Should You Compliment Team Members? The Honest Answer

Leadership & Executive Coach | David Buirs

Should You Compliment Team Members? The Honest Answer

David Buirs is a leadership coach based in Amsterdam. This article addresses the common worry managers have about complimenting their team, whether recognition leads to complacency, and what specific, honest appreciation actually sounds like. You learn why the discomfort of giving compliments is often a useful signal about your own leadership.

When someone at work tells you they really appreciated something you did, what do you actually do?

A lot of us mumble "oh it was nothing" and move the conversation along quickly. We brush it off before it can land. The spotlight feels uncomfortable, even when it's a kind one.

If receiving appreciation feels this awkward, no wonder we rarely give it either.

Won't it make my team lazy?

A worry I hear often from managers: won't complimenting my team make them lazy? Won't people stop pushing themselves if they feel too good about their work?

It sounds logical on the surface. Comfort breeds complacency, right?

But notice what's underneath. The fear assumes that people need to feel slightly short of good enough to keep trying. That the absence of recognition is what keeps performance high.

The opposite is closer to what I see in practice. People who feel genuinely seen at work tend to raise their standards over time. They work harder, not softer. Because they're no longer spending energy wondering if anyone noticed.

How you talk to yourself is how you talk to your team

Think about how you talk to yourself after finishing something good. Most of us don't pause to feel good about it. We go straight to the next item on the list.

We're wired to be tough on ourselves. The inner critic is always on. For many leaders, self-assessment borders on self-interrogation.

So being warm with someone else about their work can feel strange. It's not the language you speak with yourself. If your inner dialogue is dominated by what still needs to be better, a moment of warmth to someone else can feel off-brand. Almost dishonest, even when it's completely real.

This is why the work of giving compliments often starts with looking at how you treat yourself. The generosity you can't give inward is hard to send outward.

What actually happens when you do it

From my own years as a manager, and from working with managers who try this deliberately: it works. People start caring more. Connection increases. Engagement follows.

But something more human happens too. People feel less alone at work. They bring a bit more of themselves to the team. They're more willing to take risks, try things, speak up without hedging every sentence.

You notice they show up with more weight, not less. More ownership, not less.

What a real compliment sounds like

Here's where many managers get stuck. "Great job" doesn't land. It's too generic. It could apply to anyone. The brain processes it as background noise, the same way it processes "how are you" in a hallway.

A real compliment is specific. It names what the person did, why it mattered, and what you noticed about how they did it.

"I saw how you handled the question from finance yesterday. You stayed calm, gave them the data, and didn't get pulled into the drama. That took discipline."

That lands. Because it proves you were paying attention.

Most people have never been told something like that at work. Not once in their career. The first time you do it, you may see them not quite know what to do with it. That's how rare this kind of recognition is.

The discomfort is the signal

If giving compliments like this feels uncomfortable, that's useful information. It tells you where you've been playing small as a leader.

Joseph Campbell wrote about the cave you fear entering holding the treasure you seek. Around compliments, this pattern shows up often in coaching. The conversation that feels slightly off is often exactly the one that would move everything.

Step outside your comfort zone this week. Your team needs to see a bit more of what you already think about them.

Where this shows up in coaching

One of the patterns we often work on in management coaching is this exact gap. Managers who see their team clearly, who care deeply, whose team has no idea. Because the care stays inside.

For leaders at director and board level, the dynamic gets sharper. Senior leaders often become less visible emotionally as they climb, not more. Teams read silence as indifference. In coaching for executives we work on how to stay warm and present without losing the composure the role demands.

Organizations that want this kind of culture across the whole management layer need more than individual work. That's where leadership training comes in. Building recognition and feedback skills into the team structurally, instead of hoping one manager at a time figures it out.

An invitation for this week

Pick two people on your team. Tell them something real about their work. Specific. Concrete. No agenda attached.

See what happens to your own energy afterward. Notice what happens to the conversation. Notice what happens the next time you see them.

If you want to work on this kind of leadership more deliberately, you can always plan a free introduction. Zero obligation. Just a conversation about where you are and where you want to go.

What No One Tells Expat Executives About Leading in Amsterdam

David Buirs Leiderschapscoach & Managementtrainer

What No One Tells Expat Executives About Leading in Amsterdam

David Buirs is a leadership and executive coach based in Amsterdam who works with senior leaders navigating new organizational and cultural contexts. This article is written for expat executives moving to the Netherlands and covers how Dutch directness, flat hierarchy, and low-context communication affect leadership. It explains what to expect, what to watch out for, and how executive coaching in Amsterdam can accelerate the transition.

Imagine this. You are three weeks into your new role as SVP. First real team meeting. You walk in, present your plan, and halfway through, one of your direct reports looks up and says: "I do not think this is going to work. Here is why."

Not aggressive. Not political. Just direct.

In your previous company, that conversation happened in the hallway after the meeting, if it happened at all. Here, it happened in the room. In front of everyone.

Your first instinct might be that something is wrong. That you have already lost the room. That this person is a problem.

None of that is true. What just happened is one of the most valuable things Dutch culture has to offer. And once you understand it, you will want more of it.

Low-context culture. High-value feedback.

Erin Meyer's book The Culture Map offers one of the clearest frameworks for understanding cross-cultural leadership. She maps countries on a scale from high-context to low-context communication.

In high-context cultures, communication is layered and indirect. What is said depends on relationship, tone, timing, and shared history. Disagreement gets softened, delayed, or left unsaid entirely.

