[okanat]

... and it is their job to actually find somebody to represent the agreed-on goals and make damn sure that the leadership will listen them. If you're as a manager / team leader whatnot alone in your skillset and trained nobody to represent you and your vision, you did a bad job of management.

[scott_w]

I’m going to stick up for him on this point. It’s likely there’s no way to get the right person in the room to argue on his behalf. Much as I think it’s not a good organisational structure, it’s very likely that the CTO title was the only thing that got him into conversations with the board or C-suite, they wouldn’t speak to a VP at all, even if he asked them to.