an enormous difference between “I don’t believe in this practice” and “this person is doing it wrong”, even when the words around them are almost identical. The first one is about an idea, which anybody is free to pick up or put down. The second one is about a woman with a business, a team and a reputation, and she will feel it that way whether or not you meant it that way.

In practice that means naming the pattern rather than the salon, and talking about what you see across the industry rather than about what one person posted on Tuesday.

A preference, not a verdict

Take lymphatic work, where you’ve got sculpting, buccal, lifting, with tools, without tools, and about a dozen schools of thought sitting underneath all of it.

Not one of those is right or wrong. If a client is getting a result and she’s walking out happy, that’s the end of the conversation as far as I’m concerned, and anyone who tells you otherwise is usually selling their own method.

So instead of saying somebody’s method is wrong, I’ll say I personally don’t work that way, and then I’ll tell you why. That difference is everything, because a preference opens a conversation while a verdict starts a fight nobody in an industry this size can afford.

It also happens to be more honest, since in most of these debates there truly isn’t a single right answer, and pretending there is one just to sound authoritative is its own kind of dishonesty.

Trust the room

The other half of it is trusting your audience.

My job is to give you something to think with, not to hand you a conclusion, and this industry is full of very smart women who are perfectly capable of landing on their own view once they’ve got the information in front of them. Telling people what to think is a much weaker position than showing them how you think, and it ages far worse.

It’s also the thing that makes a point of view safe to hold in a small industry, because if you’ve truly left room for somebody to disagree with you, their disagreeing isn’t a fight, it’s just the conversation working.

The test I use

Before anything goes out, I ask myself whether I could say it to their face, at their stand, with their team standing right there.

In this industry, I probably will, and that’s not a reason to stay quiet. It’s the reason to say it properly.

If you’ve been sitting on a point of view you’ve never said out loud because of who might see it, that’s usually the one worth working out how to say.