Setting Boundaries as a New Manager: 3 Lines That Work

David Buirs | Leadership & Executive Coach

Setting Boundaries as a New Manager: 3 Lines That Work

David Buirs is a leadership coach in Amsterdam. This article helps early-career managers set boundaries using the 'yes, and' technique from improv theatre. You learn three concrete lines that protect your time without damaging your relationship with your team.

You just became a manager. And now everyone wants something from you.

Your inbox is overflowing. Your calendar is packed. For the third time today, someone asks if you have "just a minute." You say yes to everything. Because that's what good managers do, right?

Setting boundaries as a new manager is your most important survival skill. Without boundaries, you drown in other people's urgent work while your own work piles up. The trick is in how you say no. And surprisingly, that starts with yes.

Why Saying 'No' Feels So Hard

Most new managers struggle with this because they want to be liked. I see it constantly with the leaders who come to me. The fear of being the 'bad guy' runs the show.

You probably remember managers who changed after their promotion. Distant. Unreachable. You promised yourself you would be different. Approachable. With a real open-door policy.

So you say yes to everything. Every meeting. Every question. Every problem your team could handle perfectly well on their own. And then you wonder why you feel empty.

What Slips Away When You Set No Boundaries

When you always say yes, the real work suffers.

You stop planning ahead. There's no time to think about next quarter or to see problems coming.

You learn nothing new. That course you wanted to take? That book on leadership? It never happens.

You stop coaching. Real coaching takes attention. When you're interrupted all day, you give quick answers. You don't help people think for themselves.

You do no focus work. The big analyses. The strategy. The performance review that deserves attention. Everything gets rushed or pushed into the evening.

The Real Risk of Always Being Available

You think boundaries make you unkind. Look at what actually happens without them.

Your team learns they need you for everything. You raise dependent people who stop thinking for themselves. That's why organisations invest in a solid leadership track for their managers. To keep the manager from becoming the bottleneck that slows the whole department down.

Your boss sees you as someone for the small tasks. After all, you never have room for the bigger, strategic work. You grow irritable and tired. People feel it. The work that truly moves your team forward doesn't get done.

The 'Yes, And' Technique From Improv Theatre

Here's a simple way to set boundaries without sounding like a jerk.

In improv theatre, actors use "yes, and" to accept something and add to it. The scene dies the moment someone says "no." With "yes, and" you keep the scene alive and steer it somewhere at the same time.

You use the same move. You acknowledge a request, and you add your boundary. The other person feels seen and you protect your time.

Here's how that sounds in practice.

The question: "Can you join this meeting?"
Your answer: "Yes, I see why my input helps, and Sarah actually knows more about this. Let me connect you two."

The question: "Can you help me with this?"
Your answer: "Yes, this sounds important, and I'm full until Thursday. Can it wait, or shall we find someone else?"

The question: "I have a problem."
Your answer: "Yes, I hear that you're stuck, and I'm curious which solutions you've already tried."

It works because you see the other person. They feel acknowledged. And your boundary holds.

Boundaries You Can Use Today

Here are concrete boundaries you can start with right away.

For your time:
"I'm available for questions on Tuesday and Thursday, between 2 and 3 pm."
"I keep mornings free for focus work."
"I check my email three times a day. Urgent things go through Slack."

For what you take on:
"I'll point you to our knowledge base where all the processes live, start there."
"Let's spend 15 minutes on this, then you carry on yourself."
"I'll review what you make, but you build it."

For decisions:
"This is your decision. I trust your judgement."
"Come with a recommendation, not just the problem."
"I decide, and you bring the analysis."

These boundaries protect you. And they make your team better at their work.

Start Small, Start This Week

Pick one thing that keeps pulling you away from your work. Come up with a "yes, and" response to it. Use that response three times this week.

It will feel awkward. That's part of it. Someone might push back.

And you get time back. To plan. To think. To let your team grow instead of putting out fires all day. Setting boundaries as a new manager finally brings you to the core of your craft. Planning. Developing people. Making decisions.

Your team doesn't need you every second. They need you clear and focused.

Want to work on this together? For leaders who want a firmer grip on their role, business coaching for leaders helps you take charge of your time, focus, and team. At director level, executive coaching is a natural next step.

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

How Leaders Use AI (And Where It Goes Wrong)

David Buirs - Leadership- & Executive Coach

How Leaders Use AI (And Where It Gets in the Way)

David Buirs is a leadership coach in Amsterdam. This post shows how leaders use AI for planning, engagement data, conversation prep, and goal setting, and where AI gets in the way of a leader's personal work. You learn which tasks you can safely hand off and which ones you keep for yourself.

The question is no longer whether you use AI as a leader. Almost everyone already does. The question is what for.

That is where the real difference shows up. Some things get better when you bring AI in. Other things get hollowed out. And which is which shapes how your people see you. That image feeds straight back into how effective you can be.

