Your leadership team is already telling a story about your organization. Is it the right one?
I’ve said it before, and I’ll keep saying it: people will Google you up before they meet you. That’s true for job candidates, consultants, salespeople and even your dates if you’re single. It’s equally true for the executives who run your company. This time, though, I want to widen the lens from one person to an entire leadership team.
Imagine a prospective business partner preparing for a meeting with your company. She has already been through your website and read the claims about innovation, industry leadership, and customer commitment. Now she wants to know who she’ll be sitting across from, so she looks them up on LinkedIn.
Your CEO has a polished profile that reads a little too much like a press release. Your SVP of Sales hasn’t touched his experience section in six years. Your CTO describes herself as a “results-oriented leader with a proven track record of driving innovation,” which could describe roughly half the people on LinkedIn. Your VP of Operations has no photo and a headline that simply says “Vice President.”
Together, these four people are responsible for hundreds of millions in revenue, thousands of employees, and some of the most important relationships the company has. Their profiles tell her almost nothing about any of that.
So what impression has your leadership team made before anyone walks into the room? And here’s the question you might not expect: should your Chief Human Resources Officer care?
I think the answer is yes. Just not for the reasons you’d assume.
Companies Manage Their Corporate Identities. They Leave Their Executive Identities to Chance.
Think about what organizations spend managing the corporate brand. Brand standards, messaging guidelines, approved boilerplate, campaigns, PR strategy. Somebody has strong opinions about the exact shade of blue in the logo. Somebody signs off on every word of the company’s About page.
Then look at the people who are supposed to deliver on all those promises. Their professional identities are wildly inconsistent, and most of the time nobody internally is paying attention to them at all. They are all left to chance.
When companies do pay attention, they often hand the job to PR or corporate communications, which creates a different problem. The bios get polished, approved, and scrubbed of anything specific or human, and within a year those profiles are stale. Not to mention, they are indistinguishable from every other companies’ executive profiles. Everyone is a visionary. Everyone is passionate about innovation. Everyone is driving transformational change. And somehow nobody sounds like a person you’d actually want to meet or call.
I’m not suggesting communications and PR should stay out of it. They have real expertise, and they belong in the conversation. But managing an executive’s public image is not the same as building that executive’s professional credibility. One is about control. The other is about evidence.
Your corporate brand makes a promise. Your executives provide the evidence.
And that evidence only works if it’s real.
Executive Credibility Is an Organizational Asset
Here’s an idea that keeps surfacing in my conversations with CHROs and senior HR leaders.
Organizations know how to value their intellectual property, customer relationships, proprietary processes, and institutional knowledge. They protect those assets with contracts and build strategies around them. They obviously value their leaders, too. But they rarely treat the professional credibility those leaders have built as something worth developing or protecting.
Consider a sales executive who has spent twenty years building relationships across an industry. A technology leader whose judgment is respected by peers, customers, and competitors. A business unit president whose track record gives employees and investors confidence. That credibility opens doors, shortens sales cycles, attracts talent, and lowers the perceived risk of doing business with you. It is worth real money.
But that credibility belongs to the individual. And the organization benefits from it every day.
Executive credibility is both a personal asset and an organizational asset.
That distinction matters. Companies don’t own their executives’ reputations, and they shouldn’t try to. But they have a legitimate interest in helping their leaders develop, communicate, and sustain the credibility the business depends on. Most organizations spend heavily to build leadership capability and almost nothing to make that capability visible to anyone outside the building.
LinkedIn Is More Than a Digital Resume
I’ve reviewed thousands of LinkedIn profiles, and the pattern that still surprises me is how many accomplished people cannot effectively communicate the value of their own experience. They’ve led remarkable teams, solved hard problems, launched products, entered new markets, and turned businesses around. Their profiles read like job descriptions. Or worse, sound and look like everyone else’s LinkedIn profile.
LinkedIn stopped being a job-search platform a long time ago. Now it’s where people go to evaluate credibility. Candidates research the leaders they might work for. Customers check out the executives responsible for delivering on what the sales team promised. Partners size up expertise. Journalists, conference organizers, and industry peers look for voices worth listening to. And more and more, search engines and AI tools are pulling from that same public record to form first impressions on everyone’s behalf.
None of this means every executive needs to become a content creator. Some of the most credible leaders I know rarely post. But when someone searches for them, their experience, expertise, and accomplishments should be easy to find and easy to understand.
Being visible and being credible are different things. Being credible and being recognized as credible are different things, too. I think of it as three distinct steps: Being Seen. Being Trusted. Being Known. Most leadership teams have gaps in at least one of them, and most organizations have no idea where those gaps are.
Why CHROs Should Care
I can think of three reasons, and every one of them sits inside responsibilities CHROs already own.
1. Talent attraction and retention
People don’t just evaluate companies. They evaluate the people running them. Your employer brand may promise innovation, opportunity, and growth, but candidates are going to try to validate it. When they look up your leadership team, do they find interesting, experienced people whose backgrounds back up those promises? Or a row of outdated profiles and recycled corporate language? Executive credibility reinforces the confidence someone needs to say yes, and in a competitive talent market, confidence is often the deciding factor.
2. Leadership development
Organizations invest serious money developing leaders: coaching, assessments, succession planning, development programs, executive education. All of it is designed to prepare people for bigger jobs. So here’s the uncomfortable question: If you’ve invested heavily in building an executive’s capabilities, why is it difficult for people outside the company to validate those them?
