Increase Your Organisation’s Engagement: 79% vs 22%

David Buirs - Leadership Coach & Management Trainer

Increase your organisation's engagement: why 79% of managers at the best companies are engaged, and only 22% everywhere else

David Buirs is a Leadership & Executive Coach in Amsterdam who delivers in-company management training. This article covers how to increase your organisation's engagement, drawing on Gallup's State of the Global Workplace 2026. The reader learns why the management layer determines engagement across the whole company, what psychological mechanism drives it, and which three steps make the difference.

Europe has the lowest employee engagement in the world. Twelve percent.

That figure comes from Gallup's State of the Global Workplace 2026, based on more than 141,000 employed respondents across over 140 countries. Globally, engagement fell to 20 percent, the lowest point since 2020. The estimated cost: 10 trillion dollars in lost productivity per year. To make that number tangible: that's roughly what Germany and Japan produce together in an entire year. Two of the largest economies on earth. Drained away in people who log in reluctantly.

If you want to increase your organisation's engagement, the cause of the decline probably sits closer to home than you think. With your managers. This article shows what the data says, why poor leadership pulls engagement down so hard, and which three steps make the difference.

The Numbers That Keep HR Awake

The quarterly figures from your HR audit come in. The eNPS has stagnated. Absenteeism is climbing. Turnover among your high potentials in the Amsterdam region is rising.

You are far from alone. Gallup has been measuring this since 2009, across 5.75 million respondents. The trend of recent years is clear: engagement is falling for the second year running.

What stands out in the latest edition is where that decline comes from.

The Management Layer Carries the Decline

Between 2024 and 2025, engagement among managers fell from 27 to 22 percent. Five points in a single year. Since 2022 they have lost nine points.

Among employees without leadership responsibilities, the figure stayed relatively stable, somewhere between 18 and 20 percent.

For years, managers held an advantage. Gallup calls it the engagement premium. They were more engaged than the people they led, and they passed that energy on. That advantage has nearly vanished. Managers are now about as engaged as their teams.

Which is precisely the problem. Gallup consistently finds that managers account for 70 percent of the variance in team engagement. What the manager feels, the team feels within a quarter.

Why Poor Management Damages Engagement So Badly

Almost everyone nods along at the claim that a manager makes the difference. Far fewer people can explain how that works mechanically. And that's exactly where the key sits.

Engagement emerges when three psychological needs are met. Autonomy, competence, and relatedness. That is the core of self-determination theory, one of the most robustly supported motivation theories in psychology. A manager influences all three, every single day.

Autonomy disappears under micromanagement. A manager who checks everything out of insecurity takes away control. Without control, work feels like executing someone else's plan. Motivation evaporates.

Competence goes unfed without feedback. People want to grow and want to know where they stand. A manager who avoids difficult conversations leaves people guessing for years. Someone who has no idea whether they deliver good work stops trying to improve.

Relatedness collapses under ambiguity. Without psychological safety, people keep quiet. They share no mistakes, no ideas, no concerns. What remains is presence without engagement.

Then there's the contagion effect. Emotions transfer across a team, and the manager broadcasts loudest. An exhausted leader who walks into a meeting with no energy passes that on to eight people at once. Tired managers make tired teams. It really is that simple.

Most Leaders Motivate on Instinct

Here sits the sore spot I encounter in nearly every programme.

Ask a manager how they motivate their people, and you get an answer built on intuition. A bonus dangled ahead. A compliment in the team meeting. A bit of extra pressure during a tense week.

That intuition is structurally off. External incentives such as reward and pressure work briefly and weaken intrinsic motivation over the long run. Research has shown this for decades. Yet the vast majority of leaders still operate this way, because nobody ever explained how it actually works.

Motivating people intrinsically is a skill with a scientific foundation. You learn to ask the right question instead of giving the instruction. You learn to hand back autonomy without losing control. You learn to express appreciation in a way that lands, rather than the standard phrase everyone recognizes as ritual.

That is exactly what I teach leaders. The change in team behaviour becomes visible within a few months.

The Number That Proves It Can Be Different

Here comes the finding I get most excited about.

In organisations Gallup identifies as best-practice, 79 percent of managers are engaged. Nearly four times the global average of 22 percent. Read that again. Four times. That is an enormous gap, larger than what most interventions ever deliver.