Here is how I look at it with the leaders who come to me. AI takes over the technical and analytical work. That gives you time for the part of leadership only you can do. Being present. Asking the right question. Making real contact. How leaders use AI decides whether that room opens up or disappears.

Start With the Planning

Plenty of operational leaders drown in rosters and capacity questions. How many people do you need, and when? How busy will next month be? How much margin do you build in for illness or overrun?

This is exactly the kind of work AI is strong at. Feed it your historical numbers and let it look for patterns. Which weeks always peak? Where are you structurally short? You get a first analysis in minutes that used to cost you an afternoon.

The output is a proposal, not a decision. You know the people behind the numbers. You know one team member just came back from leave and needs to ease in. You add that context yourself. AI calculates, you weigh.

Read What Your Engagement Data Tells You

Most managers look at an engagement survey and see a grade. A 7.2. Slightly higher than last year. On to the next agenda item.

There is far more in there. Drop the anonymized results from the past few years into an AI tool and ask for trends. Where does the score drop consistently? Which themes keep coming back in the open answers? When did the decline start?

Then ask yourself the uncomfortable question. What does this data say about me as a leader? According to Gallup, only around ten percent of working people feel genuinely engaged at work. Your team is part of that figure. The numbers often show months in advance that someone is checking out, well before the resignation letter lands on your desk.

You do not have to fish those signals out of a spreadsheet yourself. That is what this tool is for.

Let an Agent Prepare Your Conversations

Here it gets more interesting than a tool that summarizes something. You can have an AI agent gather the loose signals before every one-on-one. What has happened since last time? Which agreements were still open? Which themes kept coming up in earlier conversations?

The clever part is the autonomy. A good agent pulls from different sources on its own, cross-references your calendar, and hands you a short briefing. You can set it to run every morning without asking. The briefing is simply there before your conversation starts.

You can also connect an agent like this to your email. Ask for an overview of every message you have not replied to yet, and the messages where you are still waiting on a reply. Have them ranked by urgency. Then let the agent add the open points straight to the agenda of your one-on-one with the right person. That way every loose thread comes back at the moment you are speaking to that person anyway.

And notice what you win that time for. You waste no minutes at the start of the conversation. You do not have to search for where you left off. You walk in prepared and give your full attention to the person across from you. The agent does the digging beforehand so you can put your phone away during the conversation itself.

One warning. An agent that digs through your systems touches your people's personal data. So know exactly which tool does that, and whether it happens safely and within the rules. More on that below.

Help Yourself Set Goals

As a leader you have two kinds of conversations about goals with your people.

In the first kind, you set the direction. "I expect ten percent more revenue this year. Projects X and Y are done by the end of Q3." Clear expectations, clear boundaries.

In the second kind, you flip it around. Here your people come with development goals that matter to them. What do they want to learn? Where do they want to be in two years? You have that conversation together, and it comes from them. A classic coaching conversation.

For the first kind, AI can help you. Let it think along on a sharp wording of a goal. Ask for the blind spots in your reasoning. Check whether your expectation is concrete and realistic. In the second kind, your employee holds the wheel. Let them reach for AI themselves to sharpen their ideas. As long as the goal comes from them and they keep the lead, you strengthen their ownership of that development.

Guard the Line on Personal Data

Here it gets serious. The moment you type a team member's name into an AI tool, you enter personal data. Under the GDPR you are responsible for that. Recent research shows that nearly thirty-five percent of what people paste into these tools contains sensitive information. Much of it without the user noticing.

The solution is simple. Anonymize before you enter anything. Talk about "team member A" instead of a name. Say "an employee with a dip in their numbers" instead of details that point to one person. The analysis stays useful. The person stays protected.

Make a habit of this. It belongs to how you treat your people.

The Email You Are Better Off Writing Yourself

And then the part where AI can truly get in the way of your leadership.

Imagine receiving this from your manager, after a hard week:

"Dear team member, I just wanted to take a moment. Not just any email — but a heartfelt moment of appreciation. Your dedication over the past period wasn't merely impressive; it was nothing short of transformative. In a world that's constantly changing, you are the one who makes the difference. Your contribution isn't just work. It's a journey. Together we build synergy and empower one another to elevate our shared objectives to the next level. Keep shining! Warmest possible regards."

You feel right away what is wrong. Nobody talks like that. It is smooth, correct, and completely empty. No human wrote this.

Research from the University of Florida among more than a thousand professionals confirms the feeling. When people notice that a personal message was heavily AI-generated, the share who see their manager as sincere drops from eighty-three percent to somewhere between forty and fifty-two percent. That same email costs you trust, integrity, and authority.

Reading an AI email feels impersonal. A bit like putting your phone face-up on the table during a one-on-one with your direct report. Both pull the connection away at the moment it matters most.

So write your personal messages yourself. Or if you use AI for a first draft, read it back critically. Does this sound like you? Would you say it out loud this way? If not, rewrite it until it does. A grammar check is fine. Having a machine put your appreciation into words does not belong there.

