How to Connect With Your Team Through Real Listening

David Buirs | Leadership Expert

How to Really Connect With Your Team

David Buirs is a leadership and executive coach based in Amsterdam. This article explains why most managers think they’re listening to their team while their team experiences it differently. You will read about the gap between reactive and real listening, what that gap costs you, and which concrete questions open up the conversation.

Your team has noticed something about you that you haven’t.

In most of the conversations you have with them, you’re not fully there. Not gone. Just somewhere behind your own eyes, three sentences ahead, ready with your answer. They feel it. Most of them won’t say it.

That’s the gap between thinking you connect with your team and actually doing it.

Two monologues pretending to be a conversation

In most workplace conversations, two people take turns talking about themselves.

Someone tells you something about a project. You wait politely until they’re done, then jump in with something similar from your own experience. Or worse, with a solution they hadn’t asked for. Or worse still, with the next agenda item you had ready before they walked in.

Everyone has talked. Everyone has the impression a conversation took place. Nobody has learned anything.

Why you think you’re listening when you’re not

Listening is a skill almost everyone thinks they’re good at. In practice, most managers listen mainly to respond. Actually understanding comes second, if it comes at all.

The difference is where your head is. With real listening, you’re with the other person. With reactive listening, you’re with your next sentence. With your judgment. With the solution. With how it fits into your schedule.

To you, both feel like listening. To the other person, only the first feels like being heard.

What it costs your team

People only bring problems to someone who actually listens.

If a team member tries three times to put a vague beginning of something in front of you, and you keep responding before they’re halfway through, they won’t try a fourth time. They’ll tell you when it’s too late. Or not at all.

Same goes for feedback about you. For doubts about a decision. For the real reason someone has quietly been putting less energy into the work over the past few weeks.

What a team doesn’t tell you is almost always the most important thing happening.

What listening actually is

Real listening is different from being quiet while someone else talks. Being quiet is waiting your turn. Listening is emptying your head and letting the other person in.

That doesn’t work when you’re thinking about three other things. That doesn’t work with a phone on the table. That doesn’t work when you have to be in the next meeting in two minutes.

It requires a kind of slowness most work environments don’t reward. But it’s the basic condition for everything that falls under leadership.

Questions that open up the conversation

A few questions I often give people:

What makes that important to you?

How did you end up there?

What would a good outcome look like for you?

What are you actually trying to say?

That last one is underrated. Someone comes to you with a long build-up. You feel something underneath it. Ask.

What happens when you practice this

In the beginning, not much. A conversation runs a little longer. Someone doesn’t consciously notice you’re different, but they tell you a bit more.

After a few months, something happens. People come to you with problems earlier. They’ve sensed somewhere, without consciously thinking about it, that it’s worth talking to you.

The senior person on your team starts pushing back at you. They used to do that only with peers. Now they do it with you too, which actually means you’re being seen for the first time as someone who can handle it.

Someone comes to you about workload pressure two weeks earlier than they normally would. That saves you a good employee.

What it asks of you

An uncomfortable amount of slow attention.

You’re not going to make it to your next meeting through your one-on-ones anymore. You’re going to have to let moments of silence stand without immediately filling them. You’re going to have to sit in something uncomfortable sometimes, without smoothing it over with a quick “yeah, got it, so what you can do is…”.

What you build over time is a kind of calm inside yourself. Techniques don’t get you there.

How you develop that calm internally is a different story. I wrote a separate piece about how to develop leadership presence from a quieter internal place. For this article, what counts is this: the decision to listen better, and the practice of it, does more than any communication course.

The leaders I work with through management coaching often struggle with exactly this. Their team describes them as solid communicators. The real work sits deeper. They have never learned how to actually be present in a conversation. For organizations that want this addressed across their leadership layer, leadership training offers the team version of the same principle.

Plan a free introduction here. Zero obligation.

Why Can’t I Switch Off From Work? A Coach’s Perspective

Incompany Management Trainer | David Buirs

Why Can't I Switch Off From Work?

David Buirs is an executive coach based in the Amsterdam region, working with senior leaders on identity, pressure, and authentic leadership. This article explores why many leaders cannot switch off from work, even when their external workload is reduced. It covers the difference between outside pressure and inner patterns rooted in identity, and what tends to help in each case.

A manager I worked with cancelled her sabbatical twice. The third time she actually went. She came back after eight weeks rested, and within two weeks was working the same hours as before. Same emails at 11pm. Same restlessness on Sunday afternoons.

It puzzled her. The break had been genuine. The rest had been genuine. So why did the old pattern come back so quickly? Why couldn't she switch off from work, even when she finally had the chance?