Those organisations sit across every region and every sector. There is no industry where this proves impossible. What they share: engagement sits on the strategic agenda, year after year. They treat it as a structural investment.

The distance between 22 and 79 percent is the room your organisation has to move.

The Cost of the Unprepared Manager

Many managers rolled into their role because of their subject-matter expertise. The best developer becomes team lead. The strongest account manager gets a team. They said yes to that role, often with enthusiasm. Only nobody prepared them for what comes next.

Roughly half of all managers have never received management training.

That explains a great deal of what HR faces daily. In many companies I see HR spending most of its time putting out fires that started from a lack of effective leadership. The conflict that ran too long. The sick leave that was entirely predictable. The exit interview where the same name comes up again.

These managers have good intentions. They simply never received guidance.

What follows in practice:

Absenteeism climbs. A manager who misses the early signals of stress sees the burnout only when it's too late.

Retention drops. In a market like Amsterdam, talent moves the moment the relationship with their direct manager sours. People rarely leave a company. They leave a manager.

Engagement sinks. Without clear direction and without feeling appreciated, employees lose their connection to the purpose of the work.

Holding difficult conversations. Running meetings that produce something. Addressing underperformance without breaking the relationship. Motivating people intrinsically. These are all skills. They can be learned. Without guidance, they tend to fail in practice.

Three Steps to Increase Your Organisation's Engagement

The data consistently points in the same direction. If you want to raise engagement structurally, you start with the layer that determines everyone else's engagement.

1. Measure manager engagement separately.

Most organisations track a single engagement score for the whole company. That way you miss the signal. Split your data. Follow the engagement of your management layer as its own KPI, quarter after quarter.

Falling manager engagement predicts falling team engagement, usually with a lag of one or two quarters. You get an early warning system instead of a postmortem.

2. Train managers in coaching leadership and intrinsic motivation.

Gallup has given the same advice for years: teach your managers to coach. As AI takes over more technical tasks, the ability to ask the right question matters more than the ability to supply the answer.

Coaching leadership means you let people grow instead of taking over their work. It means asking where you used to advise. It is the skill that creates ownership in teams, and ownership is the engine underneath engagement.

In my programmes I teach managers exactly this kind of conversation, alongside the mechanics of intrinsic motivation. The effect is measurable: teams that solve their own problems, and an HR department with fewer fires to put out.

3. Treat engagement as strategy rather than as a project.

This separates the organisations at 79 percent from everyone else. They run no engagement programme that expires after a year. They hold a strategic priority that returns every year in the budget and on the board agenda.

A one-day training changes nothing. That is one of the central insights from educational science. The Ebbinghaus forgetting curve shows that people lose roughly 90 percent of material delivered in a single session within a week. Behavioural change comes from meaningful repetition over a longer period.

What This Delivers for Your HR Agenda

When management genuinely takes up the role, you see it on four fronts.

Higher retention. Talent stays where it feels seen and where it can grow.

Lower absenteeism. Calm on the work floor translates directly into a smaller claim on the absence budget.

A measurably higher eNPS. In black and white, so you can account for the result to the board.

Ownership in every team. Your managers solve their own problems. Your calendar frees up for strategic policy.

Where Do You Start?

Look at your management layer first. How engaged are they? When did anyone last ask them?

Ask them what they need. Ask them when they last received training in holding a difficult conversation. In most organisations, a painful silence follows.

That silence is your starting point.

In my in-company training program we work on exactly these skills. Conversation, intrinsic motivation, psychological safety, and ownership. Built on educational science principles, with measurable results on absenteeism, retention, and eNPS.

For an individual manager who needs focused support, coaching for managers is often the fastest route to change.

Curious what's happening in your organisation? Let's chat. Plan your free introduction here. Zero obligation.

You can find the full data in Gallup's State of the Global Workplace 2026.

Business Coaching for Leaders: Which Form Fits You?

David Buirs - Executive Coach

Business coaching for leaders: what it is and which form fits you

David Buirs is a Leadership & Executive Coach based in Amsterdam. This article covers business coaching for leaders, an umbrella term for leadership coaching and executive coaching. The reader learns what separates the two forms, which themes appear in both, when a coaching track makes sense, and how to choose a certified coach.