The pattern under all these examples is the same. Use AI for the calculation, the analysis, the first draft. Keep the human work with yourself. The more time you win on the technical part, the more room you have for the part that makes you a leader.

That is also exactly what makes your role future-proof. As AI takes over more technical tasks, the value of a leader moves toward the human. Being present. Having difficult conversations. Asking the right question at the right moment. None of that can be automated.

If you want to get sharper at this, that is exactly what leadership guidance focuses on. For leaders at director level, executive coaching is a logical deepening. And for organizations that want to train their managers in this structurally, a leadership program is a next step.

Running into this yourself and want to talk it through? Plan a free introduction here. We look together at where you stand and what helps you forward.

Will AI Replace Managers? The Bad News. And the Good.

David Buirs - Leadership- & Executive Coach

Will AI Replace Managers? The Bad News. And the Good.

David Buirs is a leadership and executive coach in Amsterdam. This article looks at whether AI will replace managers, how automation shrinks teams and absorbs administrative management work, and which leadership skills keep you valuable. Readers learn where to focus their development for the years ahead.

I keep coming back to one image. A company that used to need ten people, now running on three. The work stayed. Most of it just gets handled by AI agents that decide, send the email, book the ticket, process the refund, upload the data. Nobody has to ask them.

Helping managers become great leaders is my work. It is the thing I love most. So this is a future I find uncomfortable. Still, I would rather look at it clearly than pretend it is not coming. The question I hear most often these days is simple. Will AI replace managers?

Here is what I see. The more repetitive a role is, the easier it becomes for an agent to do it faster and cheaper. Work that once took ten people can now be done by one person managing ten agents. And what counts as repetitive keeps moving. A year ago an agent could handle a simple, predictable task. Now it runs a whole process, with steps and judgment calls along the way. Every month the line moves further. Work we thought was too complex ends up inside it.

Companies Are Getting Smaller

This is happening across the board. Some sectors get hit harder than others, but the direction is the same everywhere. What took ten people might soon take three. Teams shrink and output climbs. When a company only needs three people, it really matters which three.

Two Things Happen to Management at Once

When companies get smaller, managers are impacted too. A smaller organisation needs fewer managers to run it. That alone thins out the management layer.

Then add a second effect on top. A lot of classic management work is administration in disguise. Tracking progress toward KPIs. Scheduling and planning. Forecasting. Pulling numbers into a report and passing them up the chain. This is the structured, repeatable work that AI handles well.

Middle management feels this hardest. So much of that role is moving information upward and aligning people with targets. That is exactly the part AI does well. Roles heavy on coordination and reporting are most exposed. Think operations, finance, logistics, customer service, administrative layers in tech and corporate environments. The more a job is about passing information along, the more of it can be automated.

So two forces stack. Fewer managers are needed because companies are smaller. And the managers who remain see their administrative tasks absorbed by AI. What is left is the leadership part. Each leader ends up with more direct reports, supported by AI for the coordination that used to fill the week.

What Survives Is Leadership

The human skills survive. Motivating people. Coaching them. Inspiring a direction worth following. Connecting individuals into something that works together. An agent can draft your forecast. It cannot sit with someone who has lost their confidence and help them find it again. As the administrative work gets absorbed, these become the core of the job rather than the soft edge of it. This is where leadership coaching earns its place, building the skills that AI cannot touch.

There is judgment too. Knowing which AI output to trust. Knowing what to ask in the first place. Becoming more AI savvy than the people around you. These compound over time. For leaders at director level, where the decisions get heavier and lonelier, coaching for senior leaders is a logical next step.

The Skill Most Leaders Skip

Self-awareness. Research by organizational psychologist Tasha Eurich, published in Harvard Business Review, found that while 95% of people claim to be self-aware, only 10 to 15% actually fit the criteria. That gap is where your blind spots sit, out of view. Interestingly, her work also found that senior leaders are often less self-aware than they assume, partly because honest feedback gets harder to find the higher you climb.

This is workable. Find your blind spots, work on them, and you give yourself a real head start while everyone else assumes they are already fine.

And yes, an executive coach telling you to invest in your own development. I see the optics there. I believe this is coming anyway, however much I dislike the idea. For most of us it comes down to upskilling or being left behind. I happen to think most of us are capable of the upskilling. For organisations that want to build these skills across a whole team, a management training programme is a practical way to start.

Where to Start

I work with leaders at every level, from new managers to directors, helping them get ready for what the next few years will ask of them. We look at where you stand, where your blind spots are, and which skills will keep you valuable as the work around you changes.

If you want to be one of the people who comes out of this stronger, let's have a chat. A free introduction, zero obligation.

My Team Does Not Take Ownership. What Now?

David Buirs | Leadership Coach & Management Trainer

My Team Does Not Take Ownership. Why Is That?

David Buirs is a leadership and executive coach in Amsterdam. This post is about teams that do not take ownership. You will learn why more control backfires, how clear agreements and short update moments bring ownership back, and how to respond when someone fails to keep an agreement.

