Should CEOs Be the Face of Their Brand?

Unpopular opinion: You cannot successfully be a CEO, the talent and everyone's friend.

With the advent of social media and personal branding, a lot of CEOs feel like: “Oh, it's super natural for me to be the face of the brand.”

Now, to be successful, you have to know your role and your goal.

• If your role is everybody's friend, then you want to be well liked and you're gonna make choices that are safe and most likely to be accepted by the largest number of people.

• If you want to be the talent, your goal is to be famous, and you're going to make the flashy choices.

• If your role is a CEO, it is literally your job to make the hard choices to grow the business.

I want you to think about how often all three of those circles are going to overlap in the center of the Venn diagram.

So generally, when someone tries to live into all these roles, what ends up happening is that a different role leads at a different point in time, and that's when you just end up making everyone feel yanked around by someone who's super inconsistent. Why--yesterday were you so warm and cool and everybody's friend and then tomorrow, you want to have a serious discussion about work and goals and outcome? And then the next day you make a decision that's really cool just to elevate your profile?

The only founders who we see really successfully run their company and their content—have support. They have teams. So if they're the face of their marketing, then they might have a content team who's already strategized and is delivering to them everything that they need to say. The team is fixing it after the fact: They're taking all of the content that the founders face forward on and optimizing it.

Or it could be that you're a founder who has a CEO who's really charged with the business of the company, and it's literally your job to be the talent.

Here's the last thing I'll say on this; which is, perhaps most, important. A founder and CEO, who wants to be famous above all else is a threat to the company. Fame can be an outcome of your work at your company, as a leader. Let's say you do an amazing job and run a super successful company. And suddenly you're writing about it. You're keynoting about it. People follow you people are inspired by you. You're sharing your story. It feels really organic. If fame is an outcome, but you're putting your role of your company and developing your company's brand success first, and then fame is an outcome, that’s separate.

But when your goal is to be famous, that's when you're like: “Oh, let me just handle this. Let me just get on social media. Let me just be the face of this.” If it becomes more important to you that people associate your brand with you than it does that your brand succeeds, that is a threat from top to bottom.