How smart questions quietly build executive influence

We think executive presence is about how we show up. The way we speak. The confidence in our eyes. The slide deck. The tone. The LinkedIn headline. But if you’re a founder in the early years of your company, that kind of presence is just surface polish. It’s not what your team remembers. It’s not what they replicate. The strongest presence I’ve ever seen wasn’t from someone who walked into the room and owned it. It was from someone who barely spoke—but whose questions kept circling in your head long after the meeting ended.

That’s the presence that influences how others think. It shapes the room without dominating it. It gives people a framework, not an answer. And that’s the kind of executive presence that scales.

I remember one of my first big meetings after raising our seed round. Investors were on the call. So was the team. I thought I had to lead from the front. Crisp updates. Confident strategy. Quick decisions. But something felt off. After the call, my product lead pinged me. “Hey…do you actually believe we’re hitting those timelines? Or are we just saying it to sound aligned?”

That message hit me like a truck. Because I realized I’d been performing certainty. Not leading. I’d created a momentary illusion of control, not a shared sense of clarity. My presence was loud, but shallow. It didn’t help anyone make better decisions. From that day on, I shifted. I stopped trying to answer fast. I started asking slow.

I started using three questions over and over again. At first, it felt awkward. Like I was dodging responsibility by not having the answers. But over time, I noticed something. My team started bringing sharper thinking to meetings. They started anticipating the questions. Owning their logic. Calling each other in, not just up.

These questions built presence through pattern, not performance.

1. “What’s the part of this plan most likely to break—and how will we know it’s breaking?”

This one always changes the energy in the room. Because it gives people permission to voice uncertainty without sounding like a downer. It creates a new kind of leadership posture: one that assumes fragility and builds for it.

This question isn’t just about risk. It’s about attention. You’re training your team to look beyond the headline win and see the early cracks—before they widen.

2. “If I disappeared for two weeks, what would fall apart?”

This one is brutal. Because the first time you ask it, you’ll learn how much you’re still at the center. What decisions slow down. What approvals wait. What context lives only in your head.

The goal here isn’t just to test autonomy. It’s to show your team that you’re serious about building a system that doesn’t revolve around you.

3. “Who owns this—and who thinks they own it?”

There’s no faster way to uncover confusion. This question pulls apart role clarity from role assumption. It helps you find the gaps between declared responsibility and perceived ownership.

And once you surface that, you can realign without blame. You can say, “Let’s document this so everyone knows.” Not “Why didn’t you handle it?”

I noticed a difference in how people responded to me. They didn’t just look for my opinion. They came with a point of view. They referenced past conversations. They said things like, “I know you’re going to ask what breaks, so here’s our weakest point.” That’s when I knew the presence had landed. Not because I looked more polished. But because my questions had become part of the team’s thinking.

If you’re an introverted founder, or if you’re building in a culture that doesn’t reward flashiness, you might feel like you’re always one step behind the loudest person in the room.

Let me tell you this: presence isn’t volume. Influence doesn’t come from dominating airtime. The quietest person with the sharpest question often shapes the whole conversation.

You don’t need to change your personality. You need to build a pattern. Ask questions that signal what matters. And ask them often enough that they become part of how your team operates.

What makes presence durable isn’t charisma. It’s clarity. And clarity can be quiet. If your presence feels invisible, start with one moment a week where you ask a question that helps the team think deeper. Not a performance. A real pause. A zoom-out. A reminder that what matters isn’t who speaks first—it’s who speaks usefully.

Over time, those moments compound. Your team will start to see you not just as the founder who shows up, but as the founder who reframes. Who catches blind spots. Who isn’t loud, but always lands. You don’t need to be the loudest voice in the room. You need to be the voice people hear in their head when they make a decision. That’s presence. And it doesn’t need a spotlight to work.

If I could redo those early meetings, I wouldn’t speak more confidently. I’d speak less. And I’d ask better. I still use those same three questions. They anchor my 1:1s. They close our weekly standups. They appear in Notion templates and handover docs. Not because they’re magic. But because they build leadership muscle across the team.

Presence isn’t about being impressive. It’s about making others think sharper. When you ask the right questions consistently, your presence lives on—even after you log off the call. And here’s what I still forget sometimes: you have to keep using them even when things feel calm. It’s easy to fall back into telling mode when momentum picks up. But questions create culture. And culture isn’t built in a crisis. It’s built in the quiet weeks when no one’s watching.

I still get the urge to jump in with solutions. Especially when someone’s stuck. But I’ve learned to wait. To give the pause space. Sometimes that pause—awkward, silent, uncomfortable—is the most generous thing I can offer. Because that’s where someone else steps up. And that’s when presence shifts from being about me… to being about what we’ve made possible together. That’s what scales. That’s what sticks.