Why executive visibility fails when it's treated as a communications task

I've watched the same thing happen in very different organisations, across industries and leadership teams. Someone at the top decides executive visibility matters. The conversation starts with good intentions and a bit of energy. Then, almost without anyone deciding it, the whole thing gets handed to communications.

That's usually the moment it starts to quietly fall apart. Not because communications teams can't handle it, but because the problem was never theirs to solve in the first place.

Communications manages messages. Visibility is something else.

Communications teams are built for consistency. They protect the brand, coordinate approvals, translate complex ideas into clear language and make sure nothing goes out that shouldn't. All of that matters, and I've never met a leadership team that didn't need it.

But visibility isn't a message you manage once and move on from. It's showing up, repeatedly, as yourself. It's letting people see how you think, not just what you've been told to say, and building familiarity over months rather than in a single announcement. Treat that as a communications deliverable and you're applying the right framework to the wrong challenge. Leaders feel that disconnect almost immediately.

The warning signs show up fast

When visibility lives inside the communications function, the same patterns appear. The first is that everything turns into content production. The question stops being "what do I actually think about this?" and becomes "what should we post this week?" The work shifts from thinking to filling a calendar.

The second is timing. By the time something has been written, reviewed, adjusted and approved, the moment has usually passed. Timeliness is what makes people feel you're part of the conversation rather than commenting from the sidelines.

Then the voice gets smoothed out. Good communications people naturally remove edges, soften strong opinions and add a little safety language. The result is polished and forgettable, and the leader ends up sounding like everyone else. And finally, it only works as long as someone else makes it work. If communications has to write, review and schedule every post, visibility becomes their job, not yours. Jobs that belong to someone else rarely survive a busy quarter.

None of this happens because people are failing. It happens because the structure was wrong from the start.

Why it lands there anyway

I understand the reasoning. Communications already owns the external voice. If something goes public, they coordinate it. If there's a LinkedIn post, they review it. So when leadership says "we need more executive visibility", handing it to the team that handles public communication feels like the obvious move.

The catch is that most communications functions were designed for a time when corporate voice was centralised, carefully controlled and episodic. What works now is distributed, sustained and personal. The platforms are moving the same way. LinkedIn says it is tuning its feed towards authentic professional content, so that people are interacting with "a real person and a real point of view". A carefully managed corporate voice is hard to square with that. It isn't a communications brief. It's a leadership capability.

Nobody can own someone else's voice

I've seen this most clearly working with leadership teams at companies like Philip Morris, and in other regulated environments where every word matters. Visibility fails as a communications task because no one in that function can truly own another person's voice.

They can support it, build systems around it and create frameworks that make it easier. What they can't do is decide what a leader should care about, or produce authenticity through process. The only person who can own executive visibility is the executive. The organisation's job isn't to create their content. It's to create the conditions where showing up feels natural, sustainable and close to how they already think.

That's also why the stakes are higher than they look. The 2024 Edelman–LinkedIn B2B Thought Leadership Impact Report found that 73% of decision-makers see an organisation's thought leadership as a more trustworthy basis for judging its capabilities than its marketing materials. People can tell the difference between a point of view and a press release. And because the feed starts with "people you know, talking about things you care about", a real person is also simply more likely to be seen.

What shifts when ownership is right

In the organisations where this works, communications doesn't step back. It evolves into something more strategic. Instead of writing posts, the team builds frameworks that help leaders sharpen their thinking. Instead of running content calendars, it designs systems that make visibility sustainable. Instead of owning the voice, it enables it.

Leaders, for their part, don't become content machines. They get clearer about what they want to say, and then they say it. The change is small on paper and big in practice:

• Visibility stops being something done for you and becomes something built with you.
• Communications stops being a bottleneck and becomes a strategic partner.
• Presence stops feeling like performance and starts feeling like leadership.

If you work in a regulated sector, the mechanics of this matter even more. I wrote about them in how regulated companies can activate personal brands without losing control.

What I keep coming back to

The question isn't whether communications should be involved in executive visibility. Of course it should. The question is whether it should own it. The moment visibility becomes a communications deliverable, it stops working the way visibility actually works: through sustained presence that feels human rather than managed.

The organisations that get this right don't hand it over and walk away. They build it as a leadership capability, with communications playing a crucial enabling role. I've written more about that structural side in why personal branding only works as infrastructure.

If your leadership team is somewhere in this story, I'm happy to think it through with you. You can read more about how I work, look at selected work, or book a 1-1.

— Joost