You type "business coaching for leaders" into Google. And you get a wall of pages that all seem to promise something slightly different.

That's because it's an umbrella term. Business coaching means coaching aimed at a professional context, at your work and your role in it. Leaders who search for it almost always mean one of two things: leadership coaching or executive coaching. This article explains what separates the two, which themes show up in both, and how to know which form fits your situation.

What Is Business Coaching for Leaders?

Business coaching for leaders is a one-on-one track where you work on how you lead. On your behaviour, your communication, your decisions, and the beliefs underneath them.

You sit with someone who has no stake in the politics of your organization. Someone who asks about what you say, and about what you avoid. Who sometimes offers a model, sometimes asks a question, and sometimes stays quiet while you reach the conclusion yourself.

A session usually lasts an hour. You bring a real situation. That conversation you keep postponing. The reorganization you dread. The team member who drains your energy.

The Difference Between Leadership Coaching and Executive Coaching

Business coaching for leaders, leadership coaching, and executive coaching are fundamentally the same service. The distinction sits in the level of the leader, and therefore in the themes that come to the table.

Leadership coaching focuses more on junior and mid-level leaders. Team leads, managers, people who recently stepped into a bigger role. The themes tend to be operational. Delegating without taking everything back. Performance management. Building ownership in a team that keeps looking to you for every answer.

Executive coaching focuses on senior leaders, directors, and C-level. Different questions play out there. Executive presence. Communicating in the boardroom. Translating strategy and vision into something people will stand behind. Making big decisions while everyone watches.

The Themes That Show Up in Both

The overlap is larger than people expect.

Harsh self-criticism comes up in both programs. A team lead who lies awake after a difficult meeting, replaying it for hours. And a director who, after thirty years, still hears a voice saying it should have been better. That voice sounds the same regardless of your pay grade.

Wanting to communicate better. Too blunt, too careful, too little empathy, too little assertiveness. Nearly every leader recognizes themselves in at least one of those four.

Finding more balance. The calendar that fills up with other people's priorities.

And confidence. In both forms, that's often where it ends up. Confidence to make the call. To set the boundary. To be yourself in a role that sometimes seems to demand you become someone else.

When Do You Need a Coach as a Leader?

Many leaders see a coach as a corrective measure. Something offered to you when things go wrong.

Look at sport. The best athletes in the world all have a coach. They perform at the top and want to stay there. Leadership works the same way.

A few moments where a track delivers real value:

You just got promoted and the role feels bigger than you. The skills that got you here won't take you further.

There's a conversation in your head you've been postponing for weeks.

Your team looks to you for every problem. You spend your days putting out fires.

You perform well, and you sense there's more in you and in your team.

You're the only person at your level in the organization. There's nobody to think out loud with. That last one I hear most often from senior leaders. The higher you climb, the fewer people dare to ask you the question you need.

Does Business Coaching for Leaders Actually Work?

Research on coaching consistently shows effects on confidence, communication, and goal achievement. The honest answer is more nuanced than a percentage.

Coaching works when three things line up.

You want it yourself. A track imposed on you while you consider it nonsense delivers very little.

There's a click with the coach. This is the strongest predictor of results. Which is why nearly every serious coach offers a free introduction.

You do something between the sessions. The session is where you understand. The week after is where you practice.

What you notice after a good track: you make decisions faster. You postpone fewer conversations. Your team brings solutions instead of problems.

How to Choose a Good Coach

Certification. The coaching market is unregulated. Anyone can call themselves a coach. Look for ICF accreditation and serious training such as Co-Active. That guarantees a structured methodology and an ethical code.

Real leadership experience. There's a difference between someone who has mastered coaching techniques and someone who has run a department. The second one knows how it feels to announce a reorganization, or to let go of someone you like.

The click. Book an introduction and pay attention to what happens. Do you feel free to say what you actually think? Are you challenged, or only confirmed? Do you leave with more clarity than you arrived with?

What It Costs and Which Form Fits You

A serious track consists of multiple sessions across several months. Behavioural change takes time. One session gives insight. A track gives new behaviour that sticks. The investment usually runs to a few thousand euros. Many employers cover this from the training budget, even when you're the one who asks.