Picture an emerging leader who just led a major transformation, built a high-performing team, or delivered exceptional results. Internally, she’s a rising star. Externally, her profile still describes the job she had five years ago. You developed the leader. You didn’t help the leader show it.
3. Reputation and continuity
Leadership changes are inevitable. Executives retire, get promoted, change roles, or leave, and organizations plan carefully for those moments. But as I wrote in Your Leadership Team Has a Digital Succession Problem, being ready for the job and being recognized as ready are not the same thing. A title doesn’t transfer credibility. Customers, partners, and employees need time to believe in someone new, and if you wait until the announcement to start building that belief, you’ve waited too long.
So Should HR Own It?
Not necessarily. In fact, the assumption that someone else owns it is part of the problem.
Marketing understands positioning. Communications understands reputation and messaging. HR understands leadership development, talent, and succession planning. Sales understands how much trust drives a deal. And the executives themselves carry the most responsibility for their own professional identities. Every one of those groups brings something important. The question is who brings all of this together. As I wrote earlier this month in The Executive Visibility Problem Nobody Owns, this responsibility tends to fall into the gaps between functions, which is exactly why it rarely gets done.
I’m not arguing for another administrative burden on HR. I’m also not arguing that companies should script what their executives say on their personal LinkedIn accounts. That would backfire. Credibility cannot be manufactured by committee, and authenticity is the whole point.
What organizations can do is set reasonable expectations, offer real development support, and help leaders understand how their professional identities connect to the company’s reputation and financial goals. You already have standards for your website, your sales decks, your recruiting materials, and your press releases. So it’s fair to ask why the people who represent the company most visibly get so little attention.
An Exercise for Your Next Leadership Meeting
Here’s something I’d encourage any CHRO to try.
Pick the ten executives who matter most to how your organization is perceived. Your CEO and CFO, certainly. Your sales leaders, your business unit presidents, and probably a few of the emerging leaders you’re preparing for bigger roles.
Now pretend you know nothing about your company. You have no access to performance reviews, succession plans, or 360 assessments. All you have is what’s publicly available about those ten people.
What would you conclude? Would you see a capable, experienced leadership team? Would you understand the expertise that sets your company apart? Would their profiles back up the promises your brand makes? Would you feel more confident doing business with the company? Or would you find ten disconnected professional identities that tell you surprisingly little about the people running the business?
This isn’t about critiquing headshots, counting followers, or tracking how often anyone posts. It’s about understanding what your leadership team is communicating to the outside world, whether anyone intended it or not.
A Question Worth Asking
Your organization almost certainly has a strategy for developing its leaders, a strategy for communicating its brand, and a strategy for attracting and keeping talent. Does it have a strategy for making sure the people who represent the company are visible, credible, and recognizable?
Executive credibility doesn’t start when someone walks into a meeting, and it doesn’t end when the meeting does. It builds over years, shapes important relationships, and quietly adds to or subtracts from the reputation of the whole organization.
Companies manage their corporate identities with great care. Their executive identities deserve the same attention.
Perhaps the CHRO is the right person to start that conversation.
I’m currently talking with CHROs and senior HR leaders about executive visibility, professional credibility, and organizational reputation as part of the research for my next book. If your organization has tackled this, or hasn’t thought about it yet, I’d welcome your perspective.
Knox Keith is the creator of Digital Validation® and the author of Validated: Add Value. Build Trust. Be Seen. He is an Emmy Award-winning storyteller, executive advisor, and adjunct professor at SMU’s Cox School of Business, working with organizations including Dell, AT&T, Nike, Chevron, and BP.
And as always —
➡️ Get Validated: Add Value. Build Trust. Be Seen. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GQ57HLXM
➡️ Join the Digital Validation™ program — https://knoxkeith.com/courses/
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Frequently Asked Questions
Should CHROs be responsible for how executives appear on LinkedIn? Not exclusively. Executive visibility involves HR, marketing, communications, sales, and the executives themselves. CHROs are well positioned to start the conversation because executive credibility connects directly to talent attraction, leadership development, and succession, all areas HR already owns.
Why does an executive’s LinkedIn presence matter to the organization? Customers, candidates, partners, investors, and journalists research executives before they engage with a company. An executive’s public professional identity either reinforces or undermines confidence in the organization the executive represents.
What does it mean that executive credibility is an organizational asset? An executive’s credibility belongs to the individual, but the organization benefits from it. Credible leaders open doors, accelerate relationships, attract talent, and reduce perceived risk in business decisions. That makes executive credibility worth developing intentionally, not leaving to chance.
Should companies control what executives post on LinkedIn? No. Scripting personal accounts tends to produce generic, interchangeable profiles that undermine credibility. Organizations can set reasonable expectations and provide development support while leaving executives in charge of their own professional identities.
Do executives need to post regularly on LinkedIn to be credible? No. Many highly credible executives rarely post. What matters is that their experience, expertise, and accomplishments are easy to find and understand when someone looks them up.
How can a CHRO evaluate the leadership team’s digital presence? Identify the ten executives most important to how the organization is perceived. Review only their publicly available professional information and ask what an outsider would conclude about the company’s leadership, expertise, and credibility from that information alone.
What is the difference between being visible and being credible? Visibility means people can find you. Credibility means what they find gives them reason to trust you. An executive can be highly visible without being credible, or highly credible without being discoverable. Organizations benefit most when their leaders are both.
