5 minute read
Who Owns the Soul?
Author
Devin DaRif
Share:
Ask your leadership team a simple question: who's accountable for ensuring that what you say externally matches what employees experience internally?
The CMO will say brand consistency is their job, then describe work focused on customers and market perception. The CHRO will say employee experience is their job, then describe programs that don't touch external messaging. The CEO might say culture is everyone's job, which is another way of saying it's nobody's job.
Leaders are rewarded for their function's performance, not for cross-functional coherence.
The Kingdom Problem
Each leader runs their function well. The CMO builds brand awareness, the CHRO improves engagement scores, communications manages the message. Capable people doing solid work within their domains. The problem is that the domains don't connect. Each leader optimizes for their own metrics, their own stakeholders, their own definition of success. Nobody's dashboard measures whether these efforts add up to something coherent.
The gaps between functions are where coherence fades away. Marketing launches a campaign promising innovation while HR recruits for stability and risk management. The CEO's investor narrative emphasizes transformation while employees experience bureaucratic stasis. The employer brand attracts candidates with promises the employee experience can't keep. Each function did its job. The system failed anyway.
A Different Question
This won't be solved by creating a new role or adding another box to the org chart. What's needed is a shift in how existing leaders think about their work and their relationship to each other.
Coherence emerges when leaders start asking a different question before they ship anything. Corporate Impact Marketing asks whether the external promise can be delivered by employee reality. The Head of Recruiting asks whether the talent they're attracting will thrive in the actual culture. Client Relations asks whether employees would recognize the company being described to investors. These questions cut across functional boundaries. They require leaders to see past their own domains to the system they're all part of.
Why This Requires the CEO
This kind of peripheral vision doesn't come naturally. Leaders are rewarded for their function's performance, not for cross-functional coherence. The CMO doesn't get a bonus for employer brand alignment. The CHRO isn't promoted based on how well the talent brand matches the consumer brand. Nothing in the incentive structure encourages leaders to care about the whole.
Breaking the pattern requires intent, usually starting from the CEO. The CEO is the only leader with natural authority across all the functions. They're the only one who can signal that coherence matters, that leaders will be evaluated differently when they build together instead of separately. Some CEOs do this intuitively. They notice when the investor story diverges from employee reality, ask questions that cut across silos, make clear through their attention that the whole matters as much as the parts.
The Payoff
The payoff for getting this right is significant. When the CHRO thinks about what Marketing has promised before building the EVP, the EVP stops sounding like spin. When someone asks how employees will receive the rebrand before it launches, the rebrand actually lands. When leaders carry a question about coherence into their daily decisions, disconnects get caught before they become problems.
The answer to "who owns the soul" should eventually be "we all do." Getting there requires leaders who see their work as part of a system rather than a series of independent kingdoms.
At WorkingTheory, we help leadership teams see the system and build the shared orientation that makes coherence possible. Not a new role. A new way of leading together.
