by Nycole Walsh
Let me paint you a picture.
It’s 8:47 a.m. You open LinkedIn. Within four scrolls, you’ve encountered: a CEO sharing a deeply personal story about failure that ends with a product plug, a founder announcing they’re “humbled and honored” for the fifth time this month, and a VP of Something posting “Empathy is a superpower” with 4,200 likes and zero original thought.
Somewhere, a ghostwriter is collecting a check. Somewhere, a comms team is celebrating engagement metrics. And somewhere, your potential buyers are skimming right past all of it.
This is what a lot of executive content has become: a performance of depth without any actual depth. Vague enough to offend no one, generic enough to mean nothing. Optimized for the dopamine hit of a like, not for actually moving anyone to think differently.
It’s corporate astrology. It sounds meaningful. It might even feel meaningful. But it doesn’t tell you anything real, and it definitely doesn’t make you a leader.
How We Got Here
The “executive thought leadership” industrial complex took off around the same time everyone realized personal brands mattered on LinkedIn. And for a while, it worked. Authentic stories cut through, real opinions drove conversation. Execs with something to say built real audiences.
…Then the template-ification happened.
Content mills figured out the formulas. The “3 things I wish I knew” post. The humble brag wrapped in a vulnerability moment. The “hot take” that’s actually a lukewarm restatement of received wisdom.
The result? A feed full of content that performs the aesthetic of thought leadership while delivering absolutely none of the substance. Everyone sounds the same because everyone is using the same playbook. And audiences (especially the sharp B2B buyers you’re actually trying to reach) are getting very, very good at clocking it.
The sad irony is that the executives who lean hardest into this stuff often have genuinely interesting ideas buried somewhere underneath the polish. They just never actually say them.
What Fake Thought Leadership Looks Like (A Field Guide)
You know it when you see it, but let’s name it:
The Empathy Sermon. “In today’s fast-paced world, we need more empathy.” Zero examples. Zero edge. Zero action. Who among us would dare to argue against empathy? No one. Which is exactly why it’s not a take, it’s wallpaper.
The Recycled Trend Report. Copying three bullets from a Gartner deck and adding “here’s what this means for leaders” doesn’t make you a thought leader. It makes you a summarizer. AI can do that now. So can an intern. What’s your actual interpretation?
The Vague Call to Courage. “This year, I’m challenging myself to be bolder.” Cool. Bold how? About what? With what stakes? Boldness without specificity is just a mood board.
The Engagement-Bait Question. “What’s the most important leadership quality in 2025? Drop it in the comments 👇” These are not conversations. They are comment-harvesting operations dressed as community.
Why It Actually Matters (and Not Just for Vanity Metrics)
Here’s where I’ll get a little uncomfortable, because I think a lot of exec content strategies are quietly setting companies back.
Buyers, investors, and prospective employees are all doing their research. And increasingly, they’re doing it through AI. When a procurement lead asks Claude or Perplexity to summarize what your CEO thinks about [your category], it’s going to pull from what your exec has publicly said and written. If their LinkedIn is full of nothing, the AI has nothing to work with. Your exec effectively doesn’t exist in that conversation.
Our own research backs this up: 30% of GTM leaders are actively investing in executive LinkedIn profiles as a channel specifically to influence AI search visibility, and that number is only growing. The executives who are building substantive, citable, point-of-view-driven content are training the algorithms that will surface them in the searches that matter most.
Fake thought leadership doesn’t just fail to help, it actively crowds out the opportunity to build something real.
The Checklist: What Actually Builds Influence Now
Okay. Here’s the part where I stop complaining and give you something useful.
☐ Do you have an actual point of view — one that someone could reasonably disagree with? If your take is 100% agreeable to 100% of people, it’s not a take. Real thought leadership is specific enough to create friction. Not manufactured controversy, but true perspective that reflects how you actually see the world and your industry.
☐ Are you citing something no one else has? Original data. A client pattern you’ve observed over 200 engagements. A counterintuitive result from an experiment your team ran. The thing that makes your content irreplaceable is information that only you have access to. Use it.
☐ Does your content reflect a consistent intellectual thread? The best executive voices on LinkedIn aren’t just posting, they’re building a body of thought. Someone scrolling back through six months of your content should be able to articulate what you believe, what you’re building toward, and what you stand against. If your content is just a grab bag of trending topics, you’re not really building a brand.
☐ Are you willing to be specific about failure? Not “I failed and it made me stronger” — that’s the empathy sermon again. But “Here’s the exact decision we made, here’s what we thought, here’s where we were wrong, and here’s what we changed.” That specificity is what makes a story credible and worth learning from.
☐ Are you writing it (with support) or outsourcing it entirely? There’s nothing wrong with working with a communications team or a strategic content partner — in fact, that’s often how you scale without sacrificing quality (ahem). But there’s a difference between a writer who interviews you, captures your voice, and sharpens your thinking versus content that has zero of your DNA in it. Audiences can feel it and so can AI.
☐ Does your content connect to what your organization actually does? The best exec content isn’t marketing dressed up as a personal post, but it does have a connective tissue back to why your company exists. When you write about what you believe, readers should understand why your organization is built the way it is.
☐ Are you showing up in places other than your own feed? Legitimate influence is third-party validated. Speaking. Quoted in media. Contributing to communities where your buyers actually hang out. LinkedIn is one channel, not a content strategy unto itself. The executives who are winning right now are the ones getting cited by others: in articles, in AI outputs, in conversations they weren’t part of.
A Final Word
I’m not saying executive content has to be edgy or controversial or performatively authentic. I’m saying it has to be real. Grounded in something you actually know, believe, or have experienced. That’s the bar. It’s lower than you think and higher than most people are clearing.
The executives who build real influence are the ones with the sharpest points of view, the most specific stories, and the intellectual courage to say something that could start an argument — not necessarily the most polished posts.
Your LinkedIn can be way more than astrology. But you have to actually be willing to say something.
