How to Make Founder Thought Leadership Memorable (Expert Q&A)

“Thought leadership” gets thrown around like confetti these days. It’s starting to feel like just another buzzword.

But when it comes to founders, it’s not. Your founder’s voice shapes how your brand is seen, trusted, and even chosen. BRANDfog's Social CEO Survey revealed that 77% of consumers prefer to buy from companies where execs are active on social media.

So what they say in public really does affect your brand. Still, most founder thought leadership out there is forgettable.

From my experience, and convos with other PR and brand pros, it’s usually because:

The actual “thoughts” of the leader are missing
Founders are playing it safe
Or they’re content with just reposting company updates

To actually stand out, you need to find what Jennifer Maloney Adab calls a founder’s “thought leadership sweet spot.”

She’s a CEO PR and thought leadership consultant, and I’ve been following her work on LinkedIn through her newsletter Leading in Public.

As soon as I read her piece mentioning the thought leadership sweet spot, I knew I had to bring her in as our guest expert to help those building their founders' thought leadership.

So let’s get into it.

P.S. We’re capturing all our experts' insights via Leaps, the Expertise to Content platform. At Leaps, we believe in amplifying real human expertise and experience, and that’s what this content series is about. We’re sharing the experience and expertise of PR, brand, and marketing experts like Jennifer.

Uncovering your founders’ thought leadership sweet spot

Q: How do you help founders figure out their thought leadership sweet spot, as you call it — one that’s both authentic and strategically valuable for their brand?

If you have an example, can you walk us through a time when a founder struggled with this, and how they ultimately found clarity?

A: To help founders uncover their thought leadership sweet spot, I guide them through a process that connects the dots between three things:

their lived experience,
their career path, and
subject matter expertise,

and how those experiences shape their view of culture and industry. When these three layers overlap, they reveal a perspective that’s not only authentic but impossible to replicate. That’s where real thought leadership begins.

It’s tempting to default to startup updates or industry stats on LinkedIn. But the content that truly resonates, the kind that builds trust and community, starts with who you are, not just what you do.

I call this the founder’s sweet spot, and it's where the most compelling, shareable, and strategic content lives.

Let me give you an example. I once worked with a VP in the crypto space who initially believed his thought leadership should center around blockchain scalability and regulatory trends.

But when we dug into his personal story, we uncovered something more powerful: a lifelong pattern of rejecting convention.

That mindset had shaped everything from his early career choices to his current leadership style. We began framing his content around this theme of transcending the conventional, and suddenly, people weren’t just following his company.

They were following him. His posts started sparking dialogue across industries because they were deeply human and relevant.

Founders often assume their unique stories are too personal to be professional.

But when you frame those experiences through a strategic lens — how they inform your leadership, shape your opinions, or connect to bigger industry trends — you create a narrative that others can relate to, learn from, and rally behind. And that’s what makes your content memorable.

Balancing founder voice with market relevance

Q: How should PR and comms pros navigate the tension between what a founder wants to talk about and what the market or media actually finds relevant?

What strategies have you seen work to bridge that gap without compromising authenticity?

A: Leaders have different levels of comfort when it comes to being vulnerable, opening up about personal experiences, or weighing in on controversial or divisive issues.

These are the three areas where I see the most pushback, and I think it’s important to respect that. I don’t believe in pushing someone into having a point of view just because it will perform well.

That said, part of my role as a thought leadership consultant is to explain the why behind the questions I’m asking. There’s always strategic thinking involved.

Sometimes sharing something personal or speaking up on a divisive issue isn’t about clicks, but about building trust, showing leadership, or demonstrating values in action. But the call has to be theirs.

One of the tools I often use is a risk analysis.

We go through the pros and cons of speaking up, so founders or execs can weigh whether the potential benefits of having a voice outweigh the risks of staying silent. That context helps them make thoughtful, not reactive, decisions.

What I love most about this work is that it's an ongoing conversation. We’re not setting rules, we’re creating space. In that process, many leaders end up expanding their own comfort zones.

I’ve had clients who were initially hesitant open up in ways they never imagined, because they understood the impact it could have and felt ready to own it.

It’s not about pushing them. You have to partner with them, ask the right questions, offer perspective, and let them decide what feels true.

