One of the stranger things about becoming a founder is that, at some point, your behaviour stops belonging entirely to you. A passing comment becomes something somebody writes down. An idea you mention casually over coffee somehow appears on next week’s priorities. You send an email at 10.30pm because that’s when you happened to think of something, and somebody on your team wonders whether they should be answering emails at 10.30pm too. You walk into a meeting distracted after a difficult morning and, without saying very much at all, change the atmosphere in the room.
Most founders don’t set out to have this effect. In fact, many would be horrified to discover that something they considered insignificant had caused somebody else to worry, change their plans or spend three hours working on something that wasn’t actually important. Yet influence is an unavoidable part of leadership, and the more authority we have, the harder it becomes to understand how other people experience us. What feels like an ordinary conversation from one side of the table can feel considerably more significant from the other.
At Follow The Founder, we’re fascinated by the parts of leadership that happen almost invisibly. The company values written on the website matter, of course, but culture is also being created in hundreds of smaller interactions every week. It’s in how a founder responds when somebody makes a mistake, whether people feel comfortable disagreeing in meetings, what happens when someone takes a proper holiday and how the leader behaves when things aren’t going particularly well. Teams pay attention to what founders do because behaviour often tells them far more about what’s genuinely expected than any employee handbook ever could.
Perhaps that’s one of the more uncomfortable realities of leadership. You don’t get to decide whether you’re influential. You only get to decide how thoughtfully you use that influence.
A Casual Suggestion Isn’t Always Casual When You’re the Boss
Founders are idea people. It’s part of what makes them good at what they do. They notice opportunities, make connections quickly and have thoughts about what the business could be doing next, often before everyone else has finished implementing the last idea. In the early stages of a company, this energy can be incredibly valuable. When the team grows, however, the same spontaneity can create an entirely different effect.
Imagine mentioning in a Monday meeting that you’ve been thinking about starting a podcast. To you, it’s simply an interesting thought. You’re not proposing a launch date, allocating a budget or asking anyone to do anything. By Wednesday, someone on the marketing team has researched microphones, another person has looked at competitors and somebody else is wondering which existing project should be pushed back to make room for it. The founder thinks they had a conversation. The team thinks they’ve been given a new priority.
This is where power imbalance becomes important, and not necessarily in the dramatic way we tend to think about power at work. Every workplace has some degree of hierarchy, but founders occupy a particularly unusual position because they’re often simultaneously the visionary, decision-maker, employer and person most emotionally invested in the company. Even in wonderfully open cultures, employees understand that the person across the table ultimately signs off on salaries, promotions and sometimes whether their role continues to exist. That doesn’t mean teams are frightened of their founders. It simply means words carry different weight depending on who says them.
Good leadership isn’t about becoming so cautious that you stop sharing ideas. It’s about learning to give those ideas context. Saying, “This is just something I’m thinking about, please don’t do anything with it,” sounds almost comically obvious, but clarity can save an enormous amount of unnecessary work and anxiety.
People Notice What You Reward, Not Just What You Say
Most modern businesses know the language of healthy workplace culture. We talk about flexibility, wellbeing, psychological safety and sustainable work practices, and in many cases founders genuinely believe in all of them. The difficulty is that teams don’t learn culture exclusively from what leaders say. They learn it by watching what leaders reward.
A founder might tell everyone to switch off at five while personally sending emails until midnight. They might encourage people to take their annual leave while proudly mentioning that they haven’t had a proper holiday in three years. They might insist mistakes are part of learning, then visibly panic the first time something goes wrong. None of this necessarily comes from hypocrisy. Founders often hold themselves to standards they’d never consciously expect from their employees, particularly when the company still feels deeply personal to them. The trouble is that employees can’t always tell the difference.
If the person at the top consistently works through lunch, responds instantly on weekends and appears permanently available, it can create an unspoken benchmark. Nobody needs to announce that this is what commitment looks like. People are remarkably good at reading the room, particularly when their livelihood is connected to it. Over time, the behaviours that receive praise, attention and opportunity become much more powerful cultural signals than whatever happens to be written beneath “Our Values” on the company website.
That doesn’t mean founders need to pretend they never work late. Different people work differently, and entrepreneurship rarely fits neatly between nine and five. What matters is making the distinction visible. “I’m sending this now because it suits me, but I don’t expect you to read it until tomorrow” is a very different message from silence. Small pieces of context can prevent personal working habits from quietly becoming company-wide expectations.
The Emotional Weather Usually Starts at the Top
There is another form of founder influence that’s even harder to measure: mood.
Anyone who has worked closely with a founder knows how quickly their emotional state can ripple through a company. When the founder is energised, optimistic and excited about what’s coming next, that feeling can be contagious. When they’re stressed, withdrawn or unusually quiet, people notice that too. Sometimes they’ll invent explanations long before anyone has actually told them something is wrong.
