What Does a Chief Communications Officer Actually Do?

TL;DR A chief communications officer is the executive responsible for protecting and advancing an organization’s credibility. The role goes far beyond press releases: CCOs advise CEOs, prepare for crises, align legal, HR, finance, and communications, shape executive visibility, and help companies avoid the kinds of missteps seen in real-life examples from Boeing, BP, Peloton, and others.

Last summer, enterprise software firm Astronomer got the public’s attention in the worst possible way.

When a kiss-cam video of CEO Andy Byron embracing an employee at a Coldplay concert went viral, the situation quickly snowballed. Within days, Astronomer said its board had launched an investigation and accepted Byron’s resignation.

What Byron said, and didn’t say, was at the heart of the controversy. And it’s here that the chief communications officer (CCO) has a central role to play.

A CCO’s job isn’t to “spin” the story. Done right, it’s almost the opposite. CCOs help leadership understand the reputational reality, align what the organization says with what it’s prepared to do, and communicate clearly to every audience with a stake in the answer.

For CCOs, most days don’t bring crises like the kiss-cam incident. But the same basics apply: judgment, stakeholder mapping, message discipline, executive counsel, and the ability to see around corners before a moment spills into public view.

What Is A Chief Communications Officer?

A CCO is the executive responsible for how an organization presents itself to the world, and how it listens.

The role sits at the top of the corporate communications function, owning everything from public relations (PR) and media relations to internal comms and crisis preparedness.

CCOs also increasingly own executive visibility — how execs show up in the press, on stage, and in thought leadership with their own voice.

Unlike marketing, which centers on customers and revenue, the CCO’s constituency is everyone with a stake in the organization’s credibility. That audience spans employees, investors, regulators, journalists, and the general public.

The title may vary (e.g., chief corporate affairs officer, VP communications), but the mandate is the same: protect and advance the company’s reputation.

The CCO role has grown in strategic standing over the past few years. Today, 47% of CCOs at Fortune 500 companies report directly to the CEO, up from 40% in 2023.

Credit: Korn Ferry’s 2025 Chief Communications Officer (CCO) survey

What Does A Chief Communications Officer Do Day To Day?

Most of a CCO’s calendar involves preparation, counsel, and pattern recognition, and very little of it looks like communications in the traditional sense.

The role is less about drafting press releases and more about being in the room before the decision gets made. A CCO reads the reputational implications of a business move before it becomes policy, flags the employee relations angle in a financial restructuring, and tells the CEO what the headline will be before the announcement goes out. At its best, it’s a form of institutional foresight.

In a given week, that might include:

• Prepping executives for media interviews or earnings calls
• Advising HR on how to communicate a layoff before it hits the press
• Aligning legal, finance, and communications so no one says something the others can’t support
• Monitoring for reputational risk in business decisions that haven’t been announced yet
• Building media relationships before an announcement, so they exist when there’s something to manage
• Shaping the executive’s public voice — via op-eds, LinkedIn, keynote speeches, and other channels — so they lead conversations rather than get pulled into them.

The through-line is anticipation. Rather than react to the news cycle, a good CCO tries to stay a step ahead of it.

The statement that got rewritten, the quote that got softened, the press inquiry that never became a story — much of what a CCO does best leaves no trace at all.

CCO Vs. CMO Vs. Head Of PR: What’s The Difference?

The chief marketing officer (CMO) and CCO roles often get conflated because both deal in words and audiences, but their orientations are fundamentally different.

The CMO is focused on customer growth: demand generation, brand positioning, customer acquisition, product marketing. The CCO is focused on credibility: how the organization is perceived by everyone who isn’t necessarily a customer: regulators, journalists, employees, investors, community stakeholders.

In practice, the two roles must be tightly coordinated, because a brand promise that marketing makes and the company can’t keep becomes a communications problem fast.

The head of PR, meanwhile, is often a direct report to the CCO rather than a peer. Where a PR lead manages media relationships and handles press inquiries, the CCO operates at a higher altitude — advising the CEO, shaping the organization’s broader narrative strategy, and making judgment calls about what gets said publicly and what doesn’t.

