Positioning the C-Suite and Beyond: The CEO Horizon Framework

Leading a company is a team sport. If you look at the starting lineup of an American football team, you’ll see distinct profiles of speed, size, and agility that make each player ideal for the role they play on the field. (A center and wide receiver would never be mistaken for one another. And while I’m on the topic of football, good luck to fans still in the playoffs!)

While companies fortunately don’t require a strength or speed test to make it to senior leadership, like a football team they rely on each senior leader to play a distinct and complementary role to the others. Finance, Operations, Human Resources, Product Development, Sales and Marketing, and other functional leaders all have their own unique expertise and business assignments in service of “moving the ball down the field” to attain business success.

But this role clarity often falls apart when it comes to communications. Without intentional design, executive communications can become overlapping, contradictory, or confusing.

In my previous articles in this series, I introduced the CEO Horizon™ framework and talked about the intentional ways that a CEO’s platform can position them as a Visionary, Transformational Strategist, or Expert Commentator. But the CEO is rarely the sole spokesperson for a company, so it’s important to look at the entire leadership team and the role each executive plays in the communications mix. Full leverage of company leaders can generate significantly more earned media[1], one of the most cost-effective ways to build awareness and trust.

CEO Horizon → Executive Horizon

As a quick refresher, the CEO Horizon framework maps executive commentary along two dimensions: near-term vs. future-oriented, and company-centric vs. industry-centric. (For more details on considerations and strategies for positioning in each quadrant, refer to my prior posts.)

The CEO’s positioning relies on many things: company priorities, stakeholder needs, and the leader’s own comfort level. But the great news is that every company can effectively cover this span of content and perspectives, regardless of the CEO’s position in the framework. Where the CEO Horizon framework focuses on evolving a single leader’s platform, the Executive Horizon™ framework designs a coordinated leadership system.

The Executive Horizon positioning exercise relies on four key elements, evaluated for each spokesperson:

1. Functional role: Some functions are inherently more focused in a given quadrant. For example, a Chief Financial Officer (CFO) typically reports on the quarter’s results and rarely makes predictions past the current fiscal year.[2]

2. Audience: Some leaders are naturally aligned to a specific audience; for example, a Sales leader is most likely speaking to customers. The needs and priorities for each of these audiences will also influence placement in the framework.

3. Interests: Leaders all have natural passion areas—leadership, sustainability, innovation, etc. Aligning platforms to these interests will bring out the best in them as spokespeople.

4. Comfort: Some executives are more or less comfortable with industry commentary and future-leaning predictions. While communications coaching can help, it’s important for a leader to also stay true to who they are.

   
   

Together, these factors determine where each leader can speak most credibly and effectively.

Hypothetical Executive Horizon Framework: “Fantastic Fitness Trackers”

To illustrate how a company would implement this approach, let’s consider an imaginary company called Fantastic Fitness Trackers. They have been in the wearable fitness tracker market for at least a decade and are a publicly traded company. Their strategic communication goals are to 1) be seen as cutting-edge and relevant, despite newer competitors entering the market, 2) convey the current and future benefits of AI integration across their product line, and 3) shore up confidence in their financial growth after a couple of disappointing quarters.

Fantastic Fitness Trackers might have 10 or more leaders in the C-Suite, but for this illustration we’ll focus on five: CFO, Chief Product Officer, Chief Medical Officer, Chief People Officer, and Chief Design Officer.

In the framework above, each company leader is positioned to focus on a key aspect of the message:

Operational Leader

An operational leader focuses on the company and the near-term. At Fantastic Fitness Trackers, there are two executives positioned here. The CFO discusses the company’s strong financial performance indicators and demand outlook, primarily geared toward the investor community. The Chief People Officer describes the company’s rollout of fitness trackers as an employee benefit, resulting in higher employee engagement and lower healthcare premium costs. The People leader serves as a sales “case study,” targeting customers in the HR domain, as well as reaching current and prospective employees who value this unique benefit.

Industry Commentator

Like the Operational Leader, the Industry Commentator also keeps their content focused on the current state rather than making bold predictions for the future. But they attract broader attention and audiences by adding an industrywide commentary focused on trends. At Fantastic Fitness Trackers, the Chief Medical Officer holds this role and speaks about health trends and scientific research, including how fitness trackers address global health issues such as obesity, diabetes, and chronic stress.

Transformational Strategist

A Transformational Strategist keeps primary focus on the company but takes a more futuristic approach to their talk track, building interest and confidence in the company’s long-term direction. In this example, the Chief Product Officer plays this role by outlining an innovation roadmap, progress incorporating AI into the product line, and future improvements in user experience.

Visionary

In the final upper-right quadrant, a Visionary discusses broad future trends that align to the company’s product but are larger in scope. For Fantastic Fitness Trackers, the Chief Design Officer is situated here, discussing the future of wearable fitness including compelling use cases not even in the market’s imagination yet.

Depending on expertise, interests, and comfort level, the CEO could hold a position in any of the four quadrants. Their talk track will align closely in theme to other executives in that quadrant, but differ in altitude, audience, or scope. For example, if Fantastic Fitness Tracker’s CEO is a Visionary, they might speak about the future of fitness to business or consumer audiences (think Fortune or the Today Show), while the Chief Design Officer speaks to tech and fitness industry audiences.

The Power of an Integrated Story

Without thoughtful coordination through the Executive Horizon framework, each leader might develop a platform in a vacuum—over-indexing on the same themes, competing for the same audiences, or leaving some content angles unexplored.

Distinct executive platforms reinforcing a shared company narrative

In the case of our imaginary Fantastic Fitness Trackers company, every talk track reinforces the same core message: the company is on the leading edge of fitness innovation and is making a difference in health outcomes. With that shared foundation, each leader adds a unique dimension—more futuristic, more industry-wide, more product-centric, etc.—and reaches a unique audience with a differentiated and compelling message they “own.” Everyone knows their own position on the field, and the company wins.

Does Your Executive Team Have a Positioning Strategy?

The Executive Horizon™ framework can help leaders and their communications teams maximize executive visibility, credibility, and return on communications effort that can be measured over time: share of voice by executive, audience coverage by quadrant, mix of near-term vs. future-oriented narratives, and message traction in media and speaking venues.

If you would like a partner in these efforts, as a one-time project or through ongoing communications support, contact us.

The CEO Horizon™ framework and Executive Horizon™ framework are proprietary models developed by Juran Strategies LLC.

[1] These examples are generalized and there will be notable exceptions. For instance, a CFO might provide multi-year predictions as part of a major business model shift.

[2] Earned media encompasses all positive visibility that isn’t paid for – such as press coverage, public speaking venues, investor commentary, and social media conversations. This contrasts with paid media, such as advertising, and owned media, which includes things like websites, company-owned blogs and social media accounts, and company-hosted events.