The Netherlands sits at the extreme low-context end of the scale. What someone says, they mean. What they think, they tend to say. Not to be difficult. Because that is how trust and clarity work here.

That direct challenge in your first meeting was not disrespect. It was engagement. Your team member cared enough to say what they actually thought, to your face, which is exactly what you want from the people around you.

Google's Project Aristotle, one of the most cited studies on team performance, found that psychological safety is the single biggest predictor of a high-performing team. Not talent. Not resources. The degree to which people feel safe enough to say what they actually think.

In highly hierarchical environments, information gets filtered on the way up. By the time it reaches the executive level, it has been shaped, softened, and edited. Leaders end up making decisions on a curated version of reality.

In a genuinely flat culture, you get closer to what is actually happening. Your team will tell you things that teams in other countries would never say to a VP. That is not a problem to manage. That is a strategic asset.

Your title still matters. Your personality matters more.

You will still be treated with respect here. But the Dutch tend to weight personal qualities heavily alongside professional ones.

A VP who is warm, direct, and genuinely curious about the people around them earns a different kind of trust than one who leads primarily from position. Both may get compliance. Only one gets real engagement.

If you are used to a culture where your title creates a certain atmosphere in the room, the Dutch workplace can feel surprisingly level. The room does not change much when you walk in. What changes it is how you show up.

They are not cold. They just plan lunch differently.

If you are coming from a Latin or Mediterranean culture, you may find Dutch people a little harder to read at first. Warmer countries tend to have a different social rhythm. More spontaneity. More physical warmth. A conversation that starts at a cafe and turns into dinner without anyone planning it.

In the Netherlands, that dinner was scheduled three weeks ago.

There is a running joke among expats: asking a Dutch colleague if they are free this weekend, and being handed a planner. "How does March 4th, 2037 sound for lunch?" It lands closer to the truth than most people expect.

This is not emotional distance. It is a different relationship with time and social structure. Once you adjust your expectations, the warmth is absolutely there. It just tends to arrive on schedule.

Speaking of schedules.

Dutch culture takes punctuality seriously. If a meeting is at 15:00, people expect it to start at 15:00. Arriving at 15:03 regularly is not a disaster, but it will be noticed, and in some environments quietly held against you.

In many other cultures, a few minutes either way is simply how it works. Here, it reads differently. It signals something about how much you value other people's time. A small thing, but worth knowing early.

How to hit the ground running. Culturally.

Most expat executives arrive well-prepared on the operational side. They have read the business case, met the stakeholders, understood the numbers.

The cultural side gets far less preparation time. And it tends to be where the friction shows up first. Not in strategy sessions, but in one-on-ones. In the tone of a team update. In how feedback lands when it was meant to land differently.

This is where I can help.

I work with senior leaders who are new to Amsterdam, or new to leading Dutch teams, and want to understand the cultural dynamics before they become a problem. Not after the first misstep. Before it.

In an initial executive coaching Amsterdam conversation, we map where you are coming from culturally and what the Dutch context will demand of you specifically. Not generic culture training. A real conversation about your leadership style, your instincts, and where they will serve you here and where they will not.

We look at how you read signals from your team. How you position yourself without relying on hierarchy. How you build real trust in an environment where directness is the currency and personality weighs more than title. And how you show up in a way that is recognisably you, while fitting the culture you are operating in.

The goal is simple. That you walk into your first months here with a clear picture of the cultural landscape, and a way of leading that fits it. Not adapted to the point of losing yourself. Calibrated.

For organisations bringing senior international talent into Dutch teams, a structured leadership development program can also help bridge the gap at the team level. Not just for the incoming executive, but for the teams learning to work with a new leadership style.

One more thing about Amsterdam.

There is something the city does to people in spring and summer that is hard to explain if you have not experienced it. The terraces fill up. People linger after work. The light stays until ten at night.

Amsterdam in May feels like a different city from Amsterdam in November. The winters are real. Grey, wet, windy. Not for everyone.

But for most people who settle in, the city earns its reputation by the time April arrives. It is worth knowing what you are walking into, in every sense.

Interested or curious? Plan your free introduction here. Zero obligation.

Preparing Leaders for AI: The Skills That Actually Matter

Leadership & Executive Coach | David Buirs

The management skills AI can't replace. And why your leaders need to develop them now.

David Buirs is a Leadership and Executive Coach based in Amsterdam. In this article he examines what AI-driven automation means for new and developing managers: which skills are becoming obsolete, which are becoming critical, and why the bar for every leader is rising fast. Relevant for managers, HR professionals, and organisations considering leadership training for new managers.

Most leadership training programs teach the same things. Goal-setting. Progress tracking. Planning. Running structured meetings. Giving annual reviews.

These are solid skills. And AI is going to automate most of them.

Not completely. Not tomorrow. But the direction is clear, and it is moving faster than most organisations are ready for.

Over the past few years I have had dozens of conversations with senior leaders across industries. Directors, VPs, executives navigating this transition in real time. And a pattern keeps emerging. The technical side of management, the administrative backbone of the role, is becoming less and less what separates a good leader from a poor one.

What remains, and what increasingly cannot be delegated to a machine, is harder to teach. And far more valuable.

What Gallup has been saying for years

Before we get to AI, it is worth starting with a number that should already be unsettling.