You probably know the feeling. You hand something off, and then you have to chase it constantly. A reminder here. A check there. And still it sits there until you jump on top of it again.

You start to think you should just do it yourself. Faster, easier, done.

But then you are caught in a pattern that feeds itself.

This is one of the topics I work on most often with people. Team leads, managers, board members, VPs. In coaching this theme keeps coming back. And almost all of them tell me the same thing after we have worked on it: it gets easier and easier to let people take things on themselves.

The More You Stay on Top of It, the Less They Do

This is the painful paradox. The more you control, the less ownership you get back.

It seems illogical, but it sits deep in how people work. Research into micromanagement shows a clear mechanism. Too much control removes autonomy, and with it the felt responsibility for the outcome.

And then something subtle happens. When you become the owner of their task, your employee's brain senses that sharply. They start acting to satisfy your instructions. People then follow the rules to avoid getting the blame, rather than trying to make the work genuinely better.

So you have literally taken the ownership over. And then you wonder why no one picks it up.

The way out lies in something other than pushing harder.

Make Agreements Instead of Giving Instructions

Telling people what to do feels efficient. It rarely works, though.

What does work: making clear agreements together with your people. An agreement that two people commit to.

Do you doubt whether someone can handle it? Then ask a question.

"What is your plan? Walk me through it, so I can give you a tip if you need one."

Now two things happen at once. You hear whether the plan holds up. And you leave ownership where it belongs: with them. They present their approach to you, not the other way around. It is their plan.

The Update Agreement That Changes Everything

Here is where many managers gain the most. The way you hand off an important project.

Look first at how it often goes.

"The deadline for this project is in two weeks. Will it work out?" "Yes, it will be fine." Two weeks later: "Oh, I completely forgot."

Now you are empty-handed. Too late to steer anything.

Compare that with this approach.

"This project is important, because a lot depends on it for [reason]. I want to ask you to do this, because I believe you can. Will you help me with this? How you carry it out is up to you. I am curious though: what is your plan? Walk me through it. And because so much depends on it, will you send me a very short update every two days?"

Do you feel the difference?

You explain why it matters. You give trust. You leave the execution with them. And you build in a safety net. If you hear nothing after two days, you can steer right away. From now on you avoid surprises.

The short update works as a rhythm in which you keep course together.

And When Someone Fails to Keep the Agreement?

It happens. The question is how you respond.

The first time: take it on yourself. "Maybe I did not explain it clearly enough." This keeps the relationship open. People come out of their defensiveness, so they can really listen.

The second time: be clear and warm at once. "Last time it may have been on me. This time I explained it clearly. I want you to succeed in your role. I have little appetite for attaching a consequence to a broken agreement. But I do need to be able to rely on you. What can we do so that this goes well from now on?"

And then the most important part. If you name a consequence, follow through when it goes wrong again. Otherwise you lose your authority. Your words become cheap. Everyone on your team sees that you threaten without follow-up.

A boundary you guard is the only real boundary.

Two Things That Help Here

Always make the why explicit. People take things on when they understand why it matters. "Just do this" gives you an executor. "This matters because customers drop off otherwise" gives you an owner. The same task, a completely different sense of involvement.

Celebrate it when someone does take ownership. We mostly name what goes wrong. But behaviour you pay attention to grows. Do you see someone take initiative? Say it out loud. Just honestly. "Good that you picked this up yourself, that really helps me." That way you make ownership attractive.

To Close

A team that takes things on itself grows through steering differently. Through agreements instead of instructions. Through trust with a safety net underneath.

It feels awkward at first. You give up control you were used to holding. But that is exactly where the room sits in which your people can grow. Want to work on this personally? This is exactly the kind of theme I help with in coaching for managers. For leaders at board level, executive coaching amsterdam is a logical next step. And for organisations that want to address this structurally, a leadership development program is a solid move.

And you finally keep your hands free for the work that truly matters. Interested or curious? Let's chat. Plan your free introduction here. Zero obligation.

AI Strategy for Executives: Where to Begin?

David Buirs - Leadership Coach & Management Trainer

An AI Strategy for Executives: Where Do You Actually Start?

David Buirs is a leadership and executive coach in Amsterdam. This post is about AI strategy at board level. You will learn why you need to use AI yourself, how to choose between being a frontrunner or a follower, how to balance safety with momentum, and what agents and AI mean for your HR policy.

Most boards talk about AI as if it were an IT project. Something for the floor below. A tool you buy and roll out.

That is a misunderstanding that costs you money later.

AI touches how your organisation makes decisions, how your people work, and which skills will still hold value in five years. Those are board questions. And still I see many senior leaders who delegate the conversation because AI is not really their thing.

That is where I want to start.

Learn To Use It Yourself. Really.

You do not need to become a prompt engineer. But you do need to know how it feels to work with these tools.

