Sure, and the reason he is is because he DOES check stuff like this before sending it out.
Top leaders excel because they assemble a team around them they trust. You can't do everything yourself, you need to delegate. And having people in those positions also means you shouldn't be acting alone or those people will not stick around
First of all, I would expect a top leader to be prepared for scenarios like this (including templates of customer communication).
And yeah, I would expect a CEO to have enough legal knowledge to handle such a situation (customer communication) on his own.
But I also have to mentioned that I'm not in the US. Not every country has the litigation system of the US where you can basically destroy a company because you as the customer are too dumb to not spill hot coffee over yourself.
> you as the customer are too dumb to not spill hot coffee over yourself
presuming you're referring to the hot coffee lawsuit, maybe read details of the story. McDonalds wasn't at all blameless, and the plaintiff had reasonable demands
You expect the CEO of a company to have the legal depth of knowledge AND knowledge of all their customers, contracts and SLAs to be able to wing a communication and not somehow trip over all of that? They also should understand every possible legal jurisdiction that could be affected? You realise even the head of their legal department (a HIGHLY competent lawyer) likely wouldn’t say there could do that without speaking to the key people in their team?
Should the CEO also bang out some dev estimates for the roadmap because, hey, they should be competent enough to do something like that. Why not submit the accounts for the year? How hard can it be, just reading a few lines off their Sage or Quickbooks accounts?
Let me be more clear on what I mean by “wing it,” because “having templates” doesn’t really cut it. Anyone can bang out a “we have a problem” template, so why does the CEO need to attach their name to it? Once you’re at the point of needing a CEO to communicate, you have a specific problem, with its own specific impacts that a single person can not be expected to have enough depth of knowledge in their brain to actually talk about without involving their domain experts, including legal, technical, whatever the situation needs.
Top leaders excel because they assemble a team around them they trust. You can't do everything yourself, you need to delegate. And having people in those positions also means you shouldn't be acting alone or those people will not stick around