For the form, look at the themes you recognize. Delegating, giving feedback, performance management, ownership in your team, finding your footing in a new role. Then leadership coaching is your fit.

Executive presence, boardroom dynamics, strategy, vision, isolation at director level. Then executive coaching is the logical form.

Still unsure? Ask in an introduction call. Within twenty minutes it's usually clear where you belong.

In my coaching for managers, we work on exactly these themes, shaped around your situation and your team. For leaders at director level, executive coaching amsterdam is the logical next step, since the decisions carry more weight and the context grows more complex.

For organizations that want to develop the entire management team at once, an in-company training program is a logical step.

Interested or curious? Let's chat. Plan your free introduction here. Zero obligation.

You can read more about the ethical code and accreditation standards for coaches at the International Coaching Federation.

Skills in the AI Age: the Mistake Smart Leaders Make

David Buirs - Leadership Coach & Management Trainer

The mistake smart leaders make without realizing it: handing their judgment to AI

David Buirs is a Leadership & Executive Coach based in Amsterdam. This article covers skills in the AI age: why judgment is becoming the leadership skill that matters most as AI takes over more analytical and administrative tasks. The reader learns why AI labs are hiring philosophers, the mistake many leaders make without noticing, and three habits for keeping judgment sharp.

A philosophy graduate currently finds work more easily than a computer science graduate.

Almost nobody saw that coming. A few years ago every student got the same advice: learn to code if you want a future. Today the big AI labs are lining up for philosophers instead. The Economist reported on this recently. In 2024, 7 percent of computer science graduates were unemployed. Among philosophy graduates, that number was lower.

That flips the career logic of the last decade on its head. And it says something about which skills in the AI age actually hold their value. That's what this article is about: the mistake many smart, ambitious leaders make, often without noticing.

Why AI Labs Are Hiring Philosophers

The labs hire philosophers to teach their models how to weigh what's right. They feed them Kant and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Anthropic, the company behind Claude, builds those sources directly into the model's foundational rules.

That turns out to be the hardest thing to build into a machine. AI can already write code, and it gets better every year. Judging right from wrong, fair from unfair, what a situation actually calls for, is a different matter. So the biggest tech companies in the world bring in people who have spent their lives thinking about exactly those questions.

Let that sink in. The builders of AI find human judgment so scarce and so valuable that they pay top salaries for it.

The Mistake: Outsourcing Your Own Judgment

Here's the mistake many smart leaders make. I count myself among them.

I sometimes catch myself asking AI how to interpret a situation. Or what the right course of action is. The answer comes back, well written and confident. And I think: so that's the right answer. Solved, on to the next thing.

Later, when I think it over, that answer sometimes turns out to be off, given all the facts and circumstances. It just sounded right.

The mistake sits right there. The answer that comes back sounds convincing, but it's the statistically most likely answer to similar questions, drawn from a massive dataset. That doesn't mean it's right for you.

Critics of this trend have a name for it: ethical illiteracy. When machines answer the difficult questions for us, we slowly stop trusting our own judgment. Like a muscle you stop using.

And the risk is highest for the leaders who use AI the most. Whoever adopts fastest, whoever turns to AI for every question, hits this trap first. The more you lean on AI for interpretation, the faster that muscle weakens.

For Leaders, Judgment Is the Job

For most professions, this is an interesting observation. For leaders, it's existential.

Judgment is the core of the role. Whether someone deserves another chance. Whether your feedback was fair. Whether to protect or confront that one team member. Whether this is the right moment for a reorganization.

No dashboard exists for these calls. There's always context only you have: that person's history, the mood in the room, your own gut, trained by years of experience.

A language model knows that context only to the extent you type it in, which is by definition a filtered, simplified version of reality. The answer that comes back sounds certain, while it's built on a fraction of what you actually know.

How to Keep Your Judgment Sharp

I use AI daily myself, for all kinds of things. It comes down to sequence and role. Three habits I follow, and recommend to leaders:

1. Decide first. Form your own judgment before consulting AI. Write two sentences: this is what I think, and here's why. Only then let AI challenge you. That keeps the muscle working.

2. Treat AI as an outside advisor. A good advisor offers perspectives, asks questions, points out blind spots. The decision itself belongs to the leader. That's true for your strategy consultant, and it's true for AI.