Write a tricky email with AI. Have a strategy memo summarised. Prepare a difficult conversation. You learn quickly where the technology is strong and where you need your own judgement.

Because once you use AI yourself, you recognise AI text instantly. Those smooth, tidy sentences. That overdone enthusiasm. Texts that sound profound but actually do not say much. Everyone around you recognises it by now too.

Say you send out a company-wide message that clearly came from ChatGPT. People see that. And they draw a conclusion about you. Your authority drops at the moment you least expect it. You wanted to be efficient and you came across as lazy.

Whoever has handled the technology themselves avoids that kind of blunder. You know when AI helps and when your own voice is needed.

Frontrunner or Follower? It Depends on Your Context

There is a real debate about timing. Two possible courses.

The frontrunner experiments early. Invests. Finds a path alone, makes mistakes, builds knowledge that competitors still lack. That costs money and it costs calm in the organisation.

The follower waits for the best practices to surface. Lets others learn the expensive lessons and adopts what works. Cheaper. But you fall behind, and sometimes that gap is hard to close.

Which posture fits depends on who you are.

Do you work in a sector with people who have an affinity for technology and AI? Where many processes run that may not be complex, but also do not call for a brand new creative solution every time? Think of a logistics or e-commerce business. Stable, repeating processes and people who understand how systems work. There agents are ideal and waiting is risky.

Do you work in a sector where a lot happens by hand, where the work is less process-driven? Think of a cleaning company. There the room for AI is smaller. Then it is wiser to take targeted steps and let the market do its work.

Looking honestly at your own situation is the whole craft here. Choose what fits your people and your market.

Safety: Involve Legal, but Keep Your Common Sense

Here you have to do two things at once.

Involve your lawyers early. Make sure no personal data or sensitive company data ends up in a public LLM. That is a real risk and the consequences can be large. Make agreements, choose the right tools, train your people on what is and is not allowed.

Stay within the rules. There is no debate about that.

And still I see organisations overshoot. Everything gets locked down out of fear. Every pilot has to pass three committees. The result is that nothing happens, while your competitor simply keeps working.

Too much legal thinking costs you your lead. Stay within the rules and keep your pace at the same time. That is the balance a board has to guard.

Autonomous Agents Move Faster Than You Think

The biggest change right now sits in agents. Small autonomous programs that carry out tasks on their own. Not a tool you operate, but a digital colleague that finishes work.

An example makes it concrete. A customer emails a complaint. The agent pulls up the file, checks the record, and assesses whether the complaint is justified. Is it valid? Then the agent can issue a refund itself and write an apology email. A human reviews things at the back end. And customers can object if they disagree with a decision. When this is done well, it saves time and money.

For repetitive processes the gain is enormous. And here is the striking part. Connected agents learn from each other. That can move fast.

Look at Prosus. With 40,000 employees, the company now runs more than 60,000 agents. Their own research shows a pattern that every board should know. Around 2% of active agents drive the bulk of the business impact.

That is a strategic lesson. You do not have to automate everything at once. You find the few places where agents make a real difference, and there you go all in.

HR Strategy: Which People Become More Important?

This is perhaps the conversation that gets avoided the longest.

Technical knowledge becomes worth less. Not worthless, but less scarce. AI can take over more and more of the work that used to need a specialist.

What rises in value are human skills. Curiosity. Judgement. The ability to connect. Coaching others. Handling change well.

That has consequences for who you consider important in your organisation.

The colleague who knows a great deal but is a mediocre team player becomes less central. And the person who brings people along, creates calm, and can move with uncertainty becomes indispensable. Research points the same way. The value of work moves from pure productivity toward human skills and meaning.

As a board, your promotions and your reviews decide what you reward. That is a choice you make now, not in three years. For leaders wrestling with these questions at the highest level, executive coaching amsterdam is a logical place to sharpen them.

Start Small. Make Someone Responsible.

The biggest mistake is waiting for the perfect plan. It does not come.

Run small experiments. Say you are a scale-up. Have your sales team use AI for a week to summarise and follow up on call notes. Measure what it delivers. Small, contained, measurable.

What works, you scale up. What does not work, you drop without regret.

And appoint someone. An AI ambassador who collects the small experiments and grows the good ones step by step. Someone with energy for the topic and standing in the organisation. Without an owner, every initiative evaporates. If you want to anchor this across the organisation in actual behaviour, a form of leadership development program is often the step that turns experiments into a new way of working.

To Close

An AI strategy for the board is about leadership. About understanding what is happening yourself, looking honestly at your context, and bringing your people along with something that can feel frightening.

You do not have to get it right in one go. You do have to understand it yourself. Running into this as a board member and want to think it through for your own situation? Interested or curious? Let's chat. Plan your free introduction here. Zero obligation.

How to Lead Team Meetings Better: Stop Wasting Time

David Buirs | Leadership & Executive Coach

Why Your Meetings Always Run to the Last Minute

David Buirs is a leadership and executive coach in Amsterdam. In this article you learn how to lead team meetings as a manager: how to give a meeting a clear goal, how to steer it, and how to give people their time back. With practical tips for managers whose days drain away in meetings.

