In this article, Oluchi Ogbonnaya, Snr. Communications Associate at Paga Group Ltd, shares some tips on effective executive communications, and building thought leadership more strategically.
Not every executive needs a personal brand.
Some companies do executive communications backwards. They start their plan with the wrong question: “How do we get our CEO more visible?” The right first question is: “What do we want this executive to be known for?”
There’s a familiar formula: something happens in the business, an executive is identified, a quote is drafted, a headshot is attached, and the story goes out.
It works. But we’ve become too comfortable with the idea that executive communications is simply about putting executives in front of audiences.
The task isn’t simply to identify an executive to put forward. It’s to ask which executive should be speaking, what they should be speaking about and, most importantly, why anyone should care.
The messenger is part of the message. Who is speaking can shape whether an audience sees that message as credible and relevant, or simply more corporate noise. Getting there requires understanding why that person is the right voice, what they have the credibility to speak about, and when their voice will matter most.
Choosing the Right Spokesperson
It’s tempting, and often easier, to default to the most senior person in the room. But seniority doesn’t always equal relevance. The best spokesperson is the person with the strongest combination of expertise, credibility and proximity to the issue: the CEO for overall direction, a product leader for customer behaviour, a technology leader for infrastructure, a finance leader for the numbers. And there will be overlap from time to time. The communicator’s job is to identify the voice that makes sense for the story.
Consistency Builds Recognition
Constantly rotating who represents the business, without reason, weakens executive communications. If I keep hearing an executive speak thoughtfully about one area, I start associating them with it, and eventually trust their perspective on it. A single interview generates attention for a day. A consistent body of commentary builds a reputation.
This is why matching executives to topics deliberately matters more than defaulting to who’s available or who’s most senior. What can this person speak about with authority? What do we want people to think of when they hear this person’s name? Without that logic, executives end up commenting on whatever’s trending, rather than building a recognisable point of view.
Expertise Over Commentary
The biggest opportunity for comms teams is often sitting right in front of them: the expertise already inside the organisation. What separates mere corporate messaging from thought leadership is shifting the focus from simply ‘what we want to say about our company’ to ‘what we know that would be useful to the people we want to reach’.
An executive who only talks about how great their company is may be visible, but they aren’t building a reputation as a thought leader. An executive who can challenge an assumption or share a real lesson is contributing something beyond the company itself. Something the company, in turn, benefits from.
That’s also why executives shouldn’t comment on everything. Silence can often feel like a missed opportunity, but constant commentary dilutes credibility, the proverbial “see finish”. Good executive visibility is selective. The goal isn’t to maximise how often an executive appears; it’s to make the appearances that matter more meaningful.
Build the Voice, Don’t Manufacture It
The obvious next steps can easily be to create a content calendar, research trending topics, draft a visibility plan, and start filling the gaps. But I’d argue for starting somewhere simpler: understanding the person.
What do they genuinely know? What can they explain better than most people? What do they want to be known for?
Those questions are a much stronger foundation than asking, “What should our CEO post this week?”
The communicator’s job is to find the intersection between what the executive knows, what the business needs to say, and what the audience needs to hear.
The executive is not the story. Their expertise is.
Get that right, and executive visibility becomes less about manufacturing a presence and more about building a credible voice that works for both the executive and the company.
