657 - The Authenticity Gap: Why Executives Who Copy Influencers Undermine Their Own Companies
In this episode, Jens Heitland breaks down why copying influencer content on LinkedIn backfires for executives and why it happens most often to senior leaders trying to build a personal following.
He explains why authenticity for a CEO is a business requirement, not a soft skill, how to build a personal brand that actually supports the business, and a simple test to run before publishing anything under your name.
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The Authenticity Gap: Why Executives Who Copy Influencers Undermine Their Own Companies
A pattern has become common on LinkedIn, and it deserves closer attention than it usually gets. An executive notices that a well-known influencer's content performs well: a certain tone, a certain structure, a familiar set of talking points. The executive adopts the format. Over time, an audience with no visibility into the original source starts crediting this executive as the originator of the ideas. Engagement rises. Visibility grows. On paper, it looks like the executive has become a thought leader.
Problems start when the content has no connection to the business the executive represents and no connection to who that executive actually is outside the platform. This happens routinely to senior leaders who treat social media as a genre to imitate rather than a channel to use with intent.
The cost of imitation
When a leader borrows a persona wholesale, two things tend to go missing at once: relevance to the business and personal credibility. Content that isn't authentic gets tested eventually, whether by a client asking a follow-up question in person, by an employee noticing the gap between the online voice and the person they work with, or by the leader simply running out of material because none of it was ever truly theirs. Often, the content performs perfectly well. That's the real risk: it builds an audience around a version of the executive that doesn't exist, one disconnected from the business outcomes the leader is actually meant to drive.
Authenticity is a business requirement, not a soft skill
For most professionals, an inconsistent online persona is a minor issue. For someone in a senior leadership role, it is different because the executive's visibility is inseparable from the company's. When a CEO or senior leader posts publicly, the audience does not cleanly separate the person from the business. The two are read as one signal. That means every post either reinforces where the business is going or quietly works against it.
Here is the distinction worth making explicit. Authenticity for a senior leader has little to do with being likable or relatable online. It is closer to a functional requirement: content that does not reflect who the leader actually is, and does not connect to the direction of the business, produces attention without producing value. Worse, it can actively work against the business, training the market to associate the executive with topics, tone, or positioning the company does not stand for.
A working test for executive content
Two questions filter out most of the problem before a post is ever published. First, does this sound like something I would actually say, in the same words, in a room with people who know me? Second, does this connect to where the business needs to go. If either answer is no, the content should stay unpublished, regardless of how well similar content has performed for someone else.
Most social media advice pushes leaders to study what works for others and reproduce it. This test works the opposite way: start from who you are and what the business needs, then build the content strategy inward from that. The output may be less polished in the short term, but it holds up because it was never borrowed in the first place.
Leader first, influencer never
The clearest way to frame this for a senior executive is to separate two goals that often get blended together: building a personal following and building the business. When they conflict, the business wins. An executive is not on the payroll to run an independent influencer career under the company's letterhead; the social media presence of a senior leader is a business asset, and like any asset, its value comes from whether it moves the business forward, not from how closely it resembles someone else's success.
The leaders who get this right rarely have the most polished content calendar. What they have is an online voice indistinguishable from their in-room voice, and topics that track directly back to the direction of the company they lead. That alignment, more than imitation, is what turns an executive's presence on social media into an asset rather than a liability.
Highlights:
00:00 Copying Influencers Trap
00:08 LinkedIn Copycat Example
00:46 When Content Hurts Business
01:07 Build Authentic Presence
01:30 Executive Goals Not Fame
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Transcript :
Let's get back to the social media point. I think one of the challenges that a lot of people have is that they try to replicate what other people do. I give you an example. I have a colleague that I work with, like long time ago, and we're not really close, but we follow each other. So this person is trying to copy stuff that, let's say, famous influencers, as an example, are doing. And if you look, and this happens on LinkedIn, so very important distinction. So this person is copying the things, and then what is happening that this person thinks that this person is seen as the author and like originator of these topics. And that's not bad. That's all okay. But the tricky thing is when it comes to the business where this person in, it's completely counterintuitive for that business. I think it would be all good if it links to the business, what the business does, and it's supporting to where the business is going. But it has nothing to do with the business, and because I know the person, it has also nothing to do with the person. So the critical thing that I believe people need to look into when they work with social media topics is build an authentic version of yourself that is you, that is not different from the physical world, that's not different from who you are, and r- and build that authentically into the social media strategy, and then link it to the business. Because if you're representing a company, and that's on top level specifically, then you need to link these two together so that the business is getting the outcome where it needs to get to. It's not about building an influencer career as an executive of a company.