Look at your calendar today. A 60-minute meeting. How long did it take? Exactly 60 minutes.

That is how it almost always goes. A conversation booked for an hour fills that hour. People keep talking until the time runs out. The agenda stretches to fit whatever room you give it.

I work with a lot of managers whose days drain away in meetings. Back-to-back, with no moment to think. By the end of the day the real work hasn't started yet. Sound familiar?

Here is what I have learned. Most meetings run over for one simple reason. Nobody is leading them.

A Meeting Without a Goal Is a Meeting Without an End

Before you send an invite, ask yourself one question. What needs to be different by the end of this conversation?

There are roughly three kinds of meetings. It helps to know which one you are running.

The first is a decision. There is a choice on the table and it has to be made. The second is informing. You share something the team needs to know. The third is aligning or brainstorming. You need input from the group to move forward.

Many meetings fail because they mix these types up. You think you are coming to inform. Halfway through, a discussion breaks out as if there is still something to decide. Then you are stuck.

A good agenda names the type. "Today we decide on the new planning." That reads differently from "Let's discuss the planning." The first has an endpoint. The second can go on forever.

No agenda, no meeting. Or as I used to tell my teams: no agenda, no attenda. An invite comes in without a goal? Ask about it, kindly. "What do we want to walk away with?" That one question often saves the whole hour.

Steering Is Your Job

If you call the meeting, you are the one running it. You are responsible for the time of everyone in the room. Do the math. Eight people, one hour. That is a full working day of human attention you are managing.

Steering feels uncomfortable for many managers. You don't want to cut anyone off. You want to be liked. So you let the meeting run its own course. You watch a quick update turn into a ten-minute story.

A simple agreement helps here. At the start of the meeting, ask the group this: "May I interrupt if we drift off the agenda?"

Everyone says yes. Nobody says no to that question. And now you have permission. When the conversation drifts, you steer it back, calmly. "Good point, but this is outside our goal for today. Shall we pick it up separately?"

The surprising part: the group appreciates this enormously. People don't want to waste an hour. They are often waiting for someone with the nerve to steer. By interrupting, you protect the time. And you protect the people who would otherwise watch their afternoon disappear in silence.

Stop on Time, Even When There Is Time Left

Here comes the part almost nobody does. Is the agenda done after forty minutes? Then the meeting is over. You don't have to fill the hour.

Give people those twenty minutes back. Say it out loud. "We're done, you've got twenty minutes back." The effect is bigger than you think. You show that you respect their time. And you break the habit of time filling itself.

We simply have too many meetings, and most of them run too long. Research by Atlassian shows how many hours a week vanish into meetings nobody needed. Every half hour you give back goes to the work people were actually hired for.

Not Everyone Needs to Be There

Another habit that gives back a lot of time. Give people the option to skip, or to leave once their part is over.

It feels rude. But there are few things more tedious than half an hour of half-listening to a discussion between colleagues you add nothing to. That time is just gone.

So say it explicitly. "Point three is for the whole team, then we get into the technical side with just the developers." Whoever isn't needed can go. If it gets abused, you address that. That is a separate conversation, not a reason to keep holding everyone hostage.

Ask the Quiet People What They Think

One more thing. In every meeting a few voices dominate. Often they are the people who talk most easily, while the sharpest ideas stay unspoken.

The introverted team members often sit on good observations they hold back. They need time to think. The room is already taken up by others.

As the person running the meeting, you can solve this. Ask them directly. "Sara, you have a lot of experience with this. How do you see it?" Give them a moment. That is often where the insight comes from that moves the whole discussion forward.

This is a kind of leadership that has little to do with power. You create space so the best ideas surface, regardless of who has them.

To Close

Leading meetings better starts with realizing that time is your real scarcity. A clear goal, the right type, and someone with the nerve to steer. That is enough to bring an hour of corporate theater down to twenty minutes that lead somewhere.

There is something underneath it too. Leading meetings well earns you respect. People notice who protects their time and who lets it slide. The manager who steers firmly and kindly builds quiet authority that reaches far beyond that one meeting.

With the leaders I coach, I work on the technique of steering. But also on the layer beneath it. The patterns that make you let someone talk too long. The fear of really steering a conversation, because you worry about coming across as blunt. That fear often sits deeper than the meeting itself. That is exactly the kind of theme I work on in my management coaching. We practice it concretely, in the situations you run into. For leaders at director level, coaching for executives is a logical deepening of that same work.

Want to anchor this in a whole team rather than one person? Then a leadership training for the entire group is a logical step.

Curious whether this fits your situation? Plan your free introduction here. Zero obligation, just a good conversation.

