627: Why Your Team Stops Telling You What You Need to Know—and What It Means for Your Executive Presence
627: Why Your Team Stops Telling You What You Need to Know—and What It Means for Your Executive Presence  
Podcast: Speak Up: Develop Your Executive Presence & Leadership Communication Style
Published On: Wed Sep 16 2026
Description: Know Your Own Executive Presence Strengths & Opportunities:Click here to pinpoint the specific area in your executive presence that’s keeping you invisible to senior leadership and guarantees you stay working hard as a pack mule who never gets promoted.Today you can actually learn how to know if your executive influence is where you think it is. Listen today to learn this life changing skill. Under pressure, it’s easy to slip into a reactive, defensive, or judgmental mindset. But the questions you ask yourself and others can determine how your team responds, how much information people are willing to share, and whether you make decisions from curiosity or judgment.In this episode of the Speak Up podcast, Laura welcomes Marilee Adams, CEO of the Inquiry Institute, to explore how leaders can use questions to improve their communication, executive presence, decision-making, and relationships. In today’s episode you’ll discover:💡Why powerful inquiry actually begins with the questions you silently ask yourself—and how changing those questions can change how you show up as a leader🔎How to recognize when you’ve slipped into a “judger” mindset and intentionally shift back into a curious, open-minded “learner” mindset.🎯The exact question you need to ask yourself to help you design better questions that invite conversation instead of triggering defensiveness.Play the episode to discover how asking better questions can help you stay present under pressure, empower the people around you, and become a more effective leader.Access the Executive Presence Scorecard assessment here.To learn more visit www.speakupwithlaura.com. New Speak Up podcast episodes come out every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday early in the morning.About our guest:Meet Marilee Adams, an award-winning author, leadership expert, and pioneer of inquiry-based coaching. Through her work as founder and CEO of The Inquiry Institute, Adams has helped leaders, coaches, and organizations transform how they think, decide, and lead.To uncover her proven approach, readers can turn to her bestselling book, Change Your Questions, Change Your Life, Fifth Edition. With more than half a million copies sold in twenty-two languages, this refreshed edition shows how a simple shift in questioning can unlock clarity, confidence, and lasting results, at work and at home.The book is a powerful fable that follows Ben Knight on a transformative journey, guided by fourteen practical tools for Question Thinking. Along the way, readers learn to use the Choice Map, a powerful visual tool that reveals how everyday questions shape our mindset. The Speak Up Podcast helps high-performing professionals develop executive presence through strategic communication, executive confidence, and leadership influence. Each episode provides practical strategies to help you speak up in meetings, communicate with senior leaders, present ideas with clarity, build executive visibility, strengthen your leadership presence, influence without authority, stop overexplaining, answer difficult questions with confidence, and become a trusted executive leader. Whether you're preparing for your next Vice President promotion or looking to communicate with greater credibility and gravitas, you'll learn actionable executive communication skills that accelerate career growth.Topics covered in this episode:Executive presence and leadership communicationHow leaders can ask better questionsLearner mindset vs. judger mindsetBuilding trust and psychological safety on teamsGetting employees to tell leaders the truthEmotional self-regulation for leadersCommunicating and influencing under pressureHandling difficult questions in high-stakes meetingsUsing curiosity to improve leadership and decision-makingHow executive leaders build influence and trustPreparing for board meetings and executive presentationsActive listening and understanding othersAvoiding defensive communication as a leaderAsking questions that empower employees and teamsImproving executive decision-making through better questionsExecutive presence during conflict and tensionHow leadership behavior affects employee communicationDeveloping emotional and social intelligence as a leader