Workload pressure or inner pattern?

I've seen this from both sides of the table. As a leader, I've absolutely given people more than they should have had on their plate. Workloads creep, deadlines collide, and you don't always notice until someone is drowning. When that's the cause, the fix is clear. Take work off the plate, redistribute, hire, adjust expectations. The relief arrives quickly.

But I've also seen people where reducing the workload didn't help. Where their managers genuinely tried. Where the calendar opened up and the pressure stayed. Where the person filled the new gaps with more.

That second pattern is harder. And it's the one I want to talk about here.

The doer identity

A study from INSEAD, recently published by Preeti Varma and Jennifer Louise Petriglieri, looked at knowledge professionals who described themselves as working excessively. The researchers specifically sought out people who said: I'm doing this to myself, at least partly, and I don't know how to stop.

What they found is worth pausing on.

Every person in the study carried what the researchers call a "doer identity." Being someone who is always doing something. Not for the money. Not for the promotion. The doing itself had become part of who they were.

And in almost every case, this identity has its roots in childhood, where the researchers identified three patterns.

Three roots in childhood

The first came from homes where doing was held up as the supreme virtue. Hard work was the family value. Nobody said "you must achieve." They modelled it, lived it, talked about people who didn't work hard with a small note of disapproval. Children in these homes learned: I am worthwhile when I am producing. Stop producing and something is wrong with me.

The second came from harder environments. Homes where emotions weren't safe, where children learned early that they were on their own. Doing became a way to escape feeling. Books, schoolwork, projects, anything to be functional rather than vulnerable. As one participant put it: work became a hiding place.

The third came from homes with explicit expectations. The 8 out of 10 that needed explaining. The grandparents whose achievements you were measured against. The recognition that came when you delivered and felt absent when you didn't. Children in these homes learned: I am visible when I perform.

None of this is about blaming parents. The researchers are careful about that, and so am I. Most caregivers in these stories were doing their best with what they had, often working through their own versions of the same patterns.

The point is what the doing did. In childhood, it worked. It helped a child manage distress, feel safer, feel seen, feel adequate. It was a genuine adaptation to genuine conditions.

But what works at six doesn't always work at thirty-six. The pattern stays. The need underneath it stays. And it puts you in workplaces where you produce constantly, achieve consistently, get praised regularly, and still can't relax on a Sunday. Eventually this may lead to burnout.

How to tell which one you're dealing with

So how do you know which one you're dealing with? Workload from the outside, or pattern from the inside?

A useful question to ask yourself: have you experienced this feeling only in your current job, or has it been a constant throughout your career? If reducing your hours, taking a holiday, or moving to a calmer team brings genuine relief that lasts, the pressure was probably mostly external.

If none of that fully works, something else is going on. The vacation feels uncomfortable. The praise gives a brief lift and then dissolves. A quieter week creates anxiety rather than relief. You catch yourself manufacturing the next thing to be busy with.

Most senior leaders I work with are dealing with some mix of both. The workload is genuinely high AND there's an inner driver making it feel even heavier. The job needs adjusting AND the inner pattern needs attention.

Why a lighter workload isn't always enough

Here's the hard part. If the inner pattern is part of why you can't switch off from work, your manager cannot solve it for you. A lighter workload won't reach it. Better policies won't reach it. They might give you breathing room, but the same pattern will fill it.

What does help, in my experience, is work that goes a layer below the behaviour. Coaching that examines where the doing comes from, not just how much you do. Honest conversations with people who can see what you cannot. Sometimes therapy, depending on how deep the roots go. Mindfulness and reflection practices that help you observe the need to constantly produce with a bit of distance, which is hard to do when you're caught up in it.

And underneath all of that, the slower work of disentangling your sense of self and self-worth from your productivity. Of learning that you are a person before you are an output.

It's slow work. But definitely worth it. For yourself, for your company, and your team. You start being able to do a lot AND stop. Which, for many of us, is the harder skill.

If any of this resonates, I'd love to hear what you recognise in your own story. For senior leaders looking at this pattern in themselves, executive coaching is the kind of work that goes a layer below behaviour. For organisations where this shows up across the management layer, management training can address the wider culture of always being on. Either way, if you'd like to talk about what tends to help, plan your free introduction here. Zero obligation.

The full research paper by Varma and Petriglieri is available here on ScienceDirect.

Are you better at strategy than your CEO? You might be.

David Buirs - Leadership Coach & Management Trainer

Are You Better at Strategy Than Your CEO? You Might Be.

