Emily Hite became a chief executive and promptly wondered why that should make anyone take her ideas more seriously. The ideas were there already. So were nearly two decades of experience, the large portfolios, the hard-won client trust and the growth record. The new title changed the size of the room, perhaps, but not the truth of what she had to say.
This is an uncommon opening move in the ritual theater of corporate promotion. New CEOs are expected to acquire a wardrobe of certainty. Hite brought questions, a self-aware grin and a refusal to sand herself into a tasteful piece of office furniture. In a post after taking the job, she described the pressure to become more serious, polished, formal, curated and cultivated. Her answer was cheerful noncompliance.
“I have messy thoughts,” she wrote. “I have a big personality and a big laugh.” She wanted joy, connection and community to survive in places that can become dehumanizing. The accompanying image showed Hite in oversized sunglasses beside a white dog, both making faces for the camera. Her caption introduced the animal as her mother's favorite child. It was a rather efficient demolition of the standard CEO portrait.
The second name on the door
In April 2026, Hite became chief executive of Banyan Communications, an Atlanta consultancy founded by Sally Deval in 1995. It was the first transfer of leadership in the firm's 30-year history. Deval moved to chair of the board, preserving continuity while handing daily authority to someone who had already spent six difficult years shaping the business.
Hite arrived at Banyan in 2020 as executive vice president of corporate strategy. There are calmer years in which to learn a new company. She joined during a global pandemic, from a hastily assembled home office, while the public-sector world around Banyan was becoming both more urgent and more unstable. She later described the period as a succession of tests: shifting administrations, a changing federal contracting landscape and weakening institutional trust.
Banyan did more than endure. During Hite's first six years, the firm says she helped more than triple revenue, expanded its client portfolio and strengthened work with major federal institutions. Growth can be an anesthetic story, all upward arrows and victorious verbs. Here, it matters because it preceded the promotion. Hite was not hired to decorate a succession plan. She had already altered the scale and reach of the firm before being asked to lead it.
That scale brings its own form of friction. Banyan is large enough to assemble strategists, researchers, designers, writers and producers around complex assignments, yet small enough for a single leadership choice to register throughout the company. Its clients include nonprofits, public agencies and other institutions whose work is examined closely. A clever message is no substitute for a sound process. For Hite, growth therefore has to mean more than winning a larger volume of work. It has to leave the operation capable of keeping its promises.
Banyan revenue growth, indexed to Hite's 2020 arrival
Publicly reported relative growth. Exact annual revenue figures were not disclosed.
Rigor before rhetoric
The groundwork came from a career spent translating complicated institutions for real audiences. Before Banyan, Hite rose to senior director at ICF. She oversaw large public-sector initiatives, portfolios worth as much as $69 million and teams of more than 40 people. Her work joined communications with evaluation, training and technical assistance. The pattern is less glamorous than a brand campaign and more useful: understand the system, understand the people inside it, then make the message do something.
Her education follows the same line. She earned a bachelor's degree from New College of Florida and a Master of Public Health from the University of South Florida. A former colleague recalled that Hite could move between strategy and tactics, confront problems directly, find consensus and articulate a dissenting view without turning collaboration into combat. ICF recognized her business-development work in 2018. Two years later, Banyan put her in charge of corporate strategy.
Senior leadership at ICF, managing major portfolios, multidisciplinary teams and complex institutional work.
Joins Banyan as executive vice president of corporate strategy during the pandemic.
Helps more than triple revenue and broaden Banyan's national client portfolio.
Becomes the second CEO in Banyan's history; founder Sally Deval becomes board chair.
Real leadership is stewardship.Emily Hite
Stewardship is a useful word for a successor. It rejects the fantasy that an organization begins again when a new person gets the largest office. It also refuses mere caretaking. A steward has to preserve what deserves preserving, repair what does not and leave the place stronger for whoever follows. Hite's stated task is to honor what Banyan has stood for while building what comes next. The two clauses carry equal weight.
That balance is visible in the arrangement with Deval. The founder remains close enough to advise on long-term direction but has made room for a new chief executive. Hite, meanwhile, speaks generously about those who “paved the way.” There is little appetite for the familiar succession fiction in which the incoming leader must diminish the founder to prove the arrival of a new era.
Founder successions are often discussed as governance puzzles, but they are emotional weather systems too. Staff members remember who built the place. Clients associate a firm with the founder's judgment. The successor must make decisions without treating history as either scripture or clutter. Hite's six-year apprenticeship inside Banyan gives her an advantage: she knows the inheritance from within, and colleagues have already seen what her decisions produce. The handoff is new. The relationship is not.
A public voice, finally
For years, Hite barely posted on LinkedIn. The promotion changed that, a fact she finds both useful and faintly absurd. She observed that the title made people more inclined to listen, although it had not improved the underlying ideas. Rather than ignore the contradiction, she made it part of the argument. She would speak when she had something to say and admit when the system benefiting her was flawed.
Her posts read less like executive positioning than a live test of her management philosophy. She writes about treating adults as adults, about respect at work and about maintaining humanity inside systems that often flatten it. When a stranger attempted to use “liberalism” as an insult beneath one of those posts, Hite deleted and blocked the comment, laughed at the peculiar choice of epithet, then returned to the central question: when did basic decency at work become a side one must choose?
The wit matters. It prevents moral seriousness from curdling into self-importance. So does the willingness to show the machinery of thought, including the inconvenient parts. Hite does not pretend that becoming CEO made her free of contradiction. She simply declines to hide the contradiction behind lacquered corporate prose.
The community is part of the job
Hite's idea of community is not confined to client language. She chaired the board of Girls on the Run Atlanta, has fostered rescue dogs through LifeLine Animal Project since 2013 and has served Friends to the Forlorn since 2016. In 2025, she joined the board of Moving in the Spirit, an Atlanta organization that uses dance in youth development. ICF gave her its inaugural Endurance Award for volunteer service in 2016.
There is an obvious thread through those commitments: institutions become meaningful at the point where they meet individual lives. That helps explain why Hite treats respect as an operating principle rather than a line in an employee handbook. It also clarifies her distaste for leadership as performance. Communities are remarkably good at noticing the difference between polish and presence.
Banyan's next chapter will test the proposition at a larger scale. The firm plans to extend its North American footprint, grow its work in Canada and enter new areas where credible communications can help public institutions earn attention and trust. Expansion asks a culture to travel. The habits that work among familiar colleagues in Atlanta have to survive new markets, new clients and the administrative weather that accompanies growth.
Organizations today aren't just navigating complexity. They're being asked to earn trust continuously, often under pressure, often in public.Emily Hite
“Earn” is the important verb. Trust cannot be installed with a campaign or announced at an all-hands meeting. It accumulates through decisions: who is heard, how a deadline is handled, what happens when someone disagrees, whether growth rewards the people who made it possible. Communications can reveal an institution, but it cannot permanently disguise one.
Hite now has the authority to make that belief operational. She also has the growth record to be judged by something more substantial than tone. The intriguing question is whether the two halves of her leadership thesis can keep reinforcing each other: rigor without coldness, candor without chaos, expansion without cultural amnesia.
Six years after arriving in a makeshift home office, she sits in the chair once occupied by Banyan's founder. Yet the most revealing thing about her entrance may be the refusal to sit too stiffly. The laugh remains. The messy thoughts remain. The dog, judging by available evidence, remains unimpressed. Hite's wager is that leadership can become more credible by looking less rehearsed. Banyan now gets to see how far that wager can travel.