In my previous posts The Wise Old Man Part 1 and The Wise Old Man Part 2 I wrote about a great session I attended during SQL Saturday #8 in Orlando by Steven Jones.  This session was all about building your brand and making yourself stand out among other IT professionals.  The session influenced me enough to continue writing a series of blogs about it.

If you read the last post I was working on using some techniques to better my speaking.  In this post I want to write about what I can do to be a leader and more specifically what I can do to be a thought leadership.  Steve talked about a couple different ways of being a leader but the idea of being a thought leader really stuck with me. 

A thought leader is someone who is recognized for having innovative ideas and can demonstrate the confidence to promote or share those ideas (This is Wikipedia’s definition so someone could have edited it to say something else by now) .  Steve used Andy Warren as a great example of a thought leader because of his idea to have a free event where the SQL community can come together and learn called SQL Saturday.

I think this step might be the toughest step to building your brand of all that I have listed.  Not only do you have to come up with great new ideas but be confident enough in your ideas to share them with others.

Here’s some of the steps I plan on taking to improve my leadership.  There’s got to be more than I have come up with.  Maybe someone else can help me with that.

1. Sit with others BI professionals to brainstorm great ideas to improve our profession.
2. Keep a notepad close by to write down ideas

I’ll continue writing about my progress and here are some of my other steps that I’ll write about in the future.