Why Don’t Our Managers Show Leadership?
David Buirs is a leadership coach and trainer based in Amsterdam, specializing in managers with 0 to 4 years of experience. This article is written for HR managers and senior leaders who notice their managers are not leading effectively. It explains why this happens and what structural change actually looks like.
You see it every day. Managers who are present, but not really leading. Teams that bring every decision to you. Conflicts that never get resolved on the floor, but land on HR’s desk instead. Meetings without direction. People quietly disengaging, while nobody says a word.
It is tempting to think it is a motivation problem. That they simply do not want to lead. But that is almost never true.
Most managers genuinely want to lead. They just do not know how.
You promoted your best people
Most managers ended up in their role because they were exceptional at their job. The best developer became team lead. The top sales rep became sales manager. The sharpest analyst became department head.
That is a logical choice. And a costly one.
Being good at your craft has very little to do with being good at leading people. They are two fundamentally different skill sets. The first is about technical knowledge and personal output. The second is about people. About having conversations that feel uncomfortable. About setting direction without having all the answers. About building trust instead of doing everything yourself.
Most new managers never get properly taught that second skill set. They are thrown in at the deep end and expected to figure it out.
The forgetting curve beats the training
At some point, the organization sends them to a training. Two days at a conference hotel. A deck of slides. A handful of models with acronyms. And a satisfaction score that comfortably lands above an eight.
A week later, they work exactly the same as before.
This is not a lack of good intentions. It is neuroscience. The psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus showed in the nineteenth century that the brain forgets newly learned information rapidly without repetition. Within a week, most of it is gone. Within a month, almost nothing remains.
One-off trainings are not an investment in behavior change. They are an investment in the feeling that something is being done.
Knowledge is not the problem
Ask your managers what they should do when someone is underperforming. They can probably tell you. They know the steps. They know what a good conversation looks like.
But they do not have the conversation.
Because giving feedback is uncomfortable. Addressing a former colleague feels personal. The risk of damaging a working relationship outweighs the abstract knowledge that things would be better if they just said something.
Behavior change does not require more information. It requires practice. Repetition in a safe environment. Reflection on what worked and what did not. And guidance that lasts long enough for new habits to actually stick.
That is what most trainings are missing. Not the content. The architecture.
What actually works
Leadership develops over time, not in two days. That sounds obvious. But the implication is rarely taken seriously when designing a training program.
What works is a program that runs over several months. That connects to the manager’s day-to-day reality. That links theory to concrete situations on the floor. And that builds in space for reflection between sessions.
Not a program you roll out. A program you build around the specific challenges in your organization.
That is the core of my approach to in-company management training. Every program starts with one question: what needs to concretely change here? The design follows that question, not a standard catalogue.
The real question
Your managers are not showing leadership. Not because they do not want to. But because the organization promoted them without supporting the transition. And because the trainings that followed were too short to change anything that lasted.
That is fixable. But it requires looking further than a one-off intervention.
The question is not: how do we make sure our managers know what leadership is? The question is: how do we make sure they actually do it?
Curious whether a program like this fits what is happening in your organization? Let’s have an honest conversation about it. No sales pitch, just a good look at what is needed. Plan your free introduction here.
