“I don’t want to give away my secret sauce!”
I hear this all the time from thought leaders. They want to *hint* at the magic behind their work, but they’re afraid of revealing too much.
Spoiler alert: unless you’re sharing your ATM pin or you work with nuclear codes, no one can somehow swoop in and steal the essence of what makes your work valuable.
If you’re a knowledge worker or you work for a professional services firm, your secret sauce is much more about how you do your work than what you deliver.
That means that your “recipe” for success isn’t something anyone else can easily replicate or steal. They can’t run to the grocery store and buy the ingredients because your recipe probably doesn’t call for 2 tablespoons of tomato paste — but it could call for twenty years of experience.
Instead of worrying about giving away too much, I help my clients do the opposite — they dig deeper into what makes their work so special and articulate that specific value.
Three ingredients in thought leaders’ “secret sauce”
Thought leaders work with three key, unreplicable ingredients:
- Expertise (what they have learned about their field)
- Perspective (how they’ve learned those lessons — the growing pains, hard-won insight, mistakes made, and aha moments gained along the way)
- Vision (their hopes, predictions, and guidance for what’s coming next).
As a thought leader, you’re a little like a mountain climber. You spend years doing the hard, dirty work of climbing up a mountain (earning your expertise). When you get to the top, you can stand on your perch, look behind you at the path you took, and reflect on your perspective. You can also look out at the horizon with a clear view ahead at what’s coming next, building a vision.
No one can steal any of that. They can stand at the bottom of the mountain and map the path you took. But if they haven’t made the climb, they don’t know the tricky holds and slippery spots along the way. If they’re not standing at the top, they don’t have a perspective about what the path looks like from the other end. And they can’t use that hard work and perspective to develop a vision for the future.
In other words, your secret sauce is unstealable. Your competitors can’t copy it (and if they do, their version will feel phony and hollow). Even your peers who have climbed similar mountains won’t have your same perspective on how they got there. And new startups in your space can’t parachute in and build a compelling, grounded vision from scratch without making the climb.
Once you realize that your secret sauce isn’t actually a secret to hide behind closed doors, you can start the generous work of sharing what you know.
An example from my own thought leadership
In the past few weeks, I got two emails that showed me the impact of sharing my “secret sauce” in my Friday newsletter. Two peers told me they’ve used my ideas as a foundation for their work.
One said:
I have been following your newsletter for a couple of years. Your perspective was foundational in putting together my first thought leadership strategy for a client last year. Your ideas gave me a starting point to work with. I can now share that there have been so many wins and much of my client’s thought leader strategy and roadmap is starting to be achieved! Thank you so much for sharing your incredibly valuable perspective about thought leadership and for helping my client expand her thought leadership.
The other said:
Thank you for mentoring me through your newsletter for more than three years now! I realized afresh how much your newsletter has shaped my views. When I think of thought leadership, I think of you! When I have a question, I ask myself, “What would Lee say about this?”
These emails surprised me. If I had any instinct to think, “Oh no! They took my secret sauce!” it was quickly replaced by a more dominant realization: People know me for my ideas.
That’s what thought leadership is all about — your ideas preceding you. It’s about spreading your perspective beyond your immediate network of clients. And if I’d kept my ideas locked up for the past few years, I wouldn’t have made the same impact.
So here’s your prodding and permission: Go share your ideas. Talk openly about what you’ve learned, how you learned it, and what you see coming next. No one’s going to steal your secret sauce. If you’re lucky, they’ll riff on your recipe to cook up something of their own.
