Why looking like a leader isn’t the same as leading

We were two months into our seed raise when I realised I was rehearsing my facial expressions before every Zoom call. I’d tilt my chin slightly upward. I’d lower my voice a notch. I’d say things like “let me frame that differently” and “from a portfolio view” even when I wasn’t sure what I meant. I wasn’t lying. I was just performing. And at the time, I thought that was what leadership looked like.

You’re told early on that perception is part of the game. That founders get funded, hired, and followed because they carry “executive presence.” You hear this in pitch rooms, at mentor dinners, in blog posts about the posture of a visionary. So you practice sounding decisive even when you’re not. You mirror phrases you heard your last boss use. You pick up little tricks—long pauses before answering, making eye contact while restating strategy. But behind that stillness is a flurry of panic, uncertainty, and the hope that no one can tell you’re figuring it out in real-time.

What no one warns you about is how exhausting it becomes to sustain. Or how the pressure to look like a leader silently breaks the systems you’re trying to build.

When we hired our first five employees, I told myself I needed to project calm. That meant never showing frustration, never admitting I didn’t have a clear plan, never letting them see how thin the margin really was. I confused transparency with instability. So I kept up the show. I repeated mantras like “we’re pacing to targets” even when our sales pipeline was sputtering. I ran all-hands meetings with high energy and a clear story arc. I spoke in frameworks. But I avoided the hardest conversations—about misaligned priorities, burnout, and whether we were even solving the right problem.

It wasn’t just bad for me. It was corrosive for the team.

One engineer told me, months later, that she spent more time guessing what I really meant than doing the work itself. Another said he wasn’t sure what he was allowed to challenge, because I always sounded so sure. That one stung. I thought I was being inspiring. Turns out I was just being unreadable.

When leadership becomes performance, clarity disappears. And without clarity, teams default to assumption, hesitation, and unspoken anxiety.

The hardest part wasn’t fixing the culture. It was admitting that I had built the wrong model of leadership in my own head. I had convinced myself that founders needed to be emotionally bulletproof. That I had to sound ten steps ahead, even if I was only two. That doubt was dangerous and questions were weakness. That every visible crack would be used against me—by VCs, by the team, by other founders I admired. It took a conversation with our product lead to break that spell. He said, quietly, “We don’t need more certainty. We need more truth.”

That line changed how I lead.

Looking like a leader now means something different to me. It doesn’t mean wearing authority. It means reducing friction. It means your team knows what matters, where they stand, and what decisions are real. It means they understand the constraints and the trade-offs—not just the vision and the vibe. It means you make complexity digestible, not invisible. It means your absence doesn’t derail momentum. It means honesty isn’t sporadic—it’s systemic.

Here’s what that looked like in practice.

We replaced our performative weekly standups with team-owned cadences. We moved from feel-good values posters to operational principles tied to actual decisions. We built a rule: every objective must have a clear “kill condition”—a threshold at which we pause, pivot, or stop. We started rating our meetings on clarity, not charisma. And I began each leadership sync with one slide: “What I Don’t Know Yet.”

The shift was subtle, but the effect was profound. Team members started surfacing edge cases sooner. Managers began asking for trade-off context before launching features. New hires onboarded faster because they weren’t guessing what leadership “really wanted.” And I stopped treating leadership like theatre and started treating it like architecture.

The irony is that I finally began to look like a leader the moment I stopped trying to.

So if you’re in that early-stage fog, trying to sound like the founders you admire, trying to mimic their tone or posture or executive gravitas, I want to say this gently but clearly: that’s not leadership. That’s insecurity wearing a suit.

Real leadership starts with designing for clarity—not for control. It means you have a system for decision-making that doesn’t collapse when your voice shakes. It means people trust your thinking more than your tone. It means you’ve earned authority by creating context, not just confidence.

I used to think leadership was about having answers. Now I believe it’s about creating an environment where the right questions get asked, fast and without fear. If I could start over, here’s what I’d change.

I’d stop building leadership around my own emotional management. I’d stop thinking I needed to shield the team from every ambiguity. I’d define priorities with failure conditions, not just success metrics. I’d name assumptions in every planning doc. I’d model calm not with fake steadiness, but with real systems that hold under pressure.

And I’d remind myself daily: you are not the product. The company is not an extension of your self-worth. Your job is not to look impressive. Your job is to remove friction, build trust, and make the path forward visible.

So what does it mean to look like a leader?

It means your silence signals confidence—not confusion. It means your structure speaks louder than your slogans. It means your team walks into meetings knowing what matters, what changes, and what stays firm. It means people don’t need to decode you to do good work. It means you’re building clarity—not dependency.

And if you’re still trying to perform leadership while secretly hoping no one sees the cracks, let me tell you what I wish someone told me earlier: they already see them. But what your team really wants to know is—are you willing to name them, fix them, and bring them in to help? That’s the look that lasts. The rest is costume.