David Buirs is a leadership and executive coach based in the Amsterdam region, working with senior leaders, directors and executive teams. This article walks through Richard Rumelt's four-part framework for real strategy and offers a short test for assessing your own company's strategy. It is written for executives who want to sharpen their strategic thinking.

By the time you finish reading this, you'll know.

Most strategies that boards and executive teams produce have one big problem.

They're not strategies.

Then what are they? Often, a list of goals, a wishlist really, dressed up in fluffy, strategic sounding language.

You've seen them. "We will become the market leader by combining operational excellence with customer focus and an innovative culture. We will invest in our people, strengthen our technology, and build sustainable partnerships."

Sounds substantial. But look closer. There's no analysis of what's actually happening. No real choice. No mention of what the company will refuse to do. And no specific obstacle to break through first.

What you're left with is a list of good intentions, written in language that sounds strategic and complex. Sometimes even packaged in a 50-slide deck.

What real strategy actually looks like

Richard Rumelt, the UCLA strategy professor and one of the world's most respected strategy experts, wrote a whole book about this called Good Strategy, Bad Strategy. His point fits in one line. Most "strategies" are just wishlists, wrapped up in fluffy language. And that holds for most strategy for executives produced at board level today.

So what is a real strategy then? At its heart, a real strategy is a creative way to focus your limited resources, your time, money, attention, and energy, on overcoming the one obstacle that matters most.

Rumelt argues that to do that well, a strategy needs four parts. Miss one, and what you have isn't really a strategy.

I'll walk you through the four parts, using the example of Southwest Airlines.

A diagnosis. This is an honest and accurate analysis of what's actually going on. For Southwest, the diagnosis was that flying short distances within the US wasn't working well for most travelers. The big airlines were all built around long-haul flights, and they routed most passengers through a few large central airports, forcing you to change planes along the way. So a short flight between two nearby cities was often expensive, slow, and full of layovers. A clear picture of what was actually wrong with the market.

An obstacle. Within every diagnosis sits one core problem you have to break through before anything else works. Rumelt calls it the crux. For Southwest, the crux was a tough one. How do you make short flights cheap and fast enough to compete with cars and buses, when every existing airline's cost structure makes that essentially impossible?

A guiding policy. This is the approach you'll take to overcome that obstacle, before any concrete actions. Southwest's was simple to state. Be the cheapest, fastest airline for short US flights. Just one sentence, and yet look at everything it quietly rules out. No long-haul. No business class. No in-flight meals. No partnerships with other airlines. No making passengers connect through large central airports.

Coherent actions. Finally, a handful of moves that reinforce each other and flow from the policy. Southwest flew only one aircraft type (737s) to keep maintenance and training cheap. They used secondary airports with lower landing fees. They had no assigned seating, which made boarding faster. They cross-trained ground crews for 20-minute turnarounds. Point-to-point routes only, no connections through central hubs. Every action made the others work better, and none of them contradicted the policy.

That's a strategy. Compare it to something like "innovate faster and cut costs and improve customer focus and shrink every department by ten percent". One is a set of clear, reinforcing choices designed to overcome a main obstacle. The other is what an executive team produces when it's avoiding the work of actually choosing.

Want to try it for yourself?

If you have access to it, look at your organization's strategy statement or document.

Then ask yourself three questions. What specific problem is this strategy solving? What's the approach we've chosen? And what are we explicitly refusing to do?

If you can't answer in single sentences, you're probably holding a wishlist.

And honestly, you're in good company if that's the case. Research from MIT Sloan found that only 28% of executives and middle managers responsible for executing strategy could name three of their company's top priorities. Older HBR research from Kaplan and Norton suggested fewer than 5% of employees understood their company's strategy at all.

Which means the people running organizations often struggle to put into words where they're actually trying to take them.

This isn't really their fault

Strategic thinking is rarely taught explicitly. A handful of MBA programs cover it well, but most don't. Most senior leaders pick up bits of it on the job, if at all.

And the executive role already asks a lot. Operations, people, stakeholders, the board, market changes, the next earnings cycle. Strategy work tends to happen in whatever gaps remain after everything else has been handled.

So it's no surprise that most strategy documents come out looking the way they do.

Which is exactly the opportunity

This isn't a niche problem either. Big corporations do it. Governments do it too. Multi-billion-euro national plans that, on closer read, turn out to be mostly lists of intentions with budgets attached.

Which is precisely what makes real strategy such an advantage. Strong strategy for executives is rare enough that getting it right pulls you ahead of most of your peers by default.

The whole point of strategy is concentration. You have limited resources, whether that's time, money, attention, or your team's energy. A real strategy points all of them at the one obstacle that, once broken through, makes everything else easier. That's where outsized results come from.

