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

David Buirs - Leadership Coach & Management Trainer

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

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

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

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

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

The Numbers That Keep HR Awake

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

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

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

The Management Layer Carries the Decline

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

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

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

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

Why Poor Management Damages Engagement So Badly

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

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

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

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

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

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

Most Leaders Motivate on Instinct

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

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

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

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

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

The Number That Proves It Can Be Different

Here comes the finding I get most excited about.

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

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

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

The Cost of the Unprepared Manager

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

Roughly half of all managers have never received management training.

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

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

What follows in practice:

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

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

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

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

Three Steps to Increase Your Organisation's Engagement

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

1. Measure manager engagement separately.

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

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

2. Train managers in coaching leadership and intrinsic motivation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

What This Delivers for Your HR Agenda

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

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

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

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

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

Where Do You Start?

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

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

That silence is your starting point.

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

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

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

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

How to Have Difficult Conversations as a Manager

David Buirs | Leadership Coach & Management Trainer

How to have difficult conversations as a manager in 6 steps

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

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

Why you have been postponing that talk for weeks

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

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

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

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

The six steps

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

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

Why the technique alone is not enough

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

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

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

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

Start small

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

People Pleasing as a Manager | Why It Costs You Respect

Leadership & Executive Coach | David Buirs

People pleasing as a manager. Why being kind and people pleasing are two very different things.

David Buirs, leadership coach in Amsterdam, explains why people pleasing as a manager costs you respect and energy. This article covers the difference between genuine kindness and people pleasing, and offers practical guidance for leaders who want to be clearer without losing connection with their team.

We all want to be liked. There is nothing wrong with that. It is not a weakness or a character flaw. It is simply how we are wired.

As a child, you learn quickly: if I adapt, if I am easy to be around, if I do not cause trouble, people will like me. And it worked. At school, in your friend group, at home. It kept you safe and included.

As an adult, you carry that pattern with you. And in the workplace, especially as a manager, it seems to work too. You say yes when someone asks for something. You postpone difficult conversations. You bend when there is pushback. And people do like you.

But somewhere, it starts to wear on you.

The difference between being kind and people pleasing

There is a distinction here that many managers miss.

Being kind is genuine. You help someone because you want to. You consider others because you care about them. There is no hidden expectation attached.

People pleasing works differently. People pleasing is transactional. You do something for someone with a hidden expectation: I am nice to you, so you will be nice to me. I avoid this difficult conversation, so you will think I am a good manager. I take over your work, so you will be grateful.

And when the other person does not return the favor? You feel frustrated. Disappointed. Sometimes even angry. While they probably did not even know there was a deal on the table.

People pleasing is almost a form of manipulation. Unconscious, well-intentioned, but it places a hidden claim on the other person. And that makes the relationship unequal.

Why we all do it

Let me be honest: recognizing this is easy. Stopping it is hard.

Most managers I coach have a strong drive to help others. That is a wonderful quality. It is often the exact reason they are good at their job. They are empathetic. They sense what is going on. They want their team to do well.

The problem starts when that helpfulness is no longer a free choice, but an automatic response. When you say yes while meaning no. When you swallow feedback because you are afraid of the reaction. When you let someone's poor behavior slide because you do not want to disturb the peace.

A study by Kuang et al. (2025), published in PsyCH Journal, examined people pleasing behavior in over 2,200 participants. The researchers found a clear link between strong people pleasing tendencies and lower mental health. Think higher levels of neuroticism, lower self-esteem, and a persistent sense of emptiness. People who please a lot, it turned out, build their sense of self-worth almost entirely on external validation. And that is a fragile foundation.

What people pleasing costs you as a manager

As an individual, people pleasing drains your energy and self-respect. As a manager, the consequences are bigger. Your team notices. Maybe not consciously, but they feel it.

A manager who never addresses anything slowly loses authority. Someone is consistently late to meetings. You say nothing. A deadline is missed without any communication. You fix it yourself. Someone delivers work that is clearly below standard. You quietly adjust it.

At first you think you are protecting your team. But what you are actually communicating is: rules do not really apply here. And the people who do follow through on their commitments see that. They lose trust. In you, and eventually in the team.

Research by Georgescu and Bodislav (2025) confirms this pattern. They found that managers and employees who struggle to say no are more likely to become targets for colleagues who take advantage of that. People pleasing makes you vulnerable in a work environment where results matter, and it makes you less effective as a leader. (The Workplace Dynamic of People-Pleasing, Encyclopedia, 2025)

The fear underneath the pleasing

Why is it so hard to address someone's behavior? Because there is almost always a fear underneath.

Fear of being rejected. Fear of being seen as authoritarian. Fear of damaging the relationship. Fear of no longer being liked.

That fear is understandable. Especially if you have always learned that your worth depends on how others see you. But in a leadership role, that fear works against you.

As a manager, it is your responsibility to create an environment where people can do good work, feel heard, and know where they stand. That means sometimes having a difficult conversation. Addressing someone who is consistently late. Giving feedback when a deadline is missed. Being clear about expectations. Precisely because you care about your team.

Clear and caring at the same time

Less people pleasing as a manager goes hand in hand with being warm and honest at the same time. Giving feedback when it is needed. Setting boundaries when someone consistently does not meet expectations. And doing that from a place of respect, in the moment, instead of from built-up frustration three months later.

A few concrete situations where this plays out.

A team member is regularly late to meetings. The people pleasing response: say nothing and quietly compensate. The clear response: "I have noticed you have been coming in late to our meetings the past few weeks. I want to check in and see if everything is okay, and at the same time, it is important that we start on time."

Someone misses a deadline without communication. The people pleasing response: pick it up yourself and say nothing. The clear response: "I expected this yesterday and did not hear anything. What happened? And how do we prevent this next time?"

A colleague delivers work that does not meet expectations. The people pleasing response: rewrite it yourself. The clear response: "This is not where it needs to be yet. Here and here I see room for improvement. Can you take another look?"

In all of these cases, the message is the same: I take you seriously enough to be honest with you.

Start by noticing

Less people pleasing does not start with becoming tougher. It starts with looking honestly at yourself.

Where do you say yes when you mean no? Which conversations do you postpone? With whom do you adapt more than necessary? And what do you hope to achieve by doing that?

That last question matters most. Because if the answer is: "I hope they will like me," then that is people pleasing. And then you also know where the opportunity is.

It does not have to happen overnight. You do not need to have a confrontational conversation with your entire team tomorrow. Start small. Say something you would normally keep to yourself. Give feedback you would normally swallow. And notice what happens. Usually, the answer is: much less than you feared. And you feel a lot lighter.

Being kind is a choice. People pleasing is a habit.

The leaders I work with get noticeably better at this. Not overnight. But session by session, conversation by conversation. They learn that clarity and warmth go together. That you can address someone's behavior in a way that still makes them feel seen. And that is something you can learn. Every conversation gets a little easier than the last one.

It starts with the honest realization that being liked and leading well do not always go hand in hand. Sometimes you have to choose. And the best managers choose clarity. Not because they enjoy it. But because they know their team deserves it.

If you notice that people pleasing is a pattern that holds you back as a leader, it can help to look at it with someone. In leadership coaching we work on exactly these kinds of patterns. You learn to set boundaries without losing connection. For leaders at director level, executive coaching for directors is a natural next step. And for organizations that want to support their leaders in this structurally, management training delivers measurable results.

Sounds familiar? Or just curious? Let's talk. Zero obligation, just a good conversation.

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.

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.