Becoming a thought leader at your new job

Dave Nestoff
Aug 23, 2017 · 4 min read

When I got my new job as a Software Engineer at Simplifya, I was the first true developer they’d hired onto a team that mostly worked with a dev squad overseas. I was at a small start-up with a young product, though I did have unfettered access to my CTO (my boss). And I was a junior going into a workplace on terms I never had before.

That’s why before I ever got the job, I asked what he expected me to focus on when I started. I’d learned PHP in three days for my code sample, felt confident in my learning abilities, and wanted a jumpstart where I could.

Our CTO gave me five things I might work on:

  1. API work. Minimal experience until using the Meet-up API for my code sample (to good reviews).
  2. Laravel/PHP. Check on PHP and I knew Rails, so not too intimidating.
  3. Angular (and larger UI/UX). Only knew some concepts of Angular — though I did come with design experience.
  4. MySQL. Not PostgreSQL.
  5. Java/Android/Node. Nada.

Of the five, I prioritized what I needed to focus on. Luckily, this list was in order of most to least likely (disclaimer: I love my boss). I felt good on API work, and decided that one Laravel tutorial would be enough (~3 hours). So it came down to Angular or MySQL, the latter of which I figured couldn’t have been too different from Postgres (it’s not).

I was trying to be proactive. Little did I know I was getting a roadmap for becoming a thought leader at my new company.

As I reflect on it (and try to be anecdotal), I realize there are two parts to becoming a thought leader:

  1. Talking intelligently enough to earn trust
  2. Becoming an expert on something(s)

Let’s talk about both.

Part 1: Sounding smart (with some consistency)

I’ll start by saying the second part kind of bled into the first. As I dove into the internet library where necessary, I also tried to…

Find our blindspots

It was a lot of intent listening and note-taking at first, but then I started picking places I knew were areas our team needed more expertise. At the time, the biggest two were user experience and design.

I became increasingly vocal in conversations around those topics. My focus was on figuring out small changes we could make. I’d build up bigger once I had some momentum. Sometimes suggestions would be backed up by resources I’d recently uncovered. Other times it was just a mix of intuition and logic.

Both worked.

Know my best channel(s)

It wasn’t just IRL conversations, though. These opportunities to lead flowed over to and spawned from email. As a writer, this was where I shined the most. And even if you’re better with your vocal cords, there’s value in a paper trail.

Point being, a big part of being a good communicator is knowing where you communicate best. Keep your eyes open for the next opportunity to say something intelligent. And 99.9% of the time, that’s something useful.

Part 2: Experting (also with consistency)

Again, these two parts aren’t strictly chronological.

For me the biggest part of becoming an expert is being good at research. And the biggest part of that? Being efficient.

Reading efficiently

I’m a chronic tab-opener. I can get up to 60 tabs open in my multiple windows (when I forget to close the crap). But that’s something I’m proud of, because I’ll google something (skill no. 1), and then look at four different pieces on a topic until I find the best one.

A second layer to this is a system of organization for when you find something good. I’m a huge fan of my Chrome bookmarks (and bookmark folders), but Evernote is probably just as good at this.

Mapping the bigger picture

The action word here is “synthesizing”. Without the bigger picture, you’ll never make the most of what you learn. Logic might say it’s impossible to even be a true thought leader.

I like to imagine a new subject as a blank table of contents. Which is appropriate, because I do at times use a table of contents to organize my research. Most of the time, I’ll keep organized with a Google Drive file. Otherwise it’ll be in a note on my Mac.

I fill in that table of contents with the biggest chunks possible, then I can recursively do that for each of the chunks I fill in. The more time I’m willing to spend on it (or can afford to spend), is the greater the detail of my coverage. But I’ve done it enough to know researching from the top down is the path of greatest impact.

So what does becoming a thought leader actually mean?

Now that your mentally prepped, here are the things befitting my definition (and ambitions) of thought leadership.

  • Planning meetings: Emphasis on“planning”. There is nothing that says leader like bringing people together with a set of talking points that push things forward.
  • Stewarding the broader vision: The understanding (and organization) outlined above is what prioritization is made. Priorities should be both manageable and, to an extent, outlined chronologically.
  • Collecting research and disseminating it: All of the above is only as strong as the manner in which you relay what you know. It’s an art worthy of it’s own post, but it involves putting bite-sizes of information at the right level of technicality for everyone you’re sharing with.

So have you tried your hand a thought leadership? The funny thing is, when you’re doing it right, you might not actually even realize it.

Stay tuned for my next post: everything you need to be awesome at APIs.

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Dave Nestoff

Written by

A musician, programmer, creator working towards one thing: Making my way out of the shadows of skyscrapers and into the shade of pine trees.

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