Avatar (Fabio Alessandro Locati|Fale)'s blog

On the importance of thought leadership

February 27, 2026

Over the last 20+ years in IT, I’ve been lucky enough to work across many roles and industries. In that time, I’ve always found that the work we do, and that we’re measured against, is only one side of the story. The other side, and often the most important one, is the work we share: the ideas, the rationale, the reasoning, the reflections that shape how others think. That is what thought leadership is about, why it matters more than ever in our industry, and why I started and continue doing it.

Due to my involvement in many thought leadership activities, I’m often asked by different people why thought leadership is important. It is so common that I have a list of reasons in my head, roughly organized by beneficiary.

From a beneficiary standpoint, I think there are three major ones:

The community

I think the biggest beneficiary of thought leadership is the community itself. In this context, the definition of community is intentionally loose, as it can vary depending on the topic and the modality of the examined thought leadership. It can be the local community for a specific language or technology, an open-source project, or, sometimes, the wider community of IT practitioners.

The three reasons that make thought leadership important for a community are:

Let’s see those aspects one by one.

Is a responsibility

Very often peple that do not do thought leadership or who are starting to do it approach it from the “I” perspective: the speaker, the author. The reality, though, is the exact opposite: the most important people in thought leadership are its consumers. Doing thought leadership means gifting one’s knowledge, experience, understanding, and viewpoints to others, and it is valuable as long as the audience finds it so.

In this perspective, it is the responsibility of people who have accumulated knowledge and understanding of the domain in question to share it with others, as someone did years prior with them, allowing them to become who they are.

Builds trust in complex domains

Technologies are (or should be) exact: to get a certain result, you should take specific actions in a specific order, and every time you do it, you get the same result. On the other hand, more complex domains such as automation, security, cloud, and open-source are not like that. All of those are complex mixes of technologies, people, and processes, where there is no single way to do things correctly: there are trade-offs, contexts, and many nuances.

Thought leadership allows the community to create an understanding of this complexity by collecting single experiences and creating collective knowledge. By sharing this collective knowledge, communities can thrive and build greater confidence in the validity of certain best practices, just as a scientific experiment whose outcome does not contradict the prevailing theory reinforces it.

Strengthens the community

Communities are built on top of sharing, and sharing makes the community stronger. Thought leadership directly helps the community in this sense, but also strengthens the community in an indirect way, by creating space for the community to explore different ideas and options. It is very common at conferences that people that never met before have a conversation just after a talk about the content of the talk itself. Interesting and challenging talks obviously spark way more conversations than boring talks.

The company employing the thought leader

Very often, being a thought leader requires investing time, effort, and potentially money to make it happen. Effort can only be provided by the thought leader themself. On the other hand, money can be provided by someone different, usually the person’s employer. Time is an interesting one because the person has to make time and decide to spend it on thought leadership, but the employer can help by allowing the usage of company time to alleviate the thought leader’s burden.

So, what can companies expect from this? Personally, I think there are three key aspects:

Let’s see those aspects one by one.

Increases trust, credibility, and influence

Very few sales today are made solely on the basis of the solution’s features. People choose their suppliers for many reasons, including shared values and the belief that the supplier will make the right product suggestions.

Those two characteristics are hard for companies to convey in a way that their customers can see as genuine, and most of the ways fall under the umbrella of thought leadership.

By having its people be thought leaders, a company can ensure that customers connect its brand with the characteristics expressed through the thought leadership, rather than only with the technical characteristics of its product.

Attracts and retains talents

A complaint I hear from any business is that it is hard to attract and retain talent.

Employee thought leaders help potential hires connect with people in the organization, giving candidates a clearer sense of your company’s culture and environment, often before they speak with HR directly. This makes the company discoverable to candidates looking for intellectually stimulating environments. In addition, it signals that the company is a place where ideas are respected, not buried.

Also, when engineers, architects, product owners, and strategists contribute ideas externally, it encourages continuous learning within the organization and exposure to external feedback. This signals to the team that their knowledge matters not just internally, but to the market.

In the end, when an organization becomes known for thinking deeply, it draws those kinds of people in and keeps them.

Accelerates revenue

Multiple industry studies show that thought leadership has a tangible impact on financial outcomes. Decision-makers often internalize insights from thought leadership content before ever engaging with a vendor. This obviously does not apply in exactly the same way in all kinds of sales. It tends to happen way more when the discussed product has a complex sales cycle, due to its own complexity combined with the high level of commitment required to leverage it, which is the case with many software platform solutions.

The thought leader

Obviously, the thought leader himself has advantages as well. I think the three most important ones are:

Let’s see those aspects one by one.

Stretches you

Doing thought leadership is hard. Going on a stage, especially for the first time, is not something that is natural to everyone, to the point that I would argue that a very small minority of people find it natural. Writing blog posts requires a lot of time, which very few people who have not done it can anticipate or infer from reading. And, if you can imagine the time required to write blog posts, you can easily imagine that writing a book easily takes three orders of magnitude more time than a blog post. Also, it is not only about time, but the amount of learning you do in the process.

When mentees ask me for suggestions for activities that stretch them, I always think about possible thought leadership opportunities for them, because that tends to be one of the activities that stretches the most people.

Evolves your own thinking

Another key aspect of thought leadership is that it requires you to structure and simplify your thinking to effectively communicate it to your audience. In this effort, you’ll be able to develop much clearer, more precise ideas.

Personally, this is one of the aspects I like the most about thought leadership: writing about why a tool should (or shouldn’t) be chosen, why a pattern matters, or why ethical tech choices matter benefited me as much as it benefits the readers. I also got similar feedback from many others experiencing the same phenomenon.

Credentials

There are people primarily doing thought leadership to add it to their curriculum, but personally, I find the credentials aspect very limited and not top-of-mind.

First of all, I think the audience immediately understands the difference between content created just to increase one’s curriculum and content created to help its audience.

Secondly, I’ve found that empolyers weight less than many people think the thought leadership activities by themselves. This is not to say there is no value from this perspective in doing thought leadership activities, but that the majority of that value lies in how they are run, not in the sheer number of them.

Conclusions

Overall, I think thought leadership is a great thing, and I always encourage people to challenge themselves to share information, experiences, and insights through it. Though the benefits are very different from those usually thought by managers and people with little experience of it.

Life
Thought Leadership