The PR team executes the playbook. The CCO writes it, and has a seat at the table when the business decisions that will require a playbook are still being made.

What Skills Does A Chief Communications Officer Need?

The skills required to fill the CCO role may surprise people.

When senior communications executives were asked what matters most for CCO success, respondents rated executive presence and the ability to counsel C-suite leaders, and strategic business thinking and financial acumen, ahead of communications mastery itself.

Credit: The Medill CCO Monitor

In other words, the best CCOs are business leaders who happen to be exceptional communicators, not the other way around.

That tracks with how the role works in practice. The CCO sits at the intersection of strategy, language, and organizational politics, so the skill set is broader than most people expect.

Here’s what it takes, plus some real-life examples of what — and what not — to do:

When Microsoft changed its strategic focus to AI, CEO Satya Nadella helped tell the story.

Strategic judgment

Strategic judgment is the ability to see how a business decision will land publicly before it’s announced, and to advise leadership accordingly.

When Microsoft’s 2023 OpenAI investment accelerated its transformation into an AI-first company, that shift required more than a press release.

It meant realigning strategic focus across the entire organization through a sequenced narrative, with earnings calls, analyst briefings, employee communications, and CEO Satya Nadella’s own public appearances all telling the same story.

Executive presence and counsel

CCOs operate at the C-suite level and need to influence peers and the CEO without direct authority. That takes credibility, confidence, and discretion.

Boeing offers a powerful counterexample. In 2019, as regulators and airlines worldwide were grounding or restricting the aircraft, Boeing said it had “full confidence in the safety of the 737 MAX.”

The Securities and Exchange Commission later charged Boeing and then–CEO Dennis Muilenburg with making materially misleading public statements about the plane’s safety. Boeing has since cycled through eight CCOs in eight years.

Message discipline

This is the ability to distill complex situations into clear, consistent language, and to hold that line across multiple audiences and formats.

An infamous example from BP shows the price of even a small slip-up. In 2010, then–BP CEO Tony Hayward destroyed his credibility — and eventually his career — with a single unguarded sentence during the Deepwater Horizon disaster. His “I’d like my life back” was widely condemned as insensitive to the people who had lost their lives and others whose livelihoods were damaged by the spill.

Part of a CCO’s job is to make sure such a sentence never gets said.

Stakeholder mapping

Stakeholder mapping means understanding who cares about what the organization says, in what order, and why — from employees and investors to regulators and reporters.

During Elon Musk’s Twitter layoffs in 2022, the company told employees its offices were temporarily closed and that “all badge access” would be suspended, while some staff said they were immediately locked out of work accounts and email.

It became a vivid example of what can happen when employee comms are handled as an afterthought.

M&S CEO Stuart Machin won praise for his quick and transparent response to a cyberattack

Crisis management

Here, the goal is to stay clear-headed under pressure, moving fast without getting ahead of the facts, and knowing when to say nothing at all.

In 2025, after a cyberattack halted retail chain M&S’s online sales and exposed customer data, CEO Stuart Machin fronted clear, jargon-free updates early in the crisis.

The response drew praise for its speed and transparency, even as later criticism over breach disclosure showed how tough it is to communicate cleanly when the facts are still moving.

Media fluency

CCOs must know how journalists work, what they need, and how to build relationships that hold up when a story goes sideways.

Google and Meta, for instance, have spent years under sustained antitrust scrutiny, with the DOJ suing Google over search and digital advertising and the FTC pursuing Meta over its acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp.

For CCOs operating under that kind of pressure, media fluency means knowing how to engage reporters covering regulatory beats without feeding the story, or going dark in ways that look evasive.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has raised his public profile by staying visible

Executive visibility strategy

Deciding which leaders speak publicly, on what topics, and in what venues is a key CCO role.

Jensen Huang’s public profile rests on more than performance alone. The Nvidia CEO has been named The Economist’s best CEO, ranked No. 1 on Fortune’s 100 Most Powerful People In Business list, and included in TIME’s 100 Most Influential People.

That profile didn’t happen by accident. Huang’s consistent presence at major forums like CES and Nvidia’s own GTC shows executive visibility at work: choosing where a leader can set the agenda, frame the story, and reinforce the company’s direction.

