A head of product has a sharp view on where the market is going. She has drafted the post three times. Each time she stops before publishing, because she is not sure it is her place to speak when the chief executive never does. So the view stays in a drafts folder, and the company stays quiet on a subject it understands better than most of its competitors.

This is the part of executive visibility that gets missed. When a leader thinks about going public, they weigh it as a personal decision. It is not. The person at the top is setting a standard, whether they mean to or not, and everyone reads it.

Silence at the top is an instruction

People take their cues from the most senior person in the room, and the same is true in public. If the chief executive treats an external voice as risky, self-indulgent, or beneath the job, that judgement travels down every reporting line without a word being said. The message lands as: this is not what we do here.

The reverse also travels. When the person at the top writes plainly about the business, names hard problems, and shows their thinking, they are granting permission. They are telling a nervous head of product that this is welcome, this is safe, this is what good looks like. You cannot ask an organisation to find its voice while modelling silence at the top. We have written about how a bland institutional register got here in the death of corporate tone.

Nobody in your company will speak with more freedom than the person at the top is willing to model.

Trust concentrates on the chief executive first

There is a reason your voice carries further than anyone's. The Edelman Trust Barometer has repeatedly found that chief executives are now expected to take a public position on the issues that touch their business, and that leaders who stay silent are judged for the absence (Edelman Trust Barometer). Expectation sits on the top job whether or not the person in it wants it. The choice is not whether to be judged. It is whether to be judged for what you said or for what you would not.

That trust, once visible, does not stay with you. It gives cover to the next layer. A comms leader can point to the chief executive and say, this is how we speak here, and mean it.

Your example scales into distributed influence

One visible leader is a start. A company where many leaders speak in their own credible voices is a different kind of asset. Buyers trust it more, because the LinkedIn and Edelman B2B Thought Leadership Report keeps showing that decision-makers give real weight to individual expert thinking when they choose who to work with (LinkedIn-Edelman B2B Thought Leadership Report). That kind of reach only appears when the top of the house has already made it normal. The mechanics of building it out are covered in how forward-thinking companies are building distributed influence.

It also matters where that voice lives. Buyers, recruits and journalists increasingly land on the leader before the brand, which is why the personal profile now does work the company page cannot, a point we make in why a CEO's LinkedIn profile matters more than the company page.

  • Publish first yourself, before you ask anyone else to. The order is the message.
  • Name a real problem your business is wrestling with, not a polished win. It gives others permission to be candid too.
  • When someone below you speaks well in public, say so openly. You are setting the standard for what gets rewarded.

You do not have to become a broadcaster. You have to make it clear, by doing it, that a considered public voice is part of leading here. The ceiling is set by the person at the top. Everyone else builds up to it, and no further.

Ripple helps chief executives find a public voice that raises the standard for the whole organisation, not just their own profile. If you want to think through what your example is currently signalling, we are happy to talk it through.