EP #035: How to turn an employee into a content extractor

Executive Summary

• Interview-Based Content Creation: Interviews are an efficient way to surface and capture executives' best ideas, making it easier to generate authentic and compelling LinkedIn content.
• Creating the Right Environment: Success in interviews largely depends on setting up a strong container—using video, ensuring the interviewee is stationary, speaking sparingly, and maintaining emotional distance to encourage deeper insights.
• Start with Open-Ended Questions: Beginning with broad, open-ended questions allows for the emergence of unanticipated, rich content, tapping into ideas that have been simmering in the interviewee's subconscious.
• Flexible and Adaptive Interviewing: Prepared questions serve as a springboard, but the real value often comes from following the conversation’s natural flow, allowing for deeper exploration of meaningful topics.
• Streamlined Content Production: Transcribing interviews and editing them into posts is far more efficient than writing from scratch, enabling faster and more consistent content creation.

Deep Dive

Most of our clients are great writers. However, they don’t have the time (or interest) to write their own LinkedIn posts.

That’s why we use an interview format: it is an efficient way to surface their best ideas.

My team and I have conducted over 900 executive interviews to date. Today, I wanted to share a few lessons learned from those interviews and how you can use an employee (or friend, or spouse) to be a lean, mean content-extracting machine.

Why I recommend interviews:

If you put someone in front of a blank piece of paper, they’ll likely find it excruciating to get their ideas down. But the moment they have an interested, curious person on the other end of a table/Zoom/phone, it becomes exponentially easier for them to get into the flow of their thoughts.

This is one reason that an interview-style podcast does so well. Most people, when asked a fairly open question, will be able to expound at length with little effort.

Humans are social creatures. I’ve tried to create content by recording voice memos, by sitting and writing in a notebook and on a computer. None of these methods work nearly as well as when there is someone else in the “room” with me, even if that person is not speaking that often.

So if you want to ask your employee, friend, or spouse to help you extract your best ideas, here are a few tips.

#1: Create a strong container

The stronger the container, the deeper you can go in an interview. For me, this means:

1. Video on: seeing the other person instantly creates a stronger connection. Interviews in person and by phone can still work, but I find that over Zoom video is by far the best.
2. Stationary: we occasionally get clients who are trying to squeeze in an interview while driving, walking through an airport, etc. It never works. You get a fraction of their attention. They drop ideas. They stay on the surface. The content always sucks.
3. Speak sparingly: it’s amazing what a little silence on the interviewer’s part will do. Earlier in my interviewing career, I would plug any silence with another question, a reflection, or my own experience. Over time, I’ve learned that providing a pause as short as 3-5 seconds can allow the client to continue an idea I thought was finished.
4. Maintain emotional distance: I’ve had 8 different executives break down in tears during an interview. Thankfully, it had nothing to do with what I said… instead, it was because what they were sharing about was so meaningful to them. In each case, I just focused on breathing. No need to caretake. No need to lighten the mood. No need to normalize. Just let them experience what they’re experiencing.

80% of success in an interview comes from creating the right environment for a speaker to go deep. If you start with a strong container, you’re much more likely to get great content.

#2: Start open ended

Longtime readers will know that I always start an interview with: Is there anything top of mind that you would like to share with your audience?

I always come prepared with questions (see #3). However, when you make space for the speaker, you’ll be surprised what emerges. Our clients are often coming from a day (week, month, or year) of non-stop meetings. Our interview is their first time they get to take a breath and reflect.

Starting open-ended invites the speaker to raise ideas that have been simmering in their subconscious but have not yet taken their full shape. I often find this to be bone marrow content - rich, incredibly nutritious, and full of depth.

#3: Have 5-10 questions (sent in advance)

If an employee is interviewing you, you can give them the list of questions you would like them to ask. If you would like them to come up with their own questions, it often helps to receive the questions a few days in advance. I would encourage you not to take notes, but to let the ideas sit in the back of your mind. These interviews tend to work best when your answer isn’t rehearsed, but is still somewhat considered.

#4: Questions are just a springboard

I rarely, if ever, make it through all 10 questions. Depending on the client (and their day/mood), we may just end up going deeper and deeper on one question. If your employee/friend/spouse understands your audience, they can just be curious and ask follow-on questions.

Most interviews spiral down from an observation that stems from an initial question. If the interviewer pulls the thread, they end up uncovering deeper topics that may never surface in the prepared questions.

So make sure your interviewer knows that the questions are just a starting point - it’s even better if they are curious and go deeper on what they believe your audience will find interesting.

#5: Transcribe the call

We use Otter.ai as a cost-efficient method to transcribe all of our interviews. Then, when we write the content, 80% of the post is already there. It’s just a matter of shaping, trimming, reorganizing, and adding critical connective tissue to the post.

If you’re using an employee to interview you, it’ll be on you to create the posts. But editing is infinitely easier than writing. You’ll find you’ll produce content 10X faster using this approach than if you tried writing your posts from scratch.

Bringing it all together

Creating content doesn’t need to be hard, but it does need to be consistent. I’ve done my best to outline an approach that will work for anyone.

Don’t want to do this? Reach out - this is what Executive Presence does. We develop your content strategy, interview you monthly, create your content, and measure what works so we can do more of it.