Gallup studied 2.5 million teams and found that only one in ten managers naturally possesses the talent to lead well. The other 90 percent need deliberate development to succeed in the role. Gallup also estimates that closing this management gap could unlock close to ten trillion dollars in global productivity.

Ten trillion. And yet most organisations still promote their best individual contributor, hand them a new title, and leave them to figure it out.

The result is predictable. Teams disengage. Performance drops. Your best people leave. And HR is left managing the fallout of a problem that was preventable.

This has always been true. But AI is about to make it much more visible, much faster.

The skills that are becoming automated

In my conversations with senior leaders, there is growing consensus on which parts of management are most exposed to automation. Goal-setting frameworks. Progress dashboards. Meeting summaries. Scheduling and prioritisation. Performance data analysis. Compliance tracking. Even structured feedback templates.

These are things AI tools already do reasonably well, and will do better every year. They are also, coincidentally, the things most leadership training programs spend the majority of their time on.

That is a problem. Because if you are developing managers primarily around tasks that are being automated, you are training for yesterday.

The skills that are becoming more important

The leaders I speak with are consistently clear about what will matter more. Not instead of the basics. In addition to them. But with far greater weight.

Motivating people. Understanding what drives each individual on your team. Creating conditions where people want to do good work, not just perform for an audience.

Building real connection. Not team-building exercises. Genuine interest in the humans you work with. This is what creates psychological safety. And psychological safety is what makes people speak up, take risks, and grow.

Creating and communicating a vision. Where are we going, and why does it matter? Machines can generate roadmaps. Only a human can make people believe in one.

Judgment in complex situations. When the data is ambiguous, when the right answer is genuinely unclear, when values are in conflict. AI can offer options. It cannot own the decision.

Asking better questions. Coaching your team rather than solving their problems for them. Helping people think more clearly instead of just giving them answers. This is one of the highest-leverage things a leader can do, and one of the hardest to develop.

Coaching as a leadership style. Not as a one-off conversation, but as a way of operating. Building people's capacity over time. Making yourself less necessary, not more central.

Navigating conflict and difficult conversations. Not avoiding them. Not softening them into meaninglessness. Having them directly, with care, in a way that strengthens the relationship rather than damaging it.

Communication across ambiguity. Being clear when things are not clear. Keeping people grounded during uncertainty. This is increasingly what senior leaders say separates managers who retain their teams from those who lose them.

None of these are new. What is new is how much more weight they will carry in the years ahead.

The agent economy: fewer people, higher expectations

There is a second change coming that most organisations are not yet talking about openly.

Companies will likely have fewer employees. Not because the work disappears, but because individual employees will increasingly supervise autonomous programs doing parts of that work. AI agents handling research, reporting, drafting, analysis, customer interaction. The human in the loop becomes the decision-maker, the quality controller, the strategic director of that work.

Fewer people doing more. Each person carrying more responsibility. Each leader managing a team of humans plus a layer of automated processes.

This means fewer leadership positions overall. And significantly higher expectations for the ones that remain.

Up or out is coming for everyone

The Big 4 consulting firms have operated on an "up or out" model for decades. You develop, you grow, you take on more, or you leave. There is no comfortable plateau.

That model is starting to spread. The economics of AI-driven efficiency are pushing organisations toward leaner, more demanding structures. The comfortable middle is getting harder to hold.

What this means practically: the managers who are not actively developing their human skills, who are relying on technical expertise and hoping that is enough, will find their position increasingly difficult to sustain. Not in some abstract future. In the next few years.

This is not a threat. It is a description of a landscape that is already changing. And knowing the landscape is the first step to navigating it well.

What this means for leadership training now

The organisations that will come through this transition well are already treating leadership development as something more than a one-day training or an annual offboarding of information.

They are asking different questions. Not just "did the training go well?" But: did anything actually change? Are our managers coaching their teams differently? Are difficult conversations happening earlier? Is the culture around feedback improving?

This is why management training built on learning science, with real attention to transfer and behaviour change over time, produces different results than a standard programme. Not because the content is secret. Because the architecture is different.

And for individual managers navigating this landscape: leadership coaching gives you a dedicated space to develop precisely the skills that cannot be automated. Coaching skills, communication, judgment, self-awareness. The skills that will define your career over the next decade.

If your role sits at a more senior level and you are thinking about leadership impact at the directorial or executive level, executive coaching is a natural fit.

Start now, not when the pressure forces you to

The managers and leaders who will thrive are not necessarily the most talented. They are the ones who took their development seriously before the external pressure made it unavoidable.

Communication. Coaching. Judgment. Connection. These are not soft skills. They are the skills that will be hardest to replace, and hardest to develop quickly if you have not started.

The time to work on them is not when you are under pressure. It is now, while you have the space to build them deliberately.

If you are curious about what that could look like for you or your organisation, feel free to plan a free introduction. No obligation. Just a conversation.

From manager to director: the transition nobody explains

David Buirs | Leadership & Executive Coach

From manager to director: why the step up is bigger than you expected

David Buirs is an executive coach based in Amsterdam. This article describes the six biggest challenges in the transition from manager to director: letting go, strategic thinking, operating through others, navigating uncertainty, and the gradual disappearance of honest feedback. It explains how executive coaching helps make this transition effective.

You had been thinking about this moment for years. You knew what would be expected of you. You had watched it up close.

And yet. The first months as a director felt different from what you had imagined.

Not worse, necessarily. But unfamiliar. As if the rules of the game had changed and nobody had told you.

They had.