3. Train it deliberately. Judgment grows by seeking out difficult situations, reflecting on them, and talking them through. With a sparring partner who asks questions rather than hands you answers.

My gut is often closer to the mark than AI's. Yours probably is too. AI makes an excellent advisor. The judgment call stays ours. That's what we can still do better than any machine.

When did you last make a hard decision without checking with AI first?

In coaching for managers, this is exactly the muscle we work on: recognizing and trusting your own judgment, even under pressure. For leaders at director level, executive coaching amsterdam is a natural next step, since the decisions carry more weight and the context grows more complex.

For organizations that want to build this across the whole management team, an in-company management training is a logical next step.

Curious how this shows up for you or your team? Plan your free introduction here.

Source: NPR spoke with journalist Benjamin Sutherland about his reporting for The Economist on why AI labs are hiring philosophers.

How to Have Difficult Conversations as a Manager

David Buirs | Leadership Coach & Management Trainer

How to have difficult conversations as a manager in 6 steps

David Buirs is a leadership coach in Amsterdam. This article covers how to have a difficult conversation with an employee, in six concrete steps. You learn why you keep postponing the talk and how to handle it without your employee getting defensive.

You have a difficult conversation as a manager in six steps: prepare for your own part, name the behaviour concretely, check your assumption, allow a silence, agree on something specific, and follow up. The order helps. The real work sits before it, in how you look at the conversation before you walk into the room. I cover both below.

Why you have been postponing that talk for weeks

You know which conversation I mean. There is probably one that has been on your list for a couple of weeks now.

You postpone it because something feels at stake that is bigger than the conversation itself. Often you are protecting a story about yourself. "I am the one who keeps the mood good." Or the opposite: "I am direct, people know where they stand with me." That story feels like a strength. And it is one, until it starts making your decisions for you.

The moment you water a conversation down until almost nothing is left, or push it another week, you let the story win. That has consequences. For your team, and for the behaviour you actually want to change.

Leaving something unspoken is a choice too. Only one you pay for more dearly later.

The six steps

Models like Radical Candor and Nonviolent Communication already exist. They work. Yet many managers get stuck, because they know the technique but have no idea where to begin in the moment itself. These six steps give you that structure.

  1. Prepare for your own part. Before you work out what the other person is doing wrong, ask yourself one question: which story about myself am I protecting by avoiding this conversation? And: did I contribute something to this situation myself? A conversation where you put all the blame on the other person almost always stalls.
  2. Name the behaviour, not the person. Say what you concretely see. "The last three reports were late" lands differently from "you are unreliable." The first is about behaviour someone can change. The second is about who someone is, and every employee pushes back against that.
  3. Check your assumption out loud. You have an explanation in your head for the behaviour. It might be wrong. Ask about it. "I notice the deadlines are slipping. What is going on?" That way you make room for a story you do not know yet, and you avoid spending a whole conversation on the wrong cause.
  4. Allow a silence. After your opening you will want to fill the tension with words. Resist it. Stay quiet. The other person needs a moment to respond, and those few seconds of discomfort often produce the most honest part of the conversation.
  5. Agree on something concrete. A good conversation without a next step evaporates. Close with something measurable. What changes, from when, and how will you both see whether it is working. Vague optimism at the end feels nice, but changes nothing.
  6. Follow up. Come back to it briefly within a week or two. That shows the conversation was no one-off and that you mean it. And it gives you the chance to appreciate what did improve, which makes the next time easier.

Why the technique alone is not enough

You can learn these six steps by heart and still avoid the conversation. That happens because the brake rarely sits with the technique. The brake sits with how you see yourself. As long as you believe that being honest makes you less empathic, you keep postponing, however many step-by-step plans you know.

Real change happens when you start to see yourself as someone who can do both. Warm and clear. The feedback you keep delaying comes from the same care that makes you so likeable. You say something because you want this person to grow and not be caught off guard six months from now.

If you are more on the direct side, you already do the naming well. Your gain sits in the tone. You speak as if you are talking to someone whose best interest you have at heart.

In the business coaching for leaders I do, this is the pattern that comes back most often. The question is rarely "how do I say this." The question is "who do I want to be when I say it." For leaders at director level, executive coaching is a logical deepening of that same work.

