Thought Leadership Is Just Solving Problems Out Loud
I’ve had more than one conversation with engineers considering management where this idea comes up — the idea that thought leadership requires some sort of profound revelation, or some kind of anointing process before you’re allowed to participate. Thought leadership is an aspect of management that becomes more expected the higher you go, and is often explicitly called out in leadership role descriptions. Feeling like you couldn’t possibly be a thought leader can make the expectation itself feel like a barrier to entry.
But here’s the most delightful secret: we’re all just figuring this out as we go along.
So if no one innately knows all of the answers, maybe thought leadership isn’t claiming to have the answers. Maybe it’s really just finding a problem you’re excited to solve and solving it while keeping others in the loop who might benefit from seeing how you approach it.
New managers often resist visibility. Hell, I often resist visibility. Even the engineers I manage resist visibility. Just watch how fast they avoid eye contact when I ask them to write an internal blog post or share a demo outside of our team.
People sometimes say engineers avoid visibility because they believe their work should speak for itself. I don’t think that’s quite right. I think we’re just used to solving problems in code. Once the solution works, it’s available to everyone. Anyone can read it.
As a manager, solutions don’t work that way. Some of the work is still code, but a lot of it isn’t. Adjusting to a leadership role meant I had to get comfortable being uncomfortable and share my solutions — my ideas — on a wider platform. It’s a lot like opening a pull request, just with a much larger audience. Both require you to be in the position of saying, “I may not have the perfect answer, but here’s my best shot. Let me know how we can iterate toward something even better.”
The first thing I did that got any real attention as a manager was an internal blog post about driving your own career: career development, conversations with your manager, and promotions. It was a topic I felt really strongly about because people were so often confused or blindsided by the process. Why not try to pull back the curtain a bit? A lot of people ended up reading it and sharing it and referring to it years after I hit publish. It was a real problem I was trying to solve. I didn’t think of it as thought leadership. I thought of it as documentation for a system people were struggling to navigate.
Visibility isn’t about positioning yourself as an expert. It’s about making your thinking accessible to the people around you. When people can see how you approach problems, they can learn from it, challenge it, and build on it. That’s where influence actually starts.
Most thought leadership doesn’t start with authority. It starts with friction.
As engineers, we’re so good at finding and solving problems. The next evolution of that is finding and solving problems that matter to other people. And not even necessarily solving them. Take your best shot, share your best guess. Thought leadership doesn’t start when you have answers. It starts when you decide a problem is worth solving out loud.
