I know corporate governance, and the titles used for various positions, varies enormously from jurisdiction to jurisdiction and company to company. But I wonder if there is a kind of standard usage among companies that use the familiar C-level titles. Specifically, I’m a bit confused as to the relation between C-level officer and members of the Board of Directors.
My impression is that the Chief Executive Officer typically sits on the Board of Directors, even though he or she is not necessarily chairing it (which in some companies is a role assigned to a separate Chairperson). But it seems that the various other Chief XYZ Officers are not always Board members; in that case, I would think they are hiwerarchically inferior to those C-level officers who sit on the Board, even though the title does not make this evident.
The situation is complicated further by the distinction between executive and external Directors which many companies take (in some jurisdictions with a two-tiered corporate governance structure, the two would form separate bodies, but in a one-tiered system such as is prevalent in most English-speaking countries the distinction is made within the Board). A logically consistent way would be to have all executive Directors as C-level officers, who are complemented by external Directors and, together with them, make up the Board; but it seems that this is not standard usage. So is there some sort of standard terminology, or is it pretty much anything goes that companies may fancy?