This is especially true during uncertain periods. Perhaps a large client has left, funding is tight or a deal hasn’t gone as planned. The founder understandably carries the emotional weight of that situation, but the team may only see fragments of it. A closed-door meeting, an unusually serious expression or a sudden request to review budgets can quickly become the beginning of an entirely fictional story about redundancies before lunch.
Leadership doesn’t require pretending everything is wonderful when it isn’t. In fact, forced optimism has its own problems, and most teams are perfectly capable of recognising when they’re being given a polished version of reality. What helps is emotional clarity. A founder can have a difficult day and say, “I’m distracted because something unrelated is happening, so please don’t read into it.” They can acknowledge that a quarter has been challenging without making everyone feel responsible for carrying their anxiety.
The goal isn’t emotional perfection. Nobody wants to work for a robot, and founders shouldn’t have to become one. It’s simply recognising that when you’re leading people, your internal weather has a slightly unfortunate habit of becoming everyone else’s forecast.
Psychological Safety Is Tested When Someone Disagrees With You
It’s relatively easy to create a culture where people feel comfortable agreeing with the founder. The more revealing question is what happens when they don’t.
Most leaders will say they want honest feedback. They want employees to challenge ideas, point out risks and tell them when something isn’t working. The real test comes when someone actually does it, particularly when the founder is enthusiastic about the idea being challenged. Does the conversation remain genuinely curious, or does the room suddenly become a little colder? Does the person who disagreed continue being invited into important conversations, or do they quietly learn that honesty has consequences?
Again, this doesn’t require malicious leadership. Founders are human, and hearing criticism about something you’ve built can feel remarkably personal. A business that began as an idea in your head may still feel like an extension of yourself years later, which makes separating disagreement from rejection surprisingly difficult. Yet the ability to do exactly that becomes increasingly important as a company grows. If everyone around a founder learns that enthusiasm is rewarded more reliably than honesty, eventually the founder stops hearing what they need to hear.
Some of the strongest leaders we’ve encountered aren’t the ones with the best answers. They’re the ones who’ve created enough trust that somebody in the room can comfortably say, “I don’t think that’s going to work,” without immediately updating their LinkedIn profile afterwards.
Influence Can Be a Force for Good
It’s easy for conversations about power and influence to become slightly ominous, as though the lesson is that founders need to spend every meeting terrified of accidentally ruining somebody’s day. That’s not particularly useful, and it also ignores the enormous positive influence leaders can have.
The same authority that can unintentionally create pressure can also create permission. When a founder openly takes a holiday, it tells everyone else that rest is legitimate. When they admit they don’t know something, it makes uncertainty safer for everyone in the room. When they respond to a mistake with curiosity rather than blame, people become more willing to experiment. When they publicly credit someone else’s work, they show that contribution is noticed. These moments may seem small from the founder’s perspective, but that’s precisely the point. Leadership culture is rarely built through one enormous gesture. It’s built through hundreds of ordinary ones.
There is something hopeful in that. Founders don’t need to become perfect leaders before they can create healthy companies, nor do they need to anticipate every possible interpretation of everything they say. They simply need enough self-awareness to recognise that their position changes the impact of their behaviour. Influence becomes far more constructive when it’s acknowledged rather than ignored.
Perhaps the best leaders aren’t those who try to have less influence. They’re the ones who become increasingly thoughtful about the kind of influence they want to have.
Final Thoughts
Founders spend a great deal of time thinking about the obvious responsibilities of leadership. Revenue, strategy, hiring, clients and growth all demand attention, and they’re relatively easy to see because businesses have numbers and dashboards designed to measure them. The quieter responsibility is understanding the environment we’re creating simply by being in the room.
A comment can create momentum. A reaction can determine whether someone speaks honestly next time. A working habit can become an expectation without anyone deliberately making it one. Equally, a little reassurance can give somebody confidence, a thoughtful response to failure can make experimentation feel safer and a founder who genuinely models the culture they talk about can influence hundreds of small decisions long after they’ve left the meeting.
That’s the psychology of influence in leadership. It isn’t really about charisma, persuasion or having the loudest voice. It’s about recognising that leadership amplifies us, including the parts of ourselves we may not realise other people are watching.
The question isn’t whether founders influence the people around them. They inevitably do. The more interesting question is what those people learn from watching.
What kind of leader are you becoming?
At Follow The Founder, we’re interested in the conversations behind the job title, including the parts of leadership that don’t appear in a business plan. Because building a great company isn’t only about what you achieve. It’s also about the environment you create for the people building it alongside you.
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