Communicating With Executives Without the Nerves

David Buirs | Leadership Coach & Management Trainer

Communicating With Executives Without the Nerves

Leadership and executive coach David Buirs, based in Amsterdam, explores why so many professionals feel anxious when communicating with executives and senior leaders. Drawing on psychology and coaching practice, this article explains how the stories we build about ourselves and others drive that anxiety, and what a more grounded starting point looks like.

You notice your hands are clammy. Your stomach feels tight and your breath goes shallow. Tonight will be another night with little sleep. You never sleep well the night before presenting to your department's Vice President.

It's actually strange, when you think about it. One person can have this effect on our body, while others don't. You might have never questioned why, and assumed that's just how things work.

Let's question it.

The Story You've Been Telling Yourself

Without realizing it, we spend our whole lives building and living a story about ourselves. And it starts young.

As a child, you made a beautiful drawing and saw how happy and proud it made your parents. That felt good. In that moment, a story began forming. "I'm good at making drawings." Months later, the same thing happens after you painted something in class. The story develops: "I'm good at making things. I'm creative."

For someone else, they might have come home with a low mark on a math exam, and their parents were visibly upset. There, a different mental story begins: "I'm bad at math." Which later expands into: "I'm probably less sharp than most people."

In our adult lives, these stories have become very elaborate. Some boost our confidence. "I'm a successful CEO and visionary. My time is precious and every second I spend on trivial things is a waste."

Or: "Most people don't like me. I can't do things well. My opinion doesn't matter much, because other people probably know more than me anyway."

We often forget one important detail. These are just stories. Stories that feel completely real.

Why Communicating With Executives Feels So Different

Picture that CEO. If people started telling her she's a failure, day after day, her inner story would change, even though nothing about her actual ability did. And the insecure man, if he kept hearing how sharp he is, would slowly start to believe a different story about himself. The person stays the same. The inner narrative changes.

So how can this insight help you?

In corporate life, many of us get nervous around senior people at work. This comes up in coaching for executives time and time again. Part of it is real. This person has some influence over our career and our job security. But part of it comes from the inner story we build about ourselves and about them.

Often, without realizing it, we treat certain people as more important. In our internal story, they are up "there," and we are down "here." That creates tension and anxiety.

Yes, in a corporate hierarchy, some people have more responsibilities, experience, and knowledge. But on a fundamental level, we're all the same.

The Story Works Both Ways

The same dynamic works in the other direction. The intern who just started, the person at reception, the new hire who seems unsure of themselves. We can subconsciously place them "below" us, just as we placed the VP "above." The intern is probably nervous around us, telling themselves the same kind of story we tell ourselves about the VP.

Same story, same mistake.

So here is the thing to try. Imagine walking into that meeting with your VP, and you see them as another human being. Someone with more experience, yes. But a fellow human, the same as the person driving your bus this morning, or the one who made your coffee. You have some information you believe is useful, and you want to share it. That's the whole interaction.

Communicating from that calmer place changes how you come across. People read it as confidence, and they listen more openly.

Change Begins With Insight

None of this happens overnight. We all walk around with conditioning and assumptions that have been with us for decades. Reading one article won't make you free from nerves before your next big meeting. But change begins with insight. And the insight is that the senior person across the table has the same fears and doubts you do.

That can be the start of a new story about yourself. One where you are confident, valuable, and worth listening to.

Start believing that, and others will too. And the next time you have a meeting with your VP on the calendar, you might notice you sleep a little better the night before.

If this is something you're working through, coaching for executives can be a practical place to do that work. For organizations that want to develop this capacity across their leadership teams, leadership training offers a structured path. And if you want to talk through where you are right now, plan a free introduction here. Zero obligation.

Improving Executive Communication: Why They Stop Listening

David Buirs | Leadership & Executive Coach

The Room Stops Listening When The Boss Talks. Here Is Why.

David Buirs is a leadership and executive coach in Amsterdam. This article is about improving executive communication for senior leaders. You will learn how calm delivery, generous context, audience translation, and honest vulnerability determine whether your message lands.

You know your stuff. You have the numbers. And yet you see it happening: the attention in the room fades while you are talking.

The higher you get, the heavier your words become. A single sentence from you can keep a team busy for a week. Or shut them down entirely.

The content is usually fine. The delivery is where it breaks down.

Calm Is Your Strongest Signal

People read your state before they hear your words.

Speak fast and the room feels rushed. Speak calmly and the room feels you have time. That you are in control.

Speak slower than feels natural. Much slower. What feels painfully slow to you sounds exactly right to your audience.

Use silence. A pause after an important sentence gives people time to let it land.

And vary. In tone, in pace, in volume. A voice that sounds the same the entire time loses people. Variation keeps them with you.

Give More Context Than You Think You Need

You have been deep in this topic for months. Your team is hearing it for the first time.

This is the curse of knowledge. The better you understand something, the harder it becomes to imagine what it is like to not understand it yet.

You skip steps. You use abbreviations. You start in the middle of your own story.

