TLA 2: identifying participants

The first email in this series talked about the importance of identifying success criteria for your thought leadership programme. The next step in developing your thought leadership programme is to decide how you are going to identify suitable candidates. 

If you have not completed all the steps set out in the first email, it may be worth revisiting it, because the criteria that you use to select candidates will depend on your objectives and success criteria.

You need to define clear qualification criteria for potential candidates, based on your target results. This ensures that everyone can see why particular people have been selected or passed over, and avoids ‘bad blood’. At a minimum, candidates need to have some expertise that could be developed into a stream of thought leadership, but you may want to be more explicit. 

We have found that a suitable nomination form includes:

• The candidate’s name;
• The background to the nomination: effectively, the reason why they are being nominated; 
• Whether the candidate is aware of the nomination;
• The topic that the candidate will cover in their thought leadership; and
• Confirmation that the line manager supports the nomination and agrees to the time commitment required (and if possible, make this commitment explicit). This avoids the risk of conflicts between the thought leadership role and the candidate’s ‘day job’; 
• Any other relevant information.

You want to be confident that your candidates will have the necessary expertise and time to commit to thought leadership.