Executive Buy-In for Business Continuity: Being Liked Is Not the Same as Being Believed

Your CEO probably likes you. That is not the same as believing your program pays for itself.

Two recent research studies about chief marketing officers explain this gap better than anything published in our own field, and they explain why executive buy-in for business continuity keeps eroding even when the relationship with leadership feels strong. David C. Baker connected the studies in a piece called Inside the Head of a CMO. The data is about marketing.

The pattern is about us.

What the research found

Boathouse’s fifth annual CEO study found that CEOs like their CMOs more than they ever have. Seventy-nine percent say they are strongly aligned with their marketing leader, a five-year high. Eighty-five percent call the CMO an effective builder of trust inside the organization.

The same survey found that 60% of those CEOs now view marketing as a cost center. One year earlier, 65% called it a profit center. That reversed in twelve months. Only 15% would give their CMO an “A.” And just 13% are confident marketing can deliver ROI.

The modern CMO is winning the relationship and losing the argument.

The second study, Confessions of a CMO, interviewed thirty marketing chiefs anonymously about how they actually operate. The quotes are remarkable. “I call everything a pilot.” “I don’t push decisions. I adjust the mood until the decision pushes itself.” One CMO, after marketing was dismissed in a leadership meeting as “the coloring-in department,” didn’t defend the function at all. He made a quip about how expensive the crayons were, got the laugh, and a few minutes later the same executive was asking for marketing’s input on a pricing brief.

These are not the behaviors of empowered executives. They are the behaviors of operatives who have concluded that openly advocating for their own function is career-limiting.

If that doesn’t sound familiar, you haven’t been managing a resilience program very long.

Resilience leaders live the same contradiction, with less data

Business continuity and crisis management leaders are trusted the same way CMOs are trusted. Executives call you when things go sideways. They like having you in the room. They believe you have their back.

And between crises, many of those same executives quietly file your function under overhead. You are graded on disasters that didn’t happen, which is a harder attribution problem than anything marketing faces. The CMO at least has pipeline numbers to argue over.

I hear this constantly in conversations with practitioners. They describe themselves as “managing it from the middle.” One senior continuity leader told me about a Saturday afternoon call from his COO after he briefed a serious risk: “Great job reporting the risk. But we need to do something about it.”

That sentence is the entire problem in twelve words. Visibility is not authority. Trust is not budget.

Here is the uncomfortable extension of the Boathouse data: if marketing, one of the best-funded staff functions in the building, can be reclassified from profit center to cost center in a single year, do not assume resilience is exempt. Assume it is next, or already there.

What the surviving operators do differently

The CMOs navigating this well are not arguing harder for their function. They stopped arguing entirely and changed how their work moves through the organization. Almost all of it translates directly to resilience leadership.

Old view	New view
Defend the program in the leadership meeting	Arm your boss to defend it for you
Present findings as a big reveal	Co-build findings so leadership owns them
Report program maturity and activity	Price decisions in dollars and downside
Take credit for what didn’t happen	Create moments where executives discover the gap themselves

Four moves matter most.

Stop reporting risk. Start pricing decisions. Senior operations and finance leaders think in investment language: what it costs to buy down a risk, what it costs to accept it, and what it costs to do nothing. A briefing that ends with “here is the risk” invites the COO stinger above. A briefing that ends with “here are three options, priced, with the cost of not acting” invites a decision. If your recommendation cannot survive translation into CFO language, it is not ready for the room.

Make exercises your evidence engine. The most powerful sentence in a resilience program is not written in the plan. It is spoken by an executive in the room. After a tabletop exercise with a financial services client, a program leader’s own conclusion was blunt: “We wouldn’t be in a good spot should we have to recover.” Nobody at Bryghtpath had to sell that finding. Leadership said it, so leadership owned it, and it became the investment case. A well-designed tabletop exercise does what a hundred status decks cannot: it lets executives discover the gap themselves, in their own words, with their peers watching.

Let them steal your findings. Baker’s advice to agencies applies word for word to resilience teams: the more fingerprints on an idea, the safer it becomes. If your recommendation only advances when everyone knows it came from you, you have built something fragile. Hand your sponsor the finding, let them present it upward as theirs, and collect your credit at budget time. The practitioners who get funded are the ones whose bosses look good carrying their work.

Talk enterprise outcomes, not program language. Boathouse’s CEO coaches marketing leaders to talk about enterprise growth instead of marketing’s contribution: “One looks selfish, the other shows you’re a team player.” The same reframe is sitting there for us. Nobody funds “program maturity” or “framework alignment.” They fund kept customer commitments, protected revenue, a defensible regulatory posture, and a leadership team that will not freeze in the first hour of a crisis. If you are still selling continuity outcomes, you are selling into a category your CEO may already see as overhead.

What this means Monday morning

Pull up the last update you sent your executive sponsor. Count the sentences framed as company outcomes versus the sentences framed as program activity. Most practitioners find the ratio runs heavily the wrong way, and fixing it costs nothing.

Then schedule an exercise designed to surface the gap leadership most needs to see, not the one your team is most prepared to handle. When the finding lands, give it away. Your sponsor carries it upward, with their fingerprints on it, in dollar terms.

You don’t need a bigger seat at the table. You need the people already sitting there to walk into their next meeting carrying your evidence.

Keep Going

A few ways to go deeper if this was useful.

• Read more. Resilience, crisis management, and continuity writing at Bryghtpath Insights, or the structured Ultimate Guide to Crisis Management.
• Run the exercise. Exercise in a Day™ builds and facilitates a full tabletop exercise in one day, designed to surface the findings your leadership needs to hear in their own words.
• Get a maturity score. Our Resiliency Diagnosis® is a standards-based review that produces a maturity score and a prioritized roadmap.
• Talk to us. Set up a call to think through your program with us.