If CEOs Won’t Speak, How About These Guys?

I don’t speak for the members of the Executive Communication Council, to their great relief. 

But as this organization’s founder and executive director, I’m getting a little restless.

The action was heavy in exec comms in the years immediately after our founding in early 2020. CEOs and other corporate c-suite leaders talked their way through COVID, emoted their way through George Floyd and intoned gravely their way through January 6, 2021. But somewhere between the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the death of Roe v. Wade, most corporate CEOs found themselves all communicated out.

Okay, fine. These things go in cycles, and I’ve seen a couple of the cycles before. CEOs all wanted to be on magazine covers in the 1990s, but hid under their desks after Enron, Arthur Anderson and the dot-com bust. A similar hibernation happened around the Great Recession, about a decade later. 

Business is so cyclical because business is one elephant that always forgets. Sooner or later, CEOs and other corporate leaders will hear the siren call of celebrity on the one hand … and rediscover the utility of the bully pulpit on the other … and executive communication will regain its dynamism.

But I don’t feel like waiting. The other day I found myself feverishly scouring the ECC’s official Charter, written and informally ratified at our founding—and as happens with such documents, forgotten. Particularly understandable in the extreme sturm und drang of the last half decade.

Below several statements on “what success will look like” if the ECC is successful in leading this burgeoning communication discipline to fulfill its potential in organizations and the society they serve, I found this devilish little line!

“Leadership communication will expand internally, beyond the C-suite—including leaders from all levels of the organization—as part of a compelling human communication choir.”

Oh, yes! So what if CEOs would rather spend the next few years whispering their business agendas through lobbyists, saving their candor for employee town halls and otherwise chuckling their way through chummy fireside chats. The largest purpose of leadership communicators was never to lionize the CEO; it was always to help their institutions become, as the ECC Charter also says in its concluding words, “more humane, socially sensible and effective.”

Until the 1960s, it was, “General Motors believes.” Since the 1960s, it’s been, “At General Motors, we believe.” Who can make that shift more profound, by giving human voice to more people in the organization? Who better than people trained to help people communicate?

If the CEOs won’t talk, how about everybody else in the organization?

I do have a memory, and I can tell you that a decade ago, UPS exec comms chief Dean Foust led a years-long program called TED@UPS, where people up and down and all around that company gave TED Talks. A UPS pilot talked about her personal journey, from a man to a woman. The CEO’s speechwriter theorized that corporations were uniquely qualified to end racism. A UPS driver told about how his 20-year career had recently been enriched by his relationship with an autistic driver helper.

By telling these stories, these people told us a lot about what UPS was—or at least thought it was, around that time.

Similarly, a General Electric website called “GE Reports” loosed a first-class magazine journalist around that company to unearth many hundreds of great stories from every nook and cranny—including profiles of many innovating employees at all levels—over the course of a decade.

I also remember a Cleveland hospital that in the wake of George Floyd made moving video testimonies on race from doctors and nurses and staff and administrators, to help the institution talk to itself, and to the community it served.

I won’t be so unreasonable as to tell executive communication professionals that they ought to talk their bosses into turning executive communication teams into “leadership communication” guerrillas and redefine the leadership communications remit to include every brilliant engineer, charismatic salesperson and culture-making mailroom character in the organization.

But the truth is, all executives are leaders, and not all leaders are executives.

And leadership communication professionals ought to remember their largest and most enduring purpose, which is to humanize the organizations for which we work, so that stakeholders relate to them not as buildings and balance sheets, but as people. (And so that maybe, they relate to stakeholders the same way.)

And if the CEOs aren’t doing that much these days, we should all be asking ourselves: Who will?