Leading with lived experience in a crowded space

Q: In your experience, how does this thought leadership sweet spot help in shaping a compelling and differentiated thought leadership position for founders/execs?

For example, in a crowded industry where many voices are already speaking on similar themes, how would you advise PR pros to identify areas where their founder can credibly lead?

A: People can get information anywhere — on a podcast, in a LinkedIn carousel, or from a Wikipedia summary.

What actually makes someone want to learn from you isn’t just the information you share. It’s who you are while sharing it. It’s your lived experience, your worldview, your voice.

That’s what builds trust, relatability, and resonance. And ultimately, that’s what sets thought leadership apart from content.

A lot of people specialize in thought leadership consulting, for example. But someone who follows me might relate to the fact that I was raised by a single mother, or that I’m an autism parent, or that I took a gap year and traveled to Thailand and Australia when I was 20.

They might appreciate that I studied journalism in college or worked as a community newspaper reporter before transitioning into PR, and how those experiences shape my beliefs and point of view on the industry.

When we show up with that level of personal clarity and depth, we stop competing for attention and start earning trust. That’s the difference between being informative and being unforgettable.

Helping founders focus without losing depth

Q: Many founders are naturally passionate about multiple topics, but from a comms strategy perspective, how do you help a founder decide which topics to deprioritize, even if they feel personally invested in them?

Can you walk us through how PR and comms teams can diplomatically steer a founder away from areas that may dilute their positioning or confuse their audience (or if they should), and what signals indicate it’s time to refine or narrow focus?

A: Founders are often multi-dimensional people with deep interests, and from a thought leadership perspective, that’s a strength.

The key is learning how to tie those interests together under a unifying concept, so their community understands what they stand for.

We sometimes refer to this as the “golden thread” — the common theme that connects a founder’s lived experiences with where they are today in their career. That’s what shapes memorable, differentiated positioning.

Rather than simply advising a founder to stop talking about something, I prefer to explore how it can be reframed or integrated into their sweet spot and content strategy.

The beauty of today’s platforms is that they offer both real-time feedback and long-term patterns. Over time, this data paints a clear picture of what’s resonating and where the community is finding value.

Most founders want to go deeper on what’s working. They want to lead with clarity. Once they see that refining focus doesn’t mean giving things up but becoming more intentional and impactful, it becomes an exciting evolution, not a restriction.

Keeping positioning fresh as founders evolve

Q: When a founder’s thought leadership and executive presence begins to gain traction, from your experience, how would you advise PR/executive branding pros to help them sustain the momentum without the messaging becoming repetitive or stale over time?

What ways or signals do you use to know when it’s time to evolve or expand a founder’s positioning, and how do you manage that shift without losing the core identity that audiences have connected with?

A: One of the great things about this work is that the founder or executive journey is always evolving. And when they lead in public, their community and stakeholders are along for the ride.

That evolution is what keeps thought leadership dynamic and allows for deeper, valuable insights to emerge over time. I build in regular content interviews at a minimum once a month with the executives I work with.

These conversations aren't just about marketing goals and industry insights, although that's always in the back of our minds.

Primarily, they're a chance to check in and reflect on what the founder has experienced professionally or personally in the last few weeks and how that's shaped their thinking on what is happening in the world at that moment in time.

Sometimes, a founder will revisit a past point of view and realize they've changed their thinking because something has happened to change it. That can be powerful because owning a shift in perspective shows growth.

Other times, something they've lived through might reinforce what they've always believed, and they want to double down on why that matters in a new, relevant way. Either way, the insights that happen in our daily lives keep narratives fresh and authentic.

You know, the world moves fast. There are new governments, there are social shifts, and economic swings. There's no reason thought leadership should feel static. It's not about pushing content for content's sake.

You have to ask the right questions and give founders the context and confidence to grow in their journey. As they get better at opening up and sharing real experiences, the content becomes richer and more valuable to their audience.

Help your founder stand out for the right reasons

What hit home for me from Jennifer’s advice is how you don’t need smart-sounding content or staged vulnerability.

You need to help your founder lean into what they actually know, believe, and have gone through — and then let that guide their voice. That’s where real connection and trust happens.

Huge thanks to Jennifer for sharing practical advice from her experience. If you’re guiding a founder’s public presence, take that as your green light: help them find their thought leadership sweet spot because that’s what will set them apart and make them worth listening to.

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