Research by IMD, based on interviews with 1,350 HR professionals, shows that leadership transitions are the most difficult moments in a leader's professional life. Not the hardest projects. Not the most complex reorganisations. The transition itself.

These are the six things new directors most commonly run into.

1. What got you here will not get you there

As a manager, you won by knowing. By doing. By solving problems before they escalated.

That behaviour made you successful. At director level, it becomes your biggest liability.

A director who keeps operating like a manager stays too close to the content. Makes decisions their managers should have made themselves. Without meaning to, builds a team that looks to them for answers instead of thinking independently.

The transition demands something that feels almost unnatural: letting go. Precisely when everything is new and uncertain.

2. You are now paid to think, not to do

As a manager, your day was full. Meetings, decisions, fires, people. At the end of the day, you had done something.

As a director, your calendar might look similar. But the real value you deliver lives somewhere else. In the quality of your thinking. In the questions you ask your managers. In the direction you set.

That takes adjusting to. Productivity feels less tangible. It becomes harder to point to what you actually accomplished.

And so many new directors drift back into operations. Not out of stubbornness. Out of habit. Because it feels familiar.

3. Most strategies are not a strategy

At director level, strategy suddenly becomes your responsibility. And that is precisely where many leaders struggle.

Because what most organisations call a strategy is actually a list of goals. Higher revenue. Better retention. More market share. Worthy ambitions. But not a strategy.

A real strategy is something different. It is a creative and smart choice about how to deploy people and resources to bridge the biggest obstacles standing between you and those goals. It defines what you will not do. It makes choices that hurt.

That requires a way of thinking most managers have never had to develop. Not because they are incapable of it, but because it was never asked of them.

4. Your influence now works through others

As a manager, you had a team. You knew who was good at what. You could course-correct, coach, step in.

As a director, you work largely through your managers. Your impact has become indirect. Your weekly one-on-ones with your managers are now where most of the real work actually happens.

That is a fundamentally different way of creating impact. And outside your own department it becomes more complex still. You need results through people who do not report to you. That requires alliances, trust, political awareness. Skills you were barely assessed on in your previous role.

5. There is no handbook anymore

As a manager, there was always a framework. A strategy from above. Goals that had been set. A leader you could consult.

As a director, you are that framework for others. You help set the direction. You answer questions that you do not always know the answer to yourself.

That requires something few people have explicitly learned: being comfortable with uncertainty. Making decisions on incomplete information. Holding course while the situation keeps changing.

And doing all of that while appearing calm and clear to your team. Because your uncertainty is felt by others. They look to you for direction. Even when you are still figuring it out yourself.

6. Honest feedback dries up

As a manager, you still received reasonably honest feedback. From your own leader, from colleagues, sometimes from your team.

At director level, that largely stops. People filter. They say what they think you want to hear. Or they stay silent. You hear less and less about what is actually happening.

You gradually build a distorted picture of how you are functioning, how you come across, where your blind spots are. Without realising it.

Why this is the moment to find a thinking partner

These are not personal failings. This is the transition. Anyone who is honest about their first years as a director will recognise something in this list.

But recognition alone does not solve it.

Because all of these challenges have something in common: they are difficult to resolve from the inside. You are too close. You have too little honest feedback. You are missing someone who asks the questions you are not asking yourself, because you are in the middle of it.

That is exactly where executive coaching makes the difference.

Not as therapy. Not as a course in strategic thinking. But as a fixed, confidential space with someone who understands the territory. Someone who helps you let go of the right things. Who keeps you honest about your blind spots. Who thinks alongside you on the questions you cannot raise inside the organisation.

Whether it is learning to step back from operations, building a real strategy, navigating complex stakeholder dynamics, or simply finding steadiness in a role that demands a great deal from you. In a coaching engagement, you work on the concrete situations that are live right now. Not abstract leadership theory.

The difference between who gets stuck in this transition and who grows through it rarely comes down to talent. It comes down to whether you have someone helping you ask the right questions at the moment it matters most.

For organisations looking to develop leaders across multiple levels, an in-company leadership program is a logical next step.

Have you recently stepped into a director role, or are you about to? Plan a free introductory conversation. No sales pitch. Just an honest conversation about where you are now and what you need.

Plan your free introduction here. Zero obligation.

Loneliness at the top: why executives carry it alone

David Buirs - Leadership Coach & Management Trainer

Loneliness at the top: why so many executives carry it alone

David Buirs is a leadership and executive coach based in Amsterdam. This article describes the loneliness many executives and senior leaders experience at the top of an organisation. It explains how executive coaching offers a professional sounding board so leaders no longer have to carry that weight alone.

You have what you worked for. The title, the responsibility, the influence.

And yet there is something you rarely say out loud.

That it is actually quite lonely.

Everyone wants something from you. Nobody sees the full picture.

Your team wants higher salaries. You understand. But the budget is limited and the trade-offs are more complex than they appear from the outside.

Three people deserve that promotion. You can only choose one. The other two will be disappointed, maybe frustrated. You already know that. And you carry it for weeks before the decision is made.

Your CEO expects growth. The board wants margins. Clients want attention. Shareholders want returns. And you stand in the middle of all of it, every single day, trying to hold course without losing anyone.

On top of that: the dynamics within your own management team. Clashing egos. Communication problems you have seen coming for months but have not been able to resolve yet. Someone overplaying their role. Someone playing it too small.

You want to set a clear strategy. A vision people genuinely get behind. But first there is another fire to put out. And then another one after that.

