How to become the intelligence thought leader for your organisation

For executives, keeping up to date with trends and events in your industry is crucial in order to ensure that your business and its strategy remains relevant.

It can be a major challenge however, with constraints on time and so many sources of information to choose from. It’s easy to see why many senior executives simply don’t have the time to perform the detailed research tasks necessary to make sense of all this information.

It’s important to overcome this challenge though, as things can move so quickly and being on top of trends is key for executives.

It’s also very important to ensure that the whole company is also up to date. For this, executives need to become the thought-leaders within their own organisations, disseminating ideas and providing inspiration for ideas to develop.

Simply distributing updates isn’t enough though, effective thought-leadership is also about engaging people, adding value, and encouraging people to take new perspectives.

It’s also important to consider the best channels to distribute information to achieve the greatest effect and to encourage people to share and discuss.

Nick Gregg, CEO of EditorEye, on the best approaches:

“Two approaches work in organisations, email and collaboration. Email is still the most effective channel to reach your audience, using mobile-friendly curated briefings but keeping this to just a few key stories, and being careful to avoid overload.

“Collaboration is also key. At its simplest this means making it easy to share articles or alternatively central applications or apps for posting and commenting on content. Either way, getting to the right insights is vital.”

Ensuring that the right processes are in place within an organisation matters here. Emails are useful but can also be easily overlooked in busy inboxes. This is why it’s important to ensure that the collaboration happens, and that ideas sent through in emails are digested and discussed.

This is another important role that the thought leader has to play. It’s not just about disseminating ideas but also about ensuring that real debate takes place around these themes and that, ultimately, information is translated into ideas and actions.