Cross-functional collaboration

The CCO should coordinate legal, HR, finance, and communications so the organization speaks with one voice, even when those functions don’t naturally agree.

In 2021, after a child died and dozens of injuries were reported involving Peloton’s Tread+ treadmill, the company initially pushed back publicly against a federal recall recommendation. That posture read less like customer-first crisis communication than legal defensiveness.

Weeks later, Peloton issued a full recall and CEO John Foley apologized. That reversal was the right move, but by then the delay had already done damage. Better cross-functional alignment could have changed the timeline — and the tone — from the start.

Executive thought leadership

CCOs are increasingly called upon to design and implement thought leadership programs for their companies CEOs and leadership team. This entails mapping out strategic narratives for each executive and target audiences, then deciding where and how they’ll get their messages across.

Owned channels (including blogs and newsletters), as well as LinkedIn, have grown to become a centerpiece of these efforts, especially as traditional media coverage has waned in importance.

Blackstone President Jon Gray offers a prime example of why executive thought leadership is such an important tool for CCOs to leverage. On LinkedIn, Gray’s weekly “running selfies” — where he shares his POV on financial issue while jogging in iconic destinations — have gone viral. His updates attract millions of views and directly impact public perception of Blackstone.

The golden thread running through all of these examples is judgment: knowing not just what to say, but when, to whom, and at what volume.

Who Needs A Chief Communications Officer?

The honest answer: more organizations than have one right now.

Many businesses distribute the CCO’s responsibilities across a PR agency, a marketing lead, and the CEO’s instincts — which works until it doesn’t.

A dedicated CCO typically becomes a priority when a company reaches the scale where its public profile starts to carry real business risk: pre-IPO, post-merger, or any moment when regulatory scrutiny, media attention, or employee headcount makes winging it a liability.

Technology companies, healthcare systems, financial institutions, and large nonprofits tend to get there fastest, because their stakeholder environments are complex and the cost of a communications snafu is high.

Boeing cycled through multiple comms chiefs and executive overhauls after the 737 MAX crisis had already cost the aviation giant tens of billions and claimed 346 lives. The stakes don’t have to reach that level to make the lesson worth absorbing: communications leadership is cheaper before a crisis than after it.

How Much Does A Chief Communications Officer Make?

CCO compensation varies widely by industry, company size, and geography, but the role reliably commands executive-level pay.

In the US, compensation often reaches the mid-six figures once salary and bonus are included, with public benchmarks generally clustering around the high $200,000s. At the Fortune 500 level, pay can run much higher: Korn Ferry’s 2025 CCO survey found that many senior-most communications leaders now receive seven-figure total compensation packages.

At midmarket private companies, compensation is typically lower and more dependent on scope, reporting line, and whether equity is included. A CCO who sits in the C-suite, advises the board, and owns crisis response will command significantly more than one whose role is primarily media relations with a senior title attached.

As communications has become more tightly linked to enterprise risk, compensation has followed, especially in sectors where a single bad news cycle can move a stock price or trigger regulatory attention.

Ready To Strengthen Your Executive Communications?

The leaders who navigate difficult moments with credibility don’t find their voice on the fly. Consistent visibility, sharp messaging, and a track record of thoughtful public presence create a reservoir of trust that can’t be manufactured at a time of need.

For many executives, partnering with an agency is the most effective way to get there. To learn more about building an executive communications platform that holds up under pressure, read this.

FAQ

Is chief communications officer (CCO) a high-level position?

Yes, a CCO is a senior executive role, often reporting directly to the CEO and advising the C-suite on reputation, messaging, and risk.

What is the role of a CCO?

A CCO leads an organization’s communications strategy across media relations, internal communications, crisis response, executive visibility, and stakeholder trust.

Is being a comms head stressful?

Yes, communications leadership can be stressful because the role often involves high-stakes decisions, tight timelines, public scrutiny, and competing internal priorities.

How much does a CCO make?

In the US, CCO compensation often reaches the mid-six figures, with Fortune 500 communications chiefs sometimes earning seven-figure total packages.

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