You cannot fully share it.

The difficult thing about your position is this: you cannot discuss everything with the people around you.

Not with your team. They do not know all the interests at play. Some information is confidential. And you are their leader. They look to you for direction, not to absorb your doubts.

Not always with peers at the same level. Sometimes they are involved parties too.

Not always with friends or a partner. They do not have the context, or they worry in ways that do not help.

So you carry it. Largely alone.

That is not weakness. That is the reality of leadership at this level.

You are not the only one who feels this way.

Research from Stanford Graduate School of Business confirms it. Nearly two-thirds of CEOs do not receive any coaching or leadership advice from outside their organisation. At the same time, almost 100% of them said they are open to it and willing to make changes based on feedback.

The willingness is there. The support is not.

And according to the Corporate Executive Board, 70% of Fortune 500 companies use executive coaching as part of their leadership development strategy. At the highest levels of business, having a coach is no longer a luxury. It is standard practice.

Not because those executives cannot handle it. But because they understand that you cannot fully see yourself from the inside. That blind spots are not a sign of incompetence. They are a sign of being human.

What a good sounding board actually does.

An executive coach is not an advisor who tells you what to do. And not a therapist who puts your feelings at the centre.

It is a professional thinking partner who keeps you sharp. Someone who asks the questions you are not asking yourself, because you are too close to it. Someone who holds up a mirror without having an agenda.

You can say what you cannot say inside the organisation. Think out loud about a decision you have been carrying for weeks. Notice patterns in how you respond to pressure, conflict, or uncertainty.

Sometimes you need someone who asks: "What makes this so heavy for you?" Sometimes you need someone who says: "Here is how you can approach that conversation." Sometimes you just need someone who gets it.

That is what executive coaching offers. No fixed formula. A fixed space.

On the value of an outside perspective.

One of the hardest things about a senior position is this: you receive less and less honest feedback over time.

People around you filter. They say what they think you want to hear. Or they stay silent, because it feels too risky to criticise someone who has influence over their position.

As a result, you build a distorted picture of how you come across. Of how your decisions land. Of where your blind spots actually are.

That is not a personal failing. That is the structure of most organisations.

A coach has no stake in your good mood. They say what is there. That is exactly why it works.

For organisations that want to address this structurally and develop leaders across multiple levels, an in-company leadership program is a logical next step.

The loneliness does not disappear. But you do not have to carry it alone.

Leadership at your level comes with a weight that others do not see. That is part of it. That does not go away.

But there is a difference between carrying that weight alone, and carrying it with someone next to you who understands.

If you are curious whether executive coaching is right for you, plan a free introductory conversation. No sales pitch. Just an honest conversation about where you are now and what you need.

Plan your free introduction here. Zero obligation.

When an Employee Won’t Accept You as Manager

Leadership & Executive Coach | David Buirs

The one single factor that separates great leaders from mediocre ones

David Buirs is a leadership coach in Amsterdam who works with managers on influence, authority, and team dynamics. This article identifies the single factor that determines leadership success and what to do when an employee won't accept your authority. The reader learns how to apply root cause analysis and open the right conversation.

Someone in your team doesn't accept you as their manager.

You see it in the eye contact that breaks a second too early. In the way they respond to your decisions. In what they don't say in meetings when everyone else does.

You've been watching it for a while. And somewhere in the back of your head, a thought keeps surfacing.

I'm the manager. They should listen. If they won't, they need to go.

Hold that thought for a second. Because before we get to what you should do, there is something worth understanding. Something that changes how you read this entire situation.

The success of your leadership is determined by your team's willingness to follow you.

Not your title. Not your experience. Not the quality of your ideas. Whether people actually choose to follow.

Why that one line matters more than most leadership advice

In 2024, psychologists Alex Haslam, Mats Alvesson, and Stephen Reicher published a paper in The Leadership Quarterly that cuts through a lot of what gets taught about leadership. They called it 'Zombie Leadership': beliefs that have been repeatedly debunked by research yet keep circulating anyway.

The most stubborn one: that leadership is about the leader.

Their finding is direct. Leadership is proven by followership. Without it, the title means nothing.

When someone on your team won't accept your authority, that is not just an awkward personnel issue. It is a signal that your leadership, in that specific relationship, is not functioning. And a non-functioning relationship does not fix itself by being ignored or by being forced.

Most managers respond to that signal with defensiveness. The best ones get curious.

Getting curious means asking the right question first

The right question is not: how do I get this person to fall in line?

It is: what is actually driving this?

There are four causes that come up most often.

Your reputation. How do people in the organization see you, before you even walk into the room? Sometimes a perception has formed, quietly, that works against you. Knowing that is not comfortable. It is useful.

Something specific that happened. A decision that landed wrong. A comment in a meeting that wasn't received the way you intended. People file these moments away and draw conclusions from them they never share out loud. The leader who finds a way to surface that gains real information.

Unprocessed loss. Did this person want the role you now hold? That kind of disappointment rarely shows up as disappointment. It shows up as resistance. Leaders who recognize this respond with acknowledgment rather than pressure, and that changes the entire trajectory of the relationship.

Frustration that was never really about you. Sometimes you are the nearest visible face of an organization someone has grown to resent. Mediocre leaders take that personally. Great leaders ask what is underneath it.

Getting clear on the cause is what makes the next step possible. Without it, you are solving the wrong problem.