Most organizations end up spreading their resources thinly across a dozen vague ambitions that don't reinforce each other. Small wins everywhere. Real progress nowhere.

An executive team that actually concentrates its resources on the right obstacle pulls ahead in ways that compound, year after year, while the competition keeps trying to do operational excellence and innovation and customer focus and three other things all at the same time.

The companies and leaders who get this right become very hard to catch.

Where you go from here

If you've read this far, and you've started mentally running your own company's strategy through Rumelt's four parts, that's actually a really good sign. That instinct, the slight discomfort about whether what you're calling a strategy actually is one, is exactly the right starting point.

From here it gets more interesting. The harder part is bringing this thinking into your executive team in a way that opens up the conversation, rather than putting people on the defensive. That's where most leaders find they need a thinking partner.

For senior leaders who want to sharpen their strategy for executives, my coaching for senior leaders is built for exactly that work. For organizations that want to bring this clarity to a wider management layer, management training applies the same principles across teams.

What did you find when you tested your company's strategy?

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

AI and the Future of Leadership

EY - Future of Work Event Amsterdam

Recently I joined the "What Can't Be Replaced by AI" event at EY's Amsterdam office. Hosted by Maarten Lintsen, with sharp insights from Anna van den Breemer-Kleene, Isabel Moll-Kranenburg, and Rina Joosten-Rabou.

I went because I'm fascinated. Sometimes a bit scared too, honestly. The pace at which this field is moving is dizzying. And as a leadership coach, I can't ignore the question of what this means for managers, for work, and for meaning.

Here's what I took away.

1. The meta-view

A theme that came up in the panel, and in a side conversation with Marielle Willemse: leaders need the capacity to zoom out. Stay away from AI tunnel vision. Look at your strategic goals, and find creative ways to make AI work for you.

Take recruitment. If efficiency is the only aim, you automate CV screening. But CVs predict roughly 3 percent of actual job success. Faster, not smarter.

The better question: how does AI help you find people who can transform and innovate your organization? Use AI to assess skills and potential. Not to count how many times someone wrote "stakeholder management" in their CV.

2. Leadership and adaptation

Only leaders who adapt fast enough will remain relevant. That requires AI literacy. Not learning to code, but understanding how to deploy the technology strategically.

And it's your job as a leader to make experimenting safe. If your team is afraid to try things, adoption stalls across your organization. Where there's fear, nothing happens.

3. From knowing to interpreting

Knowledge is rapidly losing its value at the individual level. AI gives us access to collective intelligence. Value moves from knowing to interpreting. And to asking the right questions.

Meanwhile, productivity growth in Europe is stalling. How do you use AI and agents to turn that around? Not a rhetorical question. A concrete challenge for every manager.

4. Culture and data-driven choices

Culture is how we create meaning together at work. It often feels intangible. AI can make it concrete. What is your culture today? Which behaviors fit where you want to go? How do you monitor progress?

Less guessing, more knowing.

5. Empathy and perception

The common idea is that AI can't show empathy. Yet a study showed that patients rated AI doctors as more empathetic than human ones.

Fair point: an AI has unlimited time, a doctor is under pressure. But it does make you think about your own human interactions. How often does someone at work get your full attention? Really? Or do you sneak a glance at your phone in between.

6. The value of human connection

Within a few years most of us will have a personal AI agent. It plans your meetings, analyzes data, executes tasks. My prediction: in writing, voice, and video they'll be nearly indistinguishable from humans.

So what's left that's uniquely human? In my view, primarily physical encounter. A real conversation. A coffee together. Looking someone in the eye and sensing what's going on under the surface.

That sounds simple. But it's exactly what many managers already skip. Too busy, too many meetings, firing off a quick message instead of walking over. Once everyone has an AI that fires off messages more efficiently than you, all that remains as your real added value is your personal contact.

7. Meaning beyond productivity

When AI and robots do tasks faster and cheaper than humans, we'll need new sources of meaning. Sources that don't depend on productivity alone.

This isn't new. Philosophers have wrestled for centuries with the question of what gives our lives meaning. The difference: AI forces us to take that question seriously, finally. No longer a philosophical luxury for the weekend. A core question for your career and your team.

Keep developing the qualities that make us human. Creativity. Curiosity. Empathy. Connection. Courage.

8. 2030 and beyond

The impact of AI in the coming decade will be faster and bigger than most of us realize. I'm probably underestimating it too.

The question isn't whether AI replaces us. The question is whether we keep evolving fast enough to stay meaningfully human alongside it.

