The leadership skill that separates good founders from the truly great ones

Here’s an uncomfortable truth: you are one badly handled conversation away from losing everything you’ve sacrificed for.

The ability to persuade, connect, and genuinely influence the people around you has quietly become the make-or-break capability of this era – more so than your product, your pitch deck, or the size of your Seed round. And yet most founders treat it as an afterthought, a soft skill to polish once the “real” work is done.

When the ship is sailing and investors are nodding along, anyone can look like a leader. Your team believes in the vision, they’re all-in on the mission, morale is high. Fine. Great, even. But that’s not when leadership actually matters. The real test – and I mean the gut-wrenching, no-script-for-this kind – is when things go sideways and you’re being pulled in twelve directions at once.

So let’s be brutally honest. When the pressure cranks up, what happens? Do you snap? Do you lash out at whoever’s closest? Do the cracks start spreading in ways you’d be mortified to see on camera?

If any of that lands even a little bit, stay with me. Because what I want to hand you here is the practical, high-impact playbook for actually navigating, and genuinely elevating, your leadership from ‘pretty good’ to something people remember.

When the plan falls apart, your negotiation, persuasion, and influence muscles are what get tested. But, and here’s the kicker, you can’t suddenly conjure those skills mid-crisis. They have to be built through daily practice, deliberate repetition, consciously paying attention to how you show up every single day.

Emotional control and genuine empathy outweigh every other capability in a crunch moment. If you’re dysregulated and throwing your weight around like a bull in a China shop, the thing you end up breaking isn’t a project timeline. It’s trust. And trust, once fractured with a team you’re trying to lead through uncertainty, takes a long, painful time to rebuild.

The hybrid negotiator – a new kind of leader

Right now, there’s a widening split happening among leaders. On one side, you’ve got those who are genuinely adapting to the pace of change. They’re uncomfortable, yes, but doing it anyway. On the other, there are those who are quietly hoping nobody notices they’ve been shortcutting. That second group has maybe a few years left, but probably less.

There’s a new professional archetype emerging from all of this, one I call the ‘hybrid negotiator’. Someone who genuinely understands why human connection matters and can hold steady while scaling through disruption, all while using AI the way a smart executive uses a trusted colleague: delegating intelligently, not outsourcing blindly.

I know what you’re thinking. “Sounds doable, so what’s the big deal?”

Here’s what most people miss: most professionals are using AI completely wrong. Not because they’re not trying – they definitely are – but because of how they fundamentally see it. They treat it like a text-and-answer vending machine. Ask a question, get a response, copy-paste, move on. That’s not leverage. That’s barely scratching the surface.

The mindset shift that separates the top 1% is they treat AI as a collaborator. They consider AI as a colleague, and while you wouldn’t hand a new team member a vague half-sentence task and expect a polished deliverable, but we constantly expect the same of AI.  We expect it to perform miracles without giving it the context, the constraints, or any real sense of what ‘good’ looks like. That’s on us.

Beyond that, use multiple LLMs. Stress-test your thinking. Let different tools challenge your assumptions, expose blind spots, poke holes in your logic. Inviting disagreement into your workflow isn’t weakness; it’s exactly how improvements happen.

And please, master your prompting. Not in an obsessive way, but enough to stop shortcutting. Most people think they’re prompting well. Most aren’t. If the output sounds indistinguishable from every other generic AI-generated piece of content floating around the internet… well. You’re one of them, and you probably know it.

Better prompting produces differentiated output. To get there, I use the CODO framework in every prompt: Character (tell it who to be, e.g. “you are a Founder who’s raised X in capital and has deep expertise in growth strategy”); Objective (the specific problem, and ask whether this is actually the real problem or whether there’s a deeper one underneath); Do’s and Don’ts (no guessing, no jargon, fact-check and cite); Output (define what success looks like, is it a table, five bullet points, or a one-pager).

Another thing you should remember about AI is it’s multimodal. This means you should be in a genuine dialogue with it. Talk to it, brainstorm over a screenshare, upload documents and images, give it as much context as you’d give a smart colleague on their first day.

Rules for influence worth actually following

The person least attached to the outcome controls the negotiation. Full stop. Yet I watch leaders tense up, react visibly, practically broadcast their desperation at the first flicker of friction. Don’t be that person.

Magnetic influence – the kind that actually moves people – sits at the intersection of the hybrid negotiator’s toolkit: genuine warmth, sharpened human judgment, and the intelligent use of AI as amplifier, not replacement. This is the precise skillset Founders need to be actively developing and deliberately training within their teams.

See Also

Gen Z is rewriting the entrepreneurial playbook

The World Economic Forum outlines four potential futures for the new economy in 2030. The right-hand side of the chart is where we will likely end up. This is a scenario where technological adoption is rampant and widespread, yet the geopolitical context remains volatile. Named “Tech Based Survival” it describes an economy abundant in opportunity; however, lacking in trust, stability and coordination.

What that means for you, in practice, is this: in a world drowning in information, influence becomes genuinely scarce. Whoever can cut through, with presence, clarity and actual human connection, holds an advantage that no AI tool can replicate or commoditise.

To build that kind of magnetic presence, you’re fully there. Not in your head rehearsing your next line and not half-checking your phone. You’re actually present, holding eye contact, deliberately slowing your responses down. It sounds simple, but it isn’t. Most people never manage it consistently.

Some principles worth embedding:

• Share meaningful impact. To sales teams, I say “if it were easy, anyone could do it”. I want them to build the mindset that as salespeople they are integral to the success of the business, and that the road is going to be filled with challenges. Rather than feel defeated by them, as simple reframe allows them to feel proud of what they get to do and see the hurdles as normal. This builds resilience
• Build culture around clear communication with warmth. It’s about developing a culture with deep psychological safety. Having clarity is one thing, but if you sound like you are just regurgitating ChatGPT, you may well be replaced by it, and for good reason. Great leaders level with their team, if things are changing, and times are turbulent they move them away from fear through transparency, connection, calm and give off an energy of steadiness. No AI in the world can replicate this the way a human leader can
• Be the living embodiment of your own values. No getting flustered in front of the team, no zooming out. refusing to gossip, saying ‘no’ to the deals that are unsustainable. People connect when they can see a leader authentically living the values they promote. Cognitive dissonance and lack of respect appears when a leader is selective and has one rule for some individuals and another for others. Don’t let your standard drop – remember, respect is earned
• Be the calm in the storm. This is the number one skill that builds trust, when everyone is losing their mind and the stakes are high, you are focused on momentum, options, creating and expanding value. You don’t get caught up in the negativity. Your energetic vibration signals smooth sailing, calm composure and focus
• Above all, take action. The remedy for anxiety and creating momentum together is what counts. Now is the time of the hybrid negotiator and deliberate and intentional use of magnetic influence stand out and get deeper levels of buy-in in the AI centric era of constant disruption and change

Maximising influence in the AI age

High turnover. Blame culture. Emotional intelligence in the gutter. A leader who should probably be an individual contributor but somehow ended up managing fifteen people. These are the warning signs of a business teetering on the edge of something unpleasant.

To turn that around:

• Stop hiding behind screens and digital-only communication
• Fight for your team – not for how your performance looks to the board
• Have in-person meetings and actually share, authentically
• Go the extra mile – the little things matter in ways you can’t measure
• Be the trusted advisor in the room, not the gossip or the political operator

At the core of it, information is now abundant. This means influence – genuine, human, trust-based influence – is scarce. Your impact lives in your ability to lead your people, which comes from human connection, trust and sound judgement. These are aspects a chat bot can’t automate. The mistake is, many leaders are trying to.