The conversation that great leaders don't postpone

Once you have a read on what's driving the resistance, you have the conversation.

Crucial Conversations, the book by Patterson and Grenny, offers a principle that applies directly here: before you name the problem, name what you both want. Shared purpose first. Then the difficult part.

"I want this team to work well. I think you do too. And I've noticed something between us that isn't working. I'd rather understand it than leave it."

Then you name it. Directly, calmly, without loading it with accusations.

This takes more courage than escalating to HR. It also builds something that authority-on-paper never could: genuine influence. The kind that doesn't depend on your title.

Teams notice when a manager faces something uncomfortable with curiosity and courage. That noticing changes how they see you. And over time, it changes how willing they are to follow you.

The impact of this over time

Every leader faces this at some point. The ones who handle it well come out with something the others don't: a clearer sense of how influence actually works.

Because influence is not the goal. It is what makes the goal possible. When people genuinely follow you, you can start doing what you actually became a leader for: guiding your team toward something meaningful, helping them grow, or any other positive goal worth achieving.

If this is something you're in the middle of right now, you're welcome to think it through with someone who has been there. Start with a free conversation at davidbuirs.com/en/contact/.

Managers who want to build this kind of capability more structurally will find a good home in leadership coaching. For organizations that want to make it part of how their managers operate, a leadership training program tends to be the more lasting investment.

Source: Haslam, Alvesson & Reicher (2024). Zombie Leadership: Dead ideas that still walk among us. The Leadership Quarterly.

Leadership Consultancy Amsterdam

David Buirs | Leadership & Executive Coach

The Leadership Gap That Shows Up When You Start Growing

David Buirs is a leadership consultant and coach based in the Amsterdam region, working with managers, executives, and organizations in both Dutch and English. He offers one-on-one leadership coaching, in-company management training, and strategic advisory for HR and senior leadership teams. This article explores why leadership development gets deprioritized during periods of growth, what the data says about the cost of that choice, and what it looks like to close that gap in practice.

There is a specific moment most scale-ups can recognize.

It is not a crisis. It is quieter than that.

It is when someone says: "I do not know who to talk to about this anymore." Or when a decision that used to take 20 minutes now involves four meetings. Or when a manager comes to you because they do not know how to handle someone on their team, and you realize you do not quite know either.

The company grew. The structure did not keep up.

The people managing teams in the middle are doing their best with tools that were designed for a smaller, simpler organization.

From everyone-does-everything to actual departments

In the early days of a company, the flatness is an advantage. No one waits for permission. Information flows because everyone is in the same room. The founder knows everyone by name.

Thirty people in, that changes.

You need specialists. You need structure. You need managers who can actually manage, not just coordinate tasks or relay information up and down.

The problem is that most of those managers grew up in the culture where none of that was necessary. They were promoted because they were great at their work. Because they delivered. Because people liked working with them.

And suddenly they are responsible for performance reviews, conflict resolution, motivation, feedback conversations, and figuring out why someone is not performing. Without a handbook. Without real training. Often without much support from above.

That is not a personal failure. That is a structural gap. And it shows up in established organizations just as much as in scale-ups. Leadership development is rarely treated as a strategic priority until something breaks.

What Gallup found

Every year, Gallup publishes its State of the Global Workplace report. The 2025 edition made headlines in the HR and leadership world, and the findings are hard to ignore.

Global employee engagement fell to 21% in 2024. The main driver: managers are disengaging, and that disengagement cascades. Seventy percent of team engagement is directly tied to the manager. When managers struggle, their teams follow.

The cost came to $438 billion in lost productivity. Globally. In a single year.

Gallup also found that fewer than 44% of managers worldwide have received any formal management training. Among those who have, active disengagement rates drop by half.

The two clearest recommendations from the report: train your managers, and teach them to coach.

Managers who learn coaching skills see their own engagement rise by up to 22%. The engagement of their teams goes up by up to 18%. Those are not marginal improvements. That is a different kind of organization.

Safety, voice, and why it matters for growth

Here is something worth sitting with.

When people feel safe at work, they speak up. They flag things that are not working. They try approaches that might fail. They bring problems before they become crises.

When they do not feel safe, they go quiet. They do what is asked and nothing more. They save the real feedback for their next employer.

In a company where speed and innovation matter, that silence is expensive.

Psychological safety does not mean a comfortable, frictionless workplace. It means people trust that if they raise a concern, try something that does not work, or say something difficult, they will not be punished for it.

Building that trust is a manager skill. It shows up in how a manager responds when someone brings bad news. How they run a one-on-one. How they handle a disagreement in a team meeting.

These things can be learned. They just need to be taught.

How I work with organizations and leaders

I am a leadership consultant and coach based in the Amsterdam region. I work in both Dutch and English, with individual leaders and organizations across the Netherlands and internationally.

For leaders who want to develop more intentionally, I offer leadership coaching. One-on-one, focused on the real challenges you are facing. Whether you are new to the role and figuring out what it actually requires, or years in and ready to lead with more intention and less friction.

For organizations, I offer management training built around your actual context. A program designed from your specific challenges, with measurable outcomes. Not generic content dropped into a room.

And for HR directors and senior leadership teams, I work as a strategic sparring partner. Someone to think with about culture, manager development, and what is actually driving the patterns you are seeing in your organization.

If any of that sounds relevant, I am happy to talk. Plan a free introduction here. No pitch. No proposal. Just a clear conversation about where you are and what might help.

