What Kind of a Question Is That?

This week The New York Times published a piece headlined, “CEOs Are the Heads of Companies. Should They Also Be the Face?”

What’s your gut reaction to that question?

As the head of the Executive Communication Council and as a student of CEO communication for three decades, I’ve answered this essay question many times, in many ways, during many seasons.

All those blue books boil down to one heavy-duty: It depends.

On the industry, on the company, on the executive. On the economic and sociopolitical climate, on the strategic situation and—again, on the executive.

To have The New York Times brightly pose the query as a yes or no felt to my wizened brain like those questions your little kids ask that are both profound and de-energizing. My two-year-old daughter once asked me, “What is that?” And when I answered, “a peanut,” she followed up with, “Why is it a peanut?” That’s a great question, honey, but Dad’s too tired to answer it right now.

Happily, the ECC’s charter, written and informally ratified during our founding in 2020, addresses this question with three operative items under, “What Success Will Look Like.”

In order of their direct relevance, let’s take these one by one, in answer to The New York Times.

“Executive communication will be the intellectual mainspring of corporate communication, with communication executives partnering directly with the CEO and senior leadership.”

Corporations do not set strategy, make policies or hire and fire people. Executives do. So it logically follows that corporate communication would at least intellectually be led by executive communication, and not the other way around. Or so it seemed to participants at the ECC’s Founder’s Meeting six years ago—a heady event at which “the world of executive communication,” one Founding Member said as we gathered our notes to adjourn, “shook a little bit this week.”

“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.”

The dangers of overreliance on the top executive have been evident at least since several execs had their Icarus moments in and around the dot com bust of 2000—old timers will remember Ken Lay at Enron, Dennis Kozlowski at Tyco, and “Chainsaw Al” Dunlap, at Sunbeam—that dragged their companies down too. Not to mention G.E., whose successor CEOs never quite escaped the shadow of its iconic CEO “Neutron Jack” Welch. Thus, the ECC has long advocated for the exec comms pros supporting multiple members of the c-suite. And beyond the c-suite, the ECC has occasionally discussed expanding the role of “executive communication” to something far more expansively and inclusively conceived of, as “leadership communication.” Such a program could give voice to literally anybody in the organization. For inspiration, see TED@UPS.

“Ultimately, the leaders of corporations, nonprofits, universities and other institutions will be more expressive and candid, and the institutions they run will be more humane, socially sensible and effective.”

And that is our ultimate view on this. Caveats aside, cautionary tales told, rule-proving exceptions accounted for, people who work in executive communication (and we who convene them) must believe that more articulate and forthcoming (and curious and receptive) leaders will generally run institutions that better serve the society they operate in.

For us, the question is far bigger than whether or not CEOs should be the face of companies. It’s whether companies should have human faces at all. And human voices. And human intellects. And how and when and in what circumstances and for what purposes should those faces and voices and intellects be exposed and expressed.

It’s a huge and complicated problem without a fixed answer. It’s worthy of the career-long devotion of really thoughtful, deeply responsible and highly imaginative people—the kind of people who belong to the Executive Communication Council.

And why is it a peanut, anyway?

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Editor’s Note: The Executive Communication Council is for institutional members and it’s invite-only. But to inquire about membership, contact ECC Executive Director David Murray at [email protected]. Also, consider joining your colleagues in discussing the state of play in exec comms, at the 2026 Executive Communication Summit, a virtual event June 23-25. That’s open to all executive communication professionals.