On Leading with Voice: Thoughts from a Content Strategist
There’s a difference between managing content and leading a content organization with voice. One is about calendars, workflows, and KPIs. The other is about something deeper. The need to recognize that every piece of content carries intention, tone, and trust.
These days, I’m freelancing less as I work full time as the Head of Content for a B2B media company. (Sidebar: This allows me to work on creative works in my “off hours” … like the novel I’m seeking representation for, the memoir I’m drafting, and whatever flash fiction or short stories want to eek their way out of me).
Not only am I “editor-in-chief” over our written publications, I am responsible for content curation spanning a global conference series and a podcast. I also host said podcast and curate the news for a weekly livestream (that incidentally, I also co-host).
Before I took this role, I met with a Content Strategist that I knew and asked her, “What even is it that you do?” She was candid with me on this intricacies … it’s not as easy as some content writers might believe, which had me terrified to say yes to the position.
But I did. And now, with three years in this role under my belt, I’ve come to not only fully understand the work I do (no joke, that took a while) but I formulated a new belief: voice isn’t just a creative writer’s skill, it’s a leadership skill.
Voice is how one goes about thinking up and shaping stories that are written or submitted for publication. For me, it includes guiding contributors in what to write or present on stage. It’s about a continual checks and balance process to make sure we are true to our brands and our mission and vision. And all of those things take a whole lot of trust.
Voice Isn’t Just Tone — it’s Trust
Voice gets confused with tone all the time. But tone is momentary. It flexes depending on mood, medium, or message. Voice is something deeper; it’s the thread of truth that runs through everything you publish.
In my world, where thought leadership collides with marketing goals, voice is what tells the audience: We’re not just showing up to fill space. We’re showing up with something to say.
It’s how trust is built, not just in what you say, but in how consistently you say it. And in a noisy landscape, trust is the real differentiator.
The Role of Steward, Not Star
Sometimes people assume a Head of Content is the lead voice. But in reality, I see myself as the steward of many voices. It’s my job to help contributors, speakers, and guests find their most impactful, most aligned expression of what they really want to say. That doesn’t mean ghostwriting or over-editing. It means asking the right questions, noticing where a message gets cloudy, and shaping a container where clarity — and personality — can come through.
The best compliment is when a contributor tells me their piece sounds more like them after editing. That’s when I know I’m doing my job. Or when a speaker says they had fun on stage. Those are my cues that I made them look good, and that’s always been a professional goal of mine in the workplace: make others look their best.
The Multiplatform Challenge (and Opportunity)
Voice doesn’t behave the same way across formats. The way someone tells a story on a panel is different from how they might tell it in an article or on a podcast mic. And yet, my job is to create cohesion across all those expressions, without forcing a false uniformity. That’s the challenge and the opportunity. A well-run content ecosystem lets each format breathe while still sounding unmistakably like us.
I think about this every day as I switch hats; from editing a feature, to interviewing a podcast guest, to shaping the headlines for our livestream. The medium shifts, but the intention has to stay centered.
The Leadership Work No One Sees
Here’s what doesn’t show up on a LinkedIn bullet point: the moment you gently nudge a guest to reframe their story so it resonates, the back-and-forth with a speaker who’s still finding their voice, the gut-check when a popular piece doesn’t quite align with your values. Leading with voice means holding the line, even when it’s inconvenient.
It means protecting the editorial identity and the contributor experience, while juggling the pressure to publish, to promote, to perform. This isn’t just creative work. It’s emotional labor.
And it’s leadership.
What Leading with Voice Has Taught Me
If I’ve learned anything in this role, it’s that voice is built slowly, but lost quickly. That clarity is everything. And that content with a pulse (content that breathes, connects, moves people) can’t be rushed. Leading with voice has taught me to trust intuition, to ask better questions, and to stop chasing topics that don’t feel like us. It’s also taught me that the most meaningful content isn’t always the one with the biggest metrics. Sometimes, the real win is when someone says, I felt that. I saw myself in that. I needed that.
That’s when you know you’ve led with voice.