Management Team Development

David Buirs - Leadership Coach & Management Trainer

The Fish Starts Rotting at the Head

David Buirs is a leadership coach and management trainer based in Amsterdam, specialising in management team development. This article explains why organisational problems often start at the top, not in middle management. It covers the power paradox (Keltner), psychological safety (Edmondson, Project Aristotle) and strategic misalignment as core challenges in management team development.

The fish starts rotting at the head.

It sounds harsh. But it is not an attack on leaders. It is an observation about systems.

When an organisation struggles with low engagement or a culture of politics and self-protection, the cause is rarely middle management. The cause sits one level higher.

And yet most development investments go to the managers. Not to the management team itself.

A collection of leaders is not a leadership team

Patrick Lencioni puts it plainly. Most management teams are not teams at all. They are groups of individuals who happen to attend the same meeting.

Everyone defends their own domain. Heads nod, decisions get "made", and an hour later everyone goes back to doing exactly what they were doing before.

That is not collaboration. That is coexistence.

And the irony? Those same people expect their managers to create psychological safety and move forward as one team.

You cannot give what you do not have.

The power paradox

Management team members reached their position because of what set them apart. They listened well. They built trust. They knew how to bring people along.

Dacher Keltner, psychologist at UC Berkeley, describes what often happens next. The experience of power changes behaviour in ways most people do not see coming. Leaders become less empathetic, less inclined to listen, more focused on their own priorities. Not through bad intentions, but through what power does to the brain.

The paradox: the qualities that brought you to the top are precisely the qualities that power slowly erodes.

What else goes wrong

Three things I see time and again.

No shared vision. Research by MIT Sloan across 124 organisations found that only 28% of executives responsible for executing strategy could name three of their organisation's strategic priorities. More than half of senior executives disagree with each other on what those priorities even are. Not bad people. But no shared compass either.

Reward structures that punish collaboration. When someone's performance is measured on their own department's results, there is no rational reason to proactively help colleagues. The system rewards islands.

No time for development. The agenda is always full. Development gets postponed until there is a crisis. But development that only happens in a crisis is not development. That is firefighting at a higher level.

Psychological safety starts at the top

Amy Edmondson, professor at Harvard Business School, spent decades researching team performance. Her conclusion is consistent: psychological safety is the single most important factor in whether a team functions well. Not talent, not budget, not structure.

Google confirmed this through Project Aristotle, a large-scale internal study into what separates high-performing teams from the rest. Psychological safety came out on top. Above everything else.

But if the management team does not model this itself, it spreads downward. Middle managers sense what is happening above them. They mirror it, even when they are not aware of it.

Two levels of development

Management team development works on two levels. Both are necessary.

The first is individual. Every management team member brings their own blind spots and patterns that show up in collaboration. That requires individual attention. Leadership coaching does this work. It addresses the person doing the leading, not just the role they occupy.

The second is collective. Shared language, shared norms, shared behaviour. You do not learn that alone. You learn it together, in a well-designed programme aimed at the team as a whole. For organisations that want to work on this structurally, management training at the MT level is a logical next step.

In closing

The healthiest organisations I know have one thing in common. The management team functions as a real team. They hold each other accountable, say what they think, and consciously choose shared success over individual scorecards.

That does not happen by itself. But it can be developed.

If you want to explore what that could mean for your management team, let's have a free introductory conversation. No obligation.

Promoting your best employee: a costly mistake

David Buirs - Leadership Coach & Management Trainer

Promoting your best employee: the most costly mistake in your organisation

David Buirs is a leadership coach and trainer based in Amsterdam, working with managers and leaders at all levels. This article explains why promoting your best individual contributor into a management role is one of the most common and costly mistakes in talent management. The reader learns which behavioural signals actually indicate leadership potential and how to start developing it early.

You have a standout in your team. Everything they touch works. Deadlines met, quality consistent, output reliable. Colleagues come to them for advice.

And then the thought forms: if they are this good as an individual contributor, they will make a great manager.

It is the most common mistake in talent management.

What happens next

Your best employee becomes a manager. And struggles.

Not because they are not smart or not motivated. But because the skills that made them excellent as an individual contributor have little to do with what is needed to lead a team.

As an individual contributor, you win by being better than others. As a manager, you win by making others better. Those are two fundamentally different disciplines.

And in the process, you also lose your best executor. They are now stuck in back-to-back meetings, having performance conversations they were never trained for, putting out fires they do not fully understand. The work that gave them energy is gone.

Technical excellence says nothing about leadership potential

This sounds obvious. And yet most organisations keep acting as if it is not true.

Leadership potential does not live in technical expertise. It lives in behaviour. In how someone communicates when things get tense. In how someone responds when a colleague pushes back. In whether people actually enjoy working with them, even when they are delivering difficult news.

Does someone ask questions or give answers? Do they seek connection or avoid conflict? Can they regulate themselves when the pressure builds?

Those are the indicators.

The question that rarely gets asked

Do I want the people on this team to be led by this person?

Not: are they good at their job? But: do people feel safe, heard and challenged by them?

That information does not live in performance files. It lives in the informal dynamics of the team. In who people instinctively turn to when a conversation gets difficult. In who makes sure the quieter colleague actually speaks up in a meeting.

Give potential a small assignment first

Do not promote based on performance. Test for potential.

Give someone a small stretch assignment. Have them mentor an intern. Onboard a junior team member. Coordinate a project without you hovering over it.

