Why executive LinkedIn writing fails

It's rarely effort. The people whose feeds are flat are usually trying harder than the people whose feeds work.

Five reasons, in roughly the order they do damage.

1. Nobody argued with the first draft

This is the big one and almost nobody names it.

Whoever writes for a senior person is usually junior to them. Sometimes far junior. That person cannot say "this is the boring version of your argument" to someone three levels up, so they write down what they were told, tidy it, and send it.

What publishes is accurate, competent and completely inert. Everyone can feel it's flat. Nobody can say why, because the actual cause is a reporting line.

The fix is structural, not editorial. The person editing has to be senior enough, or independent enough, to tell you the piece isn't good.

2. It's written from a brief instead of a conversation

Briefing forms produce briefing-form writing.

You fill in three bullet points about a topic. The writer expands them. What comes back is a competent expansion of three bullet points, which is exactly what it reads as.

Everything interesting you know is in the digressions — the aside, the caveat, the "well, except when" that you'd never think to write on a form. That material only surfaces when someone's asking you questions and you're talking without preparing.

3. It's about outcomes rather than decisions

"We grew 40% this year" is a fact about you. There is nothing a reader can do with it except feel mildly worse about their own year.

"We turned down our largest ever deal, and it cost us two quarters" is a decision. A reader can argue with it, learn from it, or apply it on Monday.

Senior people default to outcomes because outcomes are safe and already approved. Decisions are where the value is, and decisions require you to have been wrong sometimes.

4. The register is wrong

There's a voice people slip into the second they're writing rather than speaking. Longer sentences, passive constructions, hedges stacked on hedges until the claim has quietly disappeared.

In a meeting you're direct and occasionally blunt. In writing you sound like a company statement about a data breach.

The gap between the two is usually the entire problem. Which is why we don't let clients write — you talk, and what gets published is the meeting version.

5. It stopped

Most executive feeds don't fail. They pause.

Six weeks of good posts, then a quarter-end, then a fortnight of meaning to get back to it, then a post in March referencing something from January. The compounding never starts, so nothing accumulates, so it looks like it didn't work.

It didn't not work. It didn't run long enough to find out.

Consistency beats quality here more than anyone likes to admit — not because bad writing is fine, but because the whole mechanism is repeated exposure over months. One brilliant post a quarter is worth less than a decent one every week.

The one that isn't a reason

Posting frequency, hooks, formats, hashtags, whether to use line breaks, what time to post.

All of it is downstream of having something to say. None of it fixes a feed where the underlying argument is absent, and all of it is where nervous people put their attention because it's the part that feels controllable.

If your writing isn't working, the problem is almost never the first line. It's that the piece doesn't contain a position anyone could disagree with.

What to do about it

Find someone who'll argue with you. Talk instead of writing. Publish the decisions rather than the results. And keep going for longer than feels reasonable — inbound conversations usually start between month three and month six.

That's the whole method, and you don't need us to do it.

If you'd rather not do it yourself, that's what we're for.