9. Fewer people, more responsibility

My take: companies will hire fewer people in the years ahead. One person who can direct AI agents well achieves more than an entire team without AI. That holds for marketing, for development, for analysis, for finance.

What does this mean for managers? Also fewer. Smaller teams, flatter organizations. But more responsibility per person. And probably better paid, because the impact of that one person becomes much larger.

There's a flip side. Anyone who doesn't keep up with this development falls outside the circle. The middle ground that can still hide behind a team today won't have a place tomorrow.

For those who want to remain, this means: keep investing in yourself. In your communication. In your ability to bring people along through change. In your technological literacy. And in the human qualities AI can't reach: judgment, connection, courage.

Anyone thinking "I'll just wait and see" is losing the race before it's started.

What this means for you as a leader

Here's the core for me. AI raises the bar on what you need to bring as a leader. AI takes over the tactical work. What remains is exactly what good coaching and development build.

Real listening. Seeing beneath the surface of a conversation. Having difficult conversations without backing away. A vision that moves people. A team where people feel safe to experiment, including with AI.

These are no longer soft skills. This is your craft.

Want your managers to be ready for the years ahead? AI adoption is woven into the leadership programs I design and deliver. And it comes up in the 1-on-1 leadership coaching I offer to ambitious early-career managers. Schedule a free introduction call via the contact form. I'd love to tell you more.

Self-Awareness In Leadership: The Real Foundation

Incompany Management Trainer | David Buirs

Leadership Begins With Self-Awareness

David Buirs is a leadership and executive coach based in Amsterdam. This post explains why self-awareness is the foundation of every form of leadership development and why trainings without that foundation often fail to stick. The reader learns about the role of self-inquiry in lasting behavioural change as a leader.

There are managers who take a new leadership training every two years. They know all the models. They can draw Covey's quadrants from memory and explain how feedback works on paper.

And yet on Monday morning, they do exactly what they always did.

Why? Because the foundation is missing that all that knowledge is supposed to land on.

Knowledge versus self-knowledge

Leadership is only a small part knowledge. It's mostly about knowing who you are when the pressure rises.

A manager who finds feedback difficult doesn't need a new feedback model. What she needs first is insight into why feedback feels so heavy. Is it an old belief that conflict is dangerous? A conviction that being liked matters more than being clear?

Without that insight, you learn a technique. With it, you learn to recognise a pattern.

Know thyself

Above the entrance of the oracle at Delphi stood the words "know thyself". Centuries later, Jung put it more sharply. The person who doesn't look inward keeps wondering why the same problems follow him around.

Every experienced leader recognises this. The manager who doesn't know her triggers keeps reacting instead of leading. The director who doesn't know where his insecurity sits covers it with political games.

Those patterns can change. Just not before you see them.

The paradox of self-awareness

Here is where things get interesting. Organisational psychologist Tasha Eurich ran a multi-year research programme on self-awareness involving thousands of people. The finding was striking. Around 95 percent of people believe they are self-aware. In reality, only 10 to 15 percent actually are.

This connects to something more familiar from psychology: the Dunning-Kruger effect. The less you know about something, the more you tend to overestimate your ability in it. Not from arrogance. Simply because you are not yet skilled enough to see what you cannot see.

For leadership, this is uncomfortable. The one skill that makes the biggest difference is also the skill we most often misjudge in ourselves.

This is no reason for cynicism. It is a reason to stay curious. A leader who keeps questioning herself and actively asks for feedback belongs to the small group that genuinely grows.

Why so many trainings don't stick

This is why many leadership trainings fade within a month. Participants learn skills and apply them on top of patterns that were never examined. A thin layer of varnish on old wood.

A good leadership training starts with self-inquiry. What are your blind spots? When do you fall back into old patterns? Which beliefs about authority, conflict or success sit so deep you barely notice them anymore?

Once those questions are answered, feedback models and coaching conversations get real traction. They become extensions of who you are.

What this means for organisations

The same applies to an entire management team. An organisation that invests in leadership development without self-awareness as a foundation is investing in technique without context. The training itself can be solid. Without serious self-inquiry, behaviour change stays surface-level.

For organisations looking to work on leadership structurally, a leadership development program that integrates self-inquiry is a sensible choice. For individual managers, coaching for managers offers the space to do this work one-on-one. For directors at board level, executive coaching amsterdam is a natural place to ask the same questions at that level.

An invitation

Self-awareness is not a destination. You learn who you are by acting, bumping into things, looking back, and moving on.

If this speaks to you and you're curious what this work could look like for you or your team, a free introduction is a good first step. No sales. Just a conversation.

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.