Start small

Take that one conversation that keeps sitting on your list. Walk through the six steps once on paper. What do you concretely see, what is your assumption, what agreement do you want to make. And ask yourself that first question: which story about myself am I keeping alive by avoiding this conversation.

That preparation makes the conversation itself a good deal lighter. For a leader who wants to train these skills in a focused way, a 1-on-1 leadership program is a logical next step.

Interested or curious? Let's chat. Plan your free introduction here. Zero obligation.

Development of Senior Leaders Rests on One Thing

Leadership & Executive Coach | David Buirs

Development of Senior Leaders Rests on One Thing

David Buirs is an executive coach in Amsterdam. This post is about the development of senior leaders and why an open, curious attitude is the opening to growth. You will read how the ego treats constructive feedback as a threat, and how to break that pattern.

The higher you climb, the fewer people around you say what they really think. That makes the development of senior leaders harder than it looks. There is plenty of room to grow, but the signals that show you where become rare. Anyone who wants to keep developing at director level needs one thing first, before any specific skill comes into play. An open, curious attitude toward your own blind spots.

The power that dulls your edge

The psychologist Dacher Keltner studied power for years. He called his finding the power paradox. The very qualities you need to reach the top, empathy, attention, careful listening, get weaker once you hold that power.

Keltner compares the effect of power to a mild brain injury. You become more impulsive. You read other people less well. And you judge your own impact worse than you think.

For senior leaders this is daily reality. Your environment adapts to you. People weigh their words. The feedback you get becomes more polite, vaguer, safer. At the exact moment you hold the most influence, you receive the least honest information about yourself.

Why almost no one knows themselves well

Research by organizational psychologist Tasha Eurich shows a striking gap. Around 95 percent of people consider themselves self-aware. In reality only 10 to 15 percent meet the criteria. Nearly everyone believes they know themselves well, while most people are wrong about it.

That gap grows with experience and seniority. You have a track record. You have been right, often. So why doubt yourself anymore? This is how you get a leader who is technically strong, and who slowly loses sight of who they are.

The ego that protects itself

To understand why this is so stubborn, it helps to look at the ego. We all build an identity. A story about who we are. The sharp strategist, the connecting leader, the one who always solves it. We defend that story with everything we have.

When feedback comes in that clashes with that image, it feels like an attack. Your body reacts as if there is danger. The defenses go up and the curiosity disappears. This is how constructive criticism, really a gift, gets treated as a threat.

The painful part is that this very reflex holds your development back. The leader who pushes criticism away to keep their self-image intact pays for it over time. They stay at the level where they once became successful, while the world around them moves on.

Development of senior leaders is personal

Many senior leaders look for that one point. That single skill gap that, once closed, solves everything. In practice it rarely works that way.

Leadership development at this level is deeply personal. There are shared themes. The move from operational toward more strategic leadership. The realization that clear communication and giving context matter more as you climb the corporate ladder. But which theme comes first for you differs a lot from person to person.

For one leader the growth is in communicating with more empathy. For another it is in being more concise and direct. For one it is thinking more strategically or commercially. For another it is about more confidence and leadership presence. And someone else grows mostly by daring to let go and delegate better.

What all these leaders share is the entry point. Anyone who dares to look at themselves with an open, curious attitude finds where the growth is on their own. That attitude is the opening to everything that comes after.

Good as you are, and still developing

There is a tension here that many people find hard. Two things are true at the same time.

You are good as you are, as a person. You do not need to be repaired. And at the same time, every one of us has parts of our personality and skills that can grow further. Those two go together fine.

Anyone who keeps both in mind stops hearing feedback as a verdict on their worth. It becomes plain information. Useful information about where the next step is. In that attitude, development gets moving again, even at the highest level.

Hiring a coach is a sign of strength

Some leaders think that bringing in a coach means something is wrong. As if it exposes a weakness. The opposite is the case. It is a sign of strength.

Look at elite sport. The better the athlete, the more likely they have a coach. The best in the world work with several coaches at once. They know a sharp outsider sees what they can no longer see themselves. In leadership it works the same way.

