LinkedIn thought leadership is a stance people can disagree with.

The phrase has been worn smooth by agencies, so start with the test. A post is thought leadership when all three of these are true, and something else when any one of them fails.

• A reasonable peer could disagree. "Hire slowly" is advice everyone nods at. "Hire your first senior operator before your first salesperson, even when it delays revenue" is a stance. If nobody in your field would argue, you have restated the consensus.
• You hold it because of your work. The stance comes from a decision you made, a number you measured, a mistake you paid for. Borrowed stances read as borrowed within two posts, because you cannot answer the second question in the comments.
• You will defend it. The comments are where the stance is tested and where the reputation is made. A post you would not reply under is a post you did not mean.

Two kinds of post wear the label and fail the test. The first is the summary: five trends, seven lessons, what the report said. Useful, sometimes, and entirely without a position. The second is the borrowed take: a strong opinion about a field you have watched but never worked in. Both get engagement. Neither builds the thing the phrase names, which is a set of people who know what you think before they open the post.

A stance can be carried by three quite different kinds of post. Most founders have a native one and neglect the other two; a profile that uses all three reads as a person with a view. A profile that uses one reads as a column with a format.

The news take

Your point of view on fresh news in your niche. Something happened in your field this week and your work gives you standing on it: a competitor's pricing change, a regulation, a platform decision, a funding round in your category. The take is the stance applied to a fresh fact. It has a short shelf life and the highest chance of being read by people who do not follow you, because they are searching for the fact.

The discipline is to read the thing itself before writing about the headline. A take on a summary of a report is a take on someone else's take.

The debate

Every niche has a handful of standing arguments its practitioners have been having for years: agencies on retainers against projects, SaaS founders on product-led against sales-led, consultants on hourly against value pricing. A debate post names one, states both camps fairly in a line each, and plants a flag. It is evergreen, which means it can wait for a thin week, and it is the register where your own numbers are the whole argument.

The story

A lived story from your own work or life. A moment from a client call, a hiring decision, a quarter that went wrong, told with a decision in it and the people written as roles. The story carries a stance without announcing one; the reader draws it, which is why it travels furthest. Its weakness is that a story without a decision in it is an anecdote, and LinkedIn is full of those.

The durable kind of thought leadership is written from receipts. A stance that cites a number, a named source and the place where the sources disagree survives a hostile comment; a stance built on three summary lines does not. The method takes about forty minutes for a post that will be quoted for a year.

1. 01

   Pick one angle, phrased as a claim

   Write the stance as a sentence you might be wrong about. "Public pricing raises average deal size in services" is an angle; "pricing" is a subject.

2. 02

   Run three or four searches, one per kind of source

   One for recent reporting, one for data or a study, one for the criticism or the other camp. Short keyword queries. You are looking for the pieces people in your field would cite against you.

3. 03

   Read the sources in full, and keep receipts

   The article, the report's own numbers, the original post. For each, write one quotable fact with its source and link. Five receipts is plenty; a headline is never a receipt.

4. 04

   Find where the sources disagree

   The tension is usually the post. Two credible sources with different numbers, or a consensus the data does not quite support, is where your own work can settle something.

5. 05

   State the consensus, then your earned view

   One line for what everyone already says. Then your stance, and the specific work of yours that supports it. If the consensus is right, say so and add what it misses; agreeing with evidence is still a view.

6. 06

   Write it, then check every claim

   Draft in your own register, with the receipts carried faithfully. Then go through every number, name and superlative and confirm you can point to where it came from.

The last step is the one most founders skip. Every checkable claim in the draft, every number, every "first" and "only", should be one you can point to: your own proof points or a source you read. A stance with an unsupported number in it hands your critics the post.

For an invented founder who runs a B2B services firm and wants to be known as the operator who says the numbers other agency founders keep private. Every person in them is invented and every number is illustrative.

There is no shortcut and there is a sequence. Twelve weeks of this, at three posts a week, is where people start telling you that they knew what you would say about something before you said it. That sentence is the whole goal.

• Write your five stances down first. The claims about your field that your work supports and your peers would argue with. Every post for a quarter serves one of the five. If you cannot fill the list, you are not ready to lead the thought yet, and that is worth knowing.
• Rotate the registers. A news take when the week gives you one, a debate on the thin weeks, a story whenever your calendar produces a decision. One researched piece a fortnight keeps the stances honest.
• Answer every disagreeing comment within the day. Courteously and with the second number. The thread is read by more people than the post, and it is where the stance either holds or becomes a slogan.
• Write it the way you talk. The feed has a house style: one-line paragraphs, a reveal at the bottom, the same forty words of borrowed vocabulary. A stance written in that style reads as the feed's opinion, whatever it says. Your own sentence length and your own words are part of the argument.
• Measure by the second question. The metric is how often a comment or a message asks you the follow-up question a stance earns: "how did you handle the two who left?" Reactions tell you the post was seen; the second question tells you it was believed.

The mix and the cadence behind this sit in the LinkedIn content strategy guide; thought leadership is what its Awareness posts become once you take a side.

Every week Sonar reads your niche and writes a brief from the full articles, then puts one live development on Home as a News card. Once a month it names the standing debates in your field, the two camps in a line each and a stance grounded in your own edge, and deals one as a Debate card. Your week's moments feed the stories. The three registers on this page are the three cards.

Research first, in Compose, runs the method above on any angle you choose: three or four searches, the sources read in full, a dossier of quotable findings with their links, where the sources disagree, what everyone is already saying and the view your own positioning supports, then a draft written from it. Before you post, the fact check in the post drawer flags every number and claim it cannot trace to your own proof points or the attached reading. And the draft is held to your measured voice, with the feed's vocabulary banned outright. How a week becomes posts walks the whole path.