your ceo isn’t your only thought leader
Every company says they want to build thought leadership, but most of them mean they want their CEO to post more. The assumption is that credibility starts at the top, that if the right executive says the right things often enough, the market will start to care.
That is not how credibility works anymore.
Buyers trust operators more than spokespeople. They believe people who live the problems they are trying to solve. They want perspective that feels earned, not engineered. Yet most brands still funnel all their expertise and point of view through one polished voice at the top. It feels safe and controllable, but it wastes the potential of everyone else who has something valuable to say.
One spokesperson isn’t a strategy
Putting all your credibility behind one person feels efficient. It keeps messaging clean and easy to manage. But it also keeps your reach small. A CEO’s network is usually other executives, investors, and analysts. Those circles have value, but they are not where most buying decisions happen.
The people you actually need to reach are in operations, logistics, sales, and customer experience. They are not looking for another leadership quote. They are looking for someone who understands their world and can speak to it without pretense.
Most corporate thought leadership programs fail because they confuse polish with influence. They spend time editing tone instead of cultivating substance. One voice is easy to control, but credibility built that way cannot scale.
What we did at Bungii
We wanted to see what would happen if we stopped treating LinkedIn like a PR channel and started treating it like a skill. Not a campaign. Not a social challenge. Just a focused experiment to see what would change if people had permission to show up as themselves.
We called it the LinkedIn Lab. The idea was simple: give people a reason to post, give them a framework, and then get out of the way.
We built a short playbook. How to write like a person. How to find a hook in your day-to-day. How to share something useful without turning it into a speech. We gave it to a group across ops, sales, and marketing. No templates. No approval process. No “thoughts on leadership” fluff. Just one ask: talk about what you actually know.
The first week wasn’t quiet. I was loud on purpose. I commented on every post. I dropped links in Slack. I told people when something worked and why. That’s what it took to get it moving.
A few people went first. Others followed. Not all at once, but steadily enough that it stopped feeling like a one-off. Posts started sounding more confident. People who’d never touched LinkedIn before were suddenly getting thousands of views. That’s when the tone started to shift.
It wasn’t just marketing doing marketing. It was the team, talking like themselves, in public.
Lauren, one of our client executives, told me it changed how she saw LinkedIn. That’s when it clicked. This wasn’t a content exercise. It was a confidence exercise.
And the best part? When new people joined later, like Keith on the solutions team, no one had to tell them to participate. They saw what others were doing and started posting too. That’s how you know it worked. Not because we told people to do it, but because they decided to on their own.
Why it worked
We stopped trying to manufacture authenticity.
There was no brand voice guide and no approval queue. We simply trusted people to speak from experience. When someone in operations explained why on-time rate is a misleading performance metric, it reached more people than anything we could have posted from the company account. It was not marketing. It was truth.
Audiences respond to that. Algorithms follow engagement, but engagement follows credibility. A post written by someone who has actually solved the problem will always outperform a company talking about the theory of it.
Good LinkedIn thought leadership is not about optimizing copy for reach. It is about being credible enough that reach becomes inevitable. When multiple employees share insights grounded in their own experience, your brand starts showing up in the right places without paying for the exposure.
How to do this yourself
If you want this to work, don’t start with templates or scheduling tools. Start by making it normal for your team to share what they know. That’s it. Not personal branding. Not social engagement. Just people inside your company talking publicly about the work they’re already great at.
Here’s exactly how I ran it at Bungii:
Step 1: start it as experiment, not a program
I pitched it as a six-week test to see what would happen if more people posted consistently. Not a “brand initiative.” Not a “content strategy.” Just an experiment. That framing lowered the pressure and made it easier to say yes.
Step 2: invite everyone
We opened this up to the entire company. Ops, sales, marketing, client success, support. Some people were excited right away. Others sat back and watched for a week or two before jumping in. That was fine. The point wasn’t to force participation. It was to create momentum and let it spread.
Step 3: give them a real playbook
We didn’t do some overdesigned brand guide. I made a short, tactical doc that covered things like:
how to write like a person, not a press release
how to find content in your day-to-day work
how to keep it useful and simple
Step 4: remove friction
If people have to wait for approval, they’ll go stagnant. I told them they didn’t need permission. The only rules were: don’t share anything confidential, don’t name customers or co-workers without checking, and speak from authentic experience. That’s it.
Step 5: help the first posts succeed
In week one, I made sure to like, comment on, and reshare the first few posts internally and externally. Not in a fake “great post!” way — just enough support to show that people were watching. Once someone got 500 views and a few thoughtful replies, they wanted to do it again.
Step 6: make it part of the culture
Any time someone posted something smart, I dropped it in Slack. I brought it into team meetings. I referenced it in internal docs. That feedback loop mattered more than any metric. It told people their ideas didn’t just live on LinkedIn — they were shaping how we are viewed as a company.
Step 7: share the results
At the end of six weeks, I pulled together impressions, new followers, examples of inbound messages or leads, and feedback from the team. I shared it company-wide. The goal wasn’t to say “look how good this is.” It was to show people what was already working and why it mattered.
Step 8: don’t make it homework
We didn’t turn this into a mandatory weekly post. We didn’t track activity in a spreadsheet. We let it breathe. People kept posting on their own because they liked how it felt and saw that it worked. That’s what you want.
How to measure this right
Most people try to measure LinkedIn like it’s performance marketing. They expect dashboards, attribution, and a nice clean CPL. But LinkedIn thought leadership doesn’t behave like paid media. It behaves like trust. And trust doesn’t show up in UTM parameters.
At Bungii, I tracked impressions, reach, and engagement, but those were just the surface. What I really cared about was behavior. Were people posting without being asked? Were they getting messages from prospects or peers? Were posts showing up in sales conversations?
That’s how you know it’s working. Not when a post “performs,” but when the right people start repeating your language back to you.
You don’t measure this in clicks. You look for second-order signals. Warm intros. Better replies. Shorter ramp for new hires. The shift from “we need content” to “our team is already saying this better than we could.”
When your people start shaping how the market talks about your company, and they’re doing it with their own words, that’s not just a marketing win. That’s a culture shift. And it compounds fast if you let it.