With executive coaching I work with senior leaders on exactly this point. We look at how your ego operates, where you protect yourself, and how you find that open attitude again. If you want to train specific skills in a focused way rather than a broader track, a 1-on-1 leadership program is a logical next step. Interested or curious? Let's chat. Plan your free introduction here. Zero obligation. We look together at where your development is right now.

Bullied at Work: 7 Steps for Victim and Manager

David Buirs | Leadership & Executive Coach

Bullied at work: 7 steps for victim and manager

David Buirs is a leadership and executive coach in Amsterdam. This article explains, in seven steps, what to do when you are bullied at work or when you see a colleague being bullied. It also shows managers how to spot and address bullying.

Bullying at work rarely happens out loud. It lives in the sighs, the eye rolls, the empty seat at lunch.

According to Dutch research bodies TNO and CBS, around 5 percent of employees face bullying at work each year. It costs employers hundreds of millions in absenteeism.

If you are bullied at work, it helps to respond calmly, name it, and find support. As a manager, it is harder. You often do not see it.

Below are seven steps. For the person it happens to, the person who witnesses it, and the person who leads a team where it plays out.

1. Know the Difference Between Hard Debate and Bullying

A hard discussion about the facts is healthy. Emotions can be part of it.

Patrick Lencioni describes in his work on teams that real commitment comes after real conflict. Without that conflict you get fake harmony. People nod along and then do nothing.

Ridicule is another matter. Belittling someone for their opinion. Sighing when they speak. Cutting people off before they finish.

A joke is fine. We all sense when something slowly turns into bullying. That is the point where you step in.

2. Being Bullied Yourself? Respond Calmly and Keep a Record

Does someone make a remark that crosses a line? Stay calm. Say quietly: "I didn't catch that. Could you repeat it?"

That one question often makes the other person uncomfortable. Saying it out loud again exposes the remark.

Also, do not laugh along when they make jokes at your expense. Laughing along feels easy in the moment. It only gives the bully more room.

Keep a log as well. Date, what happened, who was there. This makes a pattern visible.

Find support from a confidant, your manager, or HR. You do not have to carry this alone.

3. Seeing It Happen to Someone Else? Do Not Look Away

Bystanders help decide whether bullying continues. The larger the group, the smaller the chance that anyone speaks up. Everyone looks at someone else.

Break that pattern. Name what you see in the moment. A simple line like "that is not how we treat each other here" is enough.

If that feels too hard in the group, go to your colleague later. Let them know you saw it. That makes a world of difference to someone who feels alone.

4. As a Manager: Ask About It, Because You Almost Never See It

I once heard only a year after someone had left that this person had been bullied by colleagues. It was terrible. I had missed it.

Since then I know: you have to ask. Regularly, every time.

A question that works in your one-on-one: "On a scale of 0 to 10, how accepted do you feel in the team?" A 6 tells you more than ten polite answers. Dig deeper at anything below an 8.

5. As a Manager: Name the Behavior One on One First

See someone belittling others? Start privately. Stay concrete. "I saw you roll your eyes when Sam made a suggestion."

Name the behavior, skip the label. Many people have no idea how they come across. A calm, direct conversation often solves more than you expect.

6. As a Manager: Have the Conversation About How You Treat Each Other

If the behavior continues, it becomes a team conversation. Set the norm clearly. Disagreement is welcome, even wanted. Belittling has no place here.

Watch the other extreme too. I have seen teams where someone made a fairly innocent remark. And the other person marched off to HR on their high horse. You want to avoid that just as much.

An open conversation about conduct helps both sides. You agree together on how you give feedback here. And how you respond when you disagree with something.

7. As a Manager: Be Firm, Even With Your Best People

If your best employee belittles others, it is time for a serious talk. Talent is no free pass.

If that conversation does not help, I would think hard about whether this person fits your company.

Bullying hits people hard psychologically. They lose their confidence, sleep badly, call in sick. As a leader, you may be very firm on this.

A toxic employee is one of the biggest cost items there is. The whole environment feels the strain. You see it in lower productivity, higher turnover, more sick days. Keeping one person can cost you a whole team.

Bullying rarely stops on its own. It stops when someone has the courage to name it. As a victim, as a bystander, or as a leader who truly sees their team.

And that last part can be learned. For leaders who want to grow stronger in this personally, leadership guidance is a logical step. At director level, executive coaching adds depth.

