Communications teams are built to manage consistency. They protect the brand. They coordinate approvals. They make sure nothing goes out that shouldn't. They translate complex ideas into clear language. All of that matters deeply. But visibility isn't a message you manage once and move on from. It's showing up, repeatedly, as yourself. It's building familiarity over time. It's letting people see how you think, not just what you've been told to say.
When I see organisations treat visibility as a communications deliverable, they're applying the wrong framework to the wrong challenge. And leaders feel that disconnect almost immediately.
When visibility lives inside the communications function, you start seeing the same patterns:
Everything becomes 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.
Nothing feels timely anymore. By the time something gets written, reviewed, adjusted, and approved, the moment has usually passed. And timeliness matters when you're trying to build presence – it's what makes people feel like you're part of the conversation, not commenting from the sidelines.
The voice gets smoothed out. Communications teams naturally remove edges, soften strong opinions, add safety language. The result is polished but forgettable. Leaders end up sounding like everyone else.
It only works when someone else makes it work. If you need communications to write, review, or schedule everything, visibility becomes their job, not yours. And when it's not your job, it doesn't survive long.
None of this happens because people are failing. It happens because the structure was wrong from the beginning.
The reasoning makes sense on the surface. Communications already owns external voice. If something needs to go public, they coordinate it. If there's a LinkedIn post, they review it. If there's a message to manage, they manage it. So when leadership decides "we need more executive visibility," the natural instinct is to give it to the team that handles public communication.
But communications teams were built for a different time – when corporate voice was centralized, carefully controlled, and episodic. What works now is different: distributed voice, sustained presence, authentic engagement. That's not a communications brief. That's a leadership capability.
I've seen this clearly when working with leadership teams at companies like Philip Morris or in regulated environments where every word matters. Visibility fails when treated as a communications task because no one in that function can truly own someone else's voice.
They can support it. They can build systems around it. They can create frameworks that make it easier. But they can't decide what a leader should care about. They can't make authenticity happen through process. They can't own another person's perspective.
The only person who can own executive visibility is the executive themselves. And the organisation's job isn't to create their content. It's to create the conditions where showing up feels natural, sustainable, and aligned with how they already think.
In the organisations where this works, communications doesn't step back. They evolve into something more strategic. Instead of writing posts, they build frameworks that help leaders clarify their thinking. Instead of managing content calendars, they design systems that make visibility sustainable. Instead of owning voice, they enable it.
Leaders don't become content machines. They become clearer about what they want to say – and then they say it.
The change is small but powerful:
The question isn't whether communications should be involved in executive visibility. Of course they should. The question is whether they should own it. Because the moment it becomes a communications deliverable, it stops working the way visibility actually works – through sustained presence that feels human, not managed. The organisations that get this right don't hand visibility to communications and walk away.
They build it as a leadership capability, with communications playing a crucial enabling role. That distinction changes everything.
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