A Different Kind of Leadership

  • June 4, 2018
  • Posted by: Robert Rose
  • Categories: Business Transformation, Content Marketing
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Can we talk about LeBron?

I’m on a fairly extensive trip throughout Europe, teaching a workshop, visiting with clients, and seeing a few sights along the way. As a result, I’m only following NBA basketball from afar. But, wow, LeBron James is simply leading the way for the Cleveland Cavaliers.

It’s funny, the theme of one of the conferences where I spoke was “leading the way,” by which the conference organizers mean expressing LeBron-level skill. The strategic use of digital content in marketing is like a buzzer-beating turnaround jump shot.  It should (or will) be an innovation for most organizations; having the heroic skills to pull it off will be critical to winning.

But I wonder if success with content marketing, or really any business transformation, requires a different kind of leadership: the ability to effect change.

In my keynote to the group, I focused on the transformation of the team as the key to the future of the content practitioner. As I did at our Intelligent Content Conference earlier this year, I said that the key to this transformation was getting everyone to be good at the game of creating content as a business strategy.

And this brings me back to this “leading the way” idea. One of the things that I’m noticing about brands that excel at content marketing (at whatever part of the buyer’s journey) is how well the content practitioners there focus on “leading” the organization into change.

In other words, they don’t just view themselves as a talented “skill position” that handles a specialized activity (natch, content). Rather, they look at themselves as a change agent, teacher, and coach where the strategic use of content is pulling the business transformation forward.

These business practitioners lead the way. They teach the organization how content optimizes every part of the business, rather than how content is a special silo that needs to be recognized.

This is our new challenge as content practitioners. We are here to drive what has historically been considered a tactic or a specialty role into a strategic, institutional competency. Content, created and managed well, has the ability to differentiate, provide competitive advantage, and ultimately transform the entire business.

We just need people to lead the way.

It’s your story. Tell it well.

Robert Rose
Chief Strategy Officer at The Content Advisory
As the Chief Strategy Officer of The Content Advisory, the exclusive education and consulting group of The Content Marketing Institute, Robert develops content and customer experience strategies for large enterprises such as The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Oracle, McCormick Spices, Capital One, and UPS.

Robert’s book, Experiences: The 7th Era of Marketing was called “a call to arms and a self-help guide for creating the experiences that consumers will fall in love with.” For the last three years, he’s co-hosted the podcast This Old Marketing, with Joe Pulizzi. It’s frequently a top 20 marketing podcast on iTunes and is downloaded more than a million times every year, in 100 countries around the world.
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Author: Robert Rose
As the Chief Strategy Officer of The Content Advisory, the exclusive education and consulting group of The Content Marketing Institute, Robert develops content and customer experience strategies for large enterprises such as The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Oracle, McCormick Spices, Capital One, and UPS. Robert’s book, Experiences: The 7th Era of Marketing was called “a call to arms and a self-help guide for creating the experiences that consumers will fall in love with.” For the last three years, he’s co-hosted the podcast This Old Marketing, with Joe Pulizzi. It’s frequently a top 20 marketing podcast on iTunes and is downloaded more than a million times every year, in 100 countries around the world.