Then do not evaluate the outcome. Evaluate the behaviour. How do they handle someone who works more slowly? How do they respond when things go off track? Do they ask for help or push through until it breaks?

That tells you more than three years of performance reviews.

Make it explicit in your organisation

Say it out loud: leadership is a separate discipline. Technical ability and management capability are not the same thing.

Then tell people what you are looking for. Not in vague competency frameworks, but concretely. What does a good manager do at your organisation? How does someone behave in a conflict? What do you expect from someone who is developing others?

When people know what you are watching for, they start paying attention to it themselves. That is already a development intervention.

And when someone does have the potential?

Then the real work begins.

Potential that is not supported rarely delivers what it promises. A manager without structured guidance makes the mistakes you end up solving. With the accompanying absence, turnover and team friction.

For organisations that want to tackle this structurally, an in-company leadership development program built around your specific context makes the difference. Not a one-day event, but a trajectory with the repetition and transfer that real behaviour change requires.

For managers who want to work on this individually, I offer coaching for managers at every level, from the newly promoted team lead to the senior leader who wants to lead more deliberately on culture, trust and results.

Curious what this looks like for your organisation or your own role? Let's talk. Plan your free introduction here. Zero obligation.

Coaching for Directors

David Buirs - Leadership Coach & Management Trainer

The higher you rise, the less you hear

David Buirs is a leadership coach based in Amsterdam who works with directors, executives and CEOs on personal leadership development. This article explains why senior leaders receive less feedback the higher they rise, how that affects the entire organisation, and what coaching for directors and executives concretely delivers. References include research by KornFerry/Hay Group and a study published in the Journal of Management Development.

You made it. You are a director now.

Years of hard work, strong results, and now you are at the top. The responsibility is bigger. The decisions are heavier. And the number of people who will tell you honestly what they think of your leadership: smaller than ever before.

That is a paradox most directors, executives and CEOs never say out loud. But almost all of them recognise it immediately.

A fish rots from the head

There is a saying I find uncomfortable. Because it is so precisely true.

"A fish starts rotting from the head."

When leadership at the top is not working well, that spreads through the entire organisation. Not overnight. But slowly, your behaviour, your tone, and your blind spots seep into the culture of everything beneath you.

In how people treat each other. In whether they dare to say what they actually think. In whether they take ownership or wait for you to decide.

That is a significant responsibility. And it asks something of you: the willingness to take yourself seriously as a leader. Not as a subject-matter expert. As the person who sets the tone for everything around you.

The higher you rise, the less feedback you receive

In 1969, Laurence Peter described a phenomenon now known as the Peter Principle. The idea is straightforward. People are promoted based on their performance in their current role. Until they reach a position where those earlier qualities are no longer sufficient.

Many directors became directors because they excelled as managers, as experts, as strategists. Not because they had already proven themselves at the very top of an organisation.

And at that level, honest feedback dries up.

Employees keep their real opinions to themselves. Peer directors are also competitors. The board wants results. And the question "am I actually doing this well?" becomes harder and harder to ask out loud.

That is not a sign of weakness. It is the structural reality of senior leadership.

But without a mirror, you do not grow. And if you as a director stop growing, the organisation stops growing with you.

The loneliness nobody talks about

One of the things I hear most from the directors I work with is how lonely it can be. Not socially. Professionally.

There is nobody you can call without a filter to say you are doubting yourself. Nobody who challenges you the way you needed to be challenged earlier in your career. Nobody to think out loud with about the question that has been on your mind for three weeks.

You carry enormous responsibility. For people, for results, for the direction of the organisation. And most evenings, you carry it alone.

Coaching for directors, executives and CEOs offers exactly that: a conversation with someone who speaks the language. Someone who knows what it feels like to work under high pressure, to navigate politics, and to sometimes simply not know what the right call is.

What the research shows

KornFerry and Hay Group conducted extensive research into the relationship between leadership and business results. Their conclusion: leadership determines 50 to 60 percent of organisational culture, and has a measurable influence of approximately 35 percent on business results.

That is not a soft finding. That is strategy.

And yet coaching for directors is still an afterthought in many organisations. Something for when things go wrong. Not something built in structurally, the way finance or marketing is.

A study published in the Journal of Management Development looked at the impact of leadership coaching on 75 middle and senior managers. The outcome was clear: coaching led to more individual attention for team members, more delegation, and less micromanagement.

Those are precisely the behavioural shifts that ripple through an entire organisation. From director to team member.

I know what it feels like

I spent five years leading a large international team as a director. I know the reality of senior leadership from the inside.

The moments when you doubt yourself but cannot call anyone. The decisions you are not sure about. The meetings where the atmosphere is off but you have not yet figured out how to turn it around.

That experience is not a side note in how I work. It is the foundation.

When we work together on executive coaching, I bring that with me. No theoretical models that read like a management book. An honest conversation about what is actually going on, and what you need to sharpen your leadership.

For organisations that want to work more broadly on leadership development across their management layers, management training is a complement that works deeper into the organisation.

When does coaching for directors make sense?

Not only when things are going wrong.

Coaching makes sense when you feel there is more you could get out of your role. When certain conversations keep getting harder. When your team is not taking the ownership you expect from them. When you notice you are spending more time solving problems than giving direction.

And sometimes it is simply this: you need someone you can be honest with.

That is allowed. That is smart.

Interested, or just curious whether there is a fit? Plan a free introductory call via this page. No sales pitch. Just an honest conversation about what is going on.