Give more background than feels logical. Explain where something comes from, why it matters now, and what the next step is. What feels obvious to you is rarely obvious to anyone else.

Translate Your Message Into Their World

Everyone is tuned into the same radio station: WIIFM. What is in it for me.

Say you walk in full of energy with a plan to increase earnings per share by four percent. To you, that is big news. To most people in the room, it means very little.

Translate it. Four percent growth means room for new roles. Better chances for promotion. Potentially higher salaries. More challenging work.

That is what people listen to.

Connect what you say to a bigger goal. And immediately tell them what that goal means for the person sitting across from you.

Nervous? Redirect Your Attention

Nerves almost always come from the same place. You are focused on yourself. What do they think of me. Am I going to mess this up.

As long as your attention is on yourself, the nerves feed themselves.

Redirect your attention to the impact you want to make. What do you want these people to walk away with? Why does that matter?

The moment your focus goes to the message, the nerves settle on their own.

It Is Okay To Say You Do Not Know

At senior level, doubt quickly feels like weakness. So many leaders pretend they have an answer to everything.

People see through that. Almost always.

"I do not know, let me find out" does something different. It shows you are honest. That you take yourself seriously without making yourself bigger than you are.

Those who dare to be vulnerable often come across as more competent. Confidence that is real carries more weight than confidence that is performed.

Say It More Often Than Feels Right

You have shared your core message three times now. You are tired of it. And that is exactly when it starts to land for everyone else.

Leaders underestimate how often a message needs to be repeated before it sticks. What feels like endless repetition to you is the first time it truly registers for your organisation.

It Starts With You

Good communication follows from who you are when you stand in front of the group. Calm, clear, and focused on the other person.

You learn this in practice. By doing it, stumbling, and watching yourself while you do. In executive coaching we work on this directly. We look at how you come across, practise the conversations that matter, and find the leader you want to be when the room is listening.

Want to take this wider across your organisation, for your entire management layer? A leadership track is a logical step.

Curious whether this fits? Plan a free introduction. Zero obligation.

Coaching for CEOs | The Leadership Team Sets the Tone

David Buirs | Leadership & Executive Coach

The Leadership Team Sets the Tone. Whether You Like It or Not.

David Buirs is an executive coach based in Amsterdam who works with senior leaders and executives. This article explores why more organisations are investing in coaching at the executive level, which themes come up most frequently, and how friction within the leadership team affects the entire organisation.

When an executive team isn't functioning well together, the rest of the organisation feels it faster than you'd expect. Decisions become unclear. Priorities keep changing. Team leads receive conflicting signals. And slowly, an undercurrent of uncertainty builds that nobody names out loud, but everybody senses.

The reverse is equally true. An executive team that collaborates well, communicates clearly, and moves in the same direction creates a stability that ripples through the entire organisation. People know where they stand. There's direction. And that alone makes teams more effective.

It's no surprise, then, that more organisations are investing in coaching at the executive level. 39% of CEOs currently work with a coach. And 87% of organisations that invest in coaching report a positive ROI. The complexity at that level calls for a confidential space to think freely. A sounding board that sits outside the internal dynamics and politics.

Three Themes I Keep Seeing as Executive Coach

Communication

It sounds basic. But at executive level, how you communicate has an outsized impact on how well your organisation performs.

I see two patterns. The first: executives who think faster and see more than the people around them. They communicate too briefly. Too concisely. In their mind, everything is crystal clear. But for the organisation, it feels like jumping from one thing to the next. The result: teams disengage or start charting their own course.

The second pattern: vague, woolly communication. No clear direction. No concrete expectations. After a meeting, people walk away with different interpretations of the same conversation.

Both patterns are recognisable. And both can be resolved with deliberate effort.

Strategy and Vision

Having a vision is one thing. Translating it into something people understand and can execute is another. Many executives think in broad strokes but struggle to make it concrete. How do you translate a strategic ambition into quarterly goals for your teams? How do you prevent your strategy from becoming a nice document that sits in a drawer?

This is where it helps to think alongside someone who stands outside your system. Someone who doesn't go along with the assumptions that have become normal inside your organisation.

Delegation

Recent research confirms what I see in practice: delegation is the most common theme in executive coaching. Not because executives don't understand the concept. But because letting go runs counter to everything that made them successful in the first place.

You reached this position because you're good at what you do. Stepping in feels productive. Doing it yourself feels safe. But at executive level, that approach stops working. Your impact is determined by how well the people around you perform. And that requires something different from you than operational excellence.

A Logical Step for Executives Who Are Growing

Most of the executives I work with are performing well. They're being coached because more is being asked of them. Because their role is expanding. Because they want to actively steer their own development rather than leaving it to chance and experience alone.

Do you have an executive on your team who is ready for that step? Or do you sense that something at executive level isn't quite working, but you can't put your finger on it? I'd be happy to schedule a no-obligation conversation to explore whether executive coaching fits the situation. No pressure. Just an open conversation. Plan your free introduction here.