If you want to train these skills in a focused way, a 1-on-1 leadership course is a good fit.

Is something playing out in your team that you would like to talk through? Plan a free introduction. No obligation.

Difficult Conversations at Work: The 2 Pillars of Safety

David Buirs | Leadership Coach & Management Trainer

Difficult Conversations at Work: What the Loud and the Silent Have in Common

David Buirs is a leadership and executive coach in Amsterdam. This article explains why difficult conversations at work break down when arguments replace safety. Readers learn how mutual respect and mutual purpose, drawn from the Crucial Conversations model, bring a tense conversation back on track.

What does a colleague who raises their voice share with one who goes completely quiet?

More than you would think.

A manager in one of my trainings told me about a talk with a team member. It started fine. Then, halfway through, she crossed her arms and stopped speaking in full sentences. He did what most of us do. He explained his point again, slower this time, with better arguments.

It went nowhere.

Aggression and Silence Come From the Same Place

Aggression and silence look like opposites. Underneath, the same thing is happening. Both people feel unsafe.

Somewhere in the conversation, they started to believe one of two things. Either you don't respect them, or you don't have their interests at heart.

And here is what most of us do next. We keep talking about the content. The content is the topic itself: the deadline, the budget, the quality of someone's work. But the problem has moved to the context. The context is everything around the words: how the conversation feels, and what each person believes about the other's intentions.

The other person has stopped listening to your arguments. Their attention has gone to protecting themselves.

Why Better Arguments Stop Working

I love using the Crucial Conversations model for this. It makes one point beautifully clear. When safety disappears, the conversation about the content is over. Safety has to come back before anything else can continue.

In the model, safety rests on two pillars.

Mutual respect: the other person believes you see them as an equal. Mutual purpose: they believe you care about what they want, and that you are working toward something you both value.

When either one disappears, you get the aggression or the silence.

Name the Tension, With Curiosity

So you pause the topic. You name what you notice in the dynamic between you two, with curiosity and without assumptions.

This is where I see it go wrong most often, even with managers I have trained on the model. The manager from earlier tried exactly this. He said: "You seem mad." His words named the tension, but his tone turned it into an accusation. She heard an attack and pulled back further.

Compare that to: "I have the feeling something doesn't sit well with you. I might be wrong, but I'm curious to hear if something is bothering you."

The same elephant is on the table. The room feels completely different.

Two Ways to Rebuild Safety

Once the tension is out in the open, two things help restore safety.

First, repair respect. If something you said came across as disrespectful, say so, and apologize where it fits. A simple "that came out wrong, that was never my intention" does more than ten good arguments.

Second, rebuild mutual purpose. Say out loud what you both want. A project that succeeds. A team that works well together. A relationship that survives this conversation. You almost always share more purpose than it feels like in the moment.

When safety returns, you can pick up the content again. And now the other person can actually hear you.

One Exception: Bad News

For bad news conversations, leave this model in the drawer. When someone is losing their job or a project ends, share the news first, clearly and with care. People handle bad news far better than confusion.

A Quick Recap

When a difficult conversation at work turns loud or silent, safety has gone. Here is how you bring it back:

  • Read the signals. Raised voices and sudden silence both point to someone feeling unsafe.
  • Pause the content. Stop arguing the deadline or the budget for a moment.
  • Name the tension with curiosity, and watch your tone so it lands as an invitation.
  • Repair respect. Own anything that came across wrong and apologize where it fits.
  • Rebuild mutual purpose. Say out loud what you both want from this.
  • Then return to the content, once the other person can actually hear you.

What Safety Looks Like When It Returns

What still moves me, after years of doing this work, is seeing what happens when someone addresses safety well. The shoulders drop. The breathing slows. It is like watching a balloon full of tension slowly deflate. The other person feels seen, often for the first time in the whole conversation.

From that moment, you can talk about anything.

Most managers were never taught how to hold these conversations. That skill can be learned, and it changes how a whole team works together. This is a lot of what we do in leadership coaching. For leaders at director level, executive coaching takes the same work to the top of the organization. For a leader who wants to train these specific skills in a focused way, a 1-on-1 leadership course is a logical next step.

Interested or curious? Let's chat. Plan your free introduction here. Zero obligation.