Skills in the AI Age: the Mistake Smart Leaders Make

David Buirs - Leadership Coach & Management Trainer

The mistake smart leaders make without realizing it: handing their judgment to AI

David Buirs is a Leadership & Executive Coach based in Amsterdam. This article covers skills in the AI age: why judgment is becoming the leadership skill that matters most as AI takes over more analytical and administrative tasks. The reader learns why AI labs are hiring philosophers, the mistake many leaders make without noticing, and three habits for keeping judgment sharp.

A philosophy graduate currently finds work more easily than a computer science graduate.

Almost nobody saw that coming. A few years ago every student got the same advice: learn to code if you want a future. Today the big AI labs are lining up for philosophers instead. The Economist reported on this recently. In 2024, 7 percent of computer science graduates were unemployed. Among philosophy graduates, that number was lower.

That flips the career logic of the last decade on its head. And it says something about which skills in the AI age actually hold their value. That's what this article is about: the mistake many smart, ambitious leaders make, often without noticing.

Why AI Labs Are Hiring Philosophers

The labs hire philosophers to teach their models how to weigh what's right. They feed them Kant and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Anthropic, the company behind Claude, builds those sources directly into the model's foundational rules.

That turns out to be the hardest thing to build into a machine. AI can already write code, and it gets better every year. Judging right from wrong, fair from unfair, what a situation actually calls for, is a different matter. So the biggest tech companies in the world bring in people who have spent their lives thinking about exactly those questions.

Let that sink in. The builders of AI find human judgment so scarce and so valuable that they pay top salaries for it.

The Mistake: Outsourcing Your Own Judgment

Here's the mistake many smart leaders make. I count myself among them.

I sometimes catch myself asking AI how to interpret a situation. Or what the right course of action is. The answer comes back, well written and confident. And I think: so that's the right answer. Solved, on to the next thing.

Later, when I think it over, that answer sometimes turns out to be off, given all the facts and circumstances. It just sounded right.

The mistake sits right there. The answer that comes back sounds convincing, but it's the statistically most likely answer to similar questions, drawn from a massive dataset. That doesn't mean it's right for you.

Critics of this trend have a name for it: ethical illiteracy. When machines answer the difficult questions for us, we slowly stop trusting our own judgment. Like a muscle you stop using.

And the risk is highest for the leaders who use AI the most. Whoever adopts fastest, whoever turns to AI for every question, hits this trap first. The more you lean on AI for interpretation, the faster that muscle weakens.

For Leaders, Judgment Is the Job

For most professions, this is an interesting observation. For leaders, it's existential.

Judgment is the core of the role. Whether someone deserves another chance. Whether your feedback was fair. Whether to protect or confront that one team member. Whether this is the right moment for a reorganization.

No dashboard exists for these calls. There's always context only you have: that person's history, the mood in the room, your own gut, trained by years of experience.

A language model knows that context only to the extent you type it in, which is by definition a filtered, simplified version of reality. The answer that comes back sounds certain, while it's built on a fraction of what you actually know.

How to Keep Your Judgment Sharp

I use AI daily myself, for all kinds of things. It comes down to sequence and role. Three habits I follow, and recommend to leaders:

1. Decide first. Form your own judgment before consulting AI. Write two sentences: this is what I think, and here's why. Only then let AI challenge you. That keeps the muscle working.

2. Treat AI as an outside advisor. A good advisor offers perspectives, asks questions, points out blind spots. The decision itself belongs to the leader. That's true for your strategy consultant, and it's true for AI.

3. Train it deliberately. Judgment grows by seeking out difficult situations, reflecting on them, and talking them through. With a sparring partner who asks questions rather than hands you answers.

My gut is often closer to the mark than AI's. Yours probably is too. AI makes an excellent advisor. The judgment call stays ours. That's what we can still do better than any machine.

When did you last make a hard decision without checking with AI first?

In coaching for managers, this is exactly the muscle we work on: recognizing and trusting your own judgment, even under pressure. For leaders at director level, executive coaching amsterdam is a natural next step, since the decisions carry more weight and the context grows more complex.

For organizations that want to build this across the whole management team, an in-company management training is a logical next step.

Curious how this shows up for you or your team? Plan your free introduction here.

Source: NPR spoke with journalist Benjamin Sutherland about his reporting for The Economist on why AI labs are hiring philosophers.

Difficult Conversations Without Anxiety: Start With Your Body

David Buirs - Leadership Coach & Management Trainer

Why You Freeze During Difficult Conversations

David Buirs is a leadership coach in Amsterdam. This article explains why your body tightens during difficult conversations, and how body awareness and attention on the other person ease the tension. It covers the Crucial Conversations model for feedback, bad news, and conflict.

You know exactly which conversation you need to have. You have rehearsed the words in your head three times already. Then you sit across from that person and feel yourself lock up. Your voice changes. Your shoulders creep up. What you wanted to say comes out half-formed.

This happens to almost every leader. Having difficult conversations without anxiety looks like something reserved for people who never get nervous. That is not how it works. The calm comes from somewhere other than you expect. It starts in your own body, long before you say a word.

What Happens in Your Body

Before a tense conversation, your body drops into an old mode. Your brain reads the situation as danger. Not a threat to your life, but a social threat. Rejection. Conflict. Losing face.

Your body responds as if there is a predator in front of you. Your breathing turns shallow. Your jaw clenches. Your stomach contracts. For many people the shoulders climb toward the ears. Others feel it in their throat or their hands.

This happens automatically. You do not choose it. And that is exactly why it has such a grip on you.

Start With Body Awareness

This is where a piece of mindfulness helps. Practical, with nothing vague about it.

The first step is noticing where you tighten. Literally. Do you feel it in your shoulders? Your jaw? Your stomach? Most people have no idea, because they never pay attention to it. They live in their head, with the words, with everything that could go wrong.

Once you know where you lock up, you can do something with it. A deep breath into your belly. Letting your shoulders drop a centimeter on purpose. Softening your jaw. This sounds small. But your body and your mind talk to each other constantly. A calmer body sends a calmer signal back to your brain.

Try this before your next difficult conversation. Thirty seconds. Feel where the tension sits, and let that spot ease a little. This is the first building block toward difficult conversations without anxiety.

The Uncomfortable Discovery

Now comes the part that sounds strange, yet is true. And it really works.

When you are very nervous before a conversation, you are mostly busy with yourself. How do I come across? What does this person think of me? Am I going to fumble? Do I seem confident enough?

You think you are worried about the other person. But your attention is on yourself. On your own image.

This is confronting to read. It does not mean you are selfish or doing something wrong. Our brain is simply wired to focus on itself. That makes sense, it keeps us safe. It just does not help you in a conversation that matters.

And this insight is exactly what eases the tension. Because the moment you see it, you can turn it around.

Turn Your Attention Outward

Move your focus from yourself to the other person. Ask yourself two questions before the conversation.

What do I want to achieve here? And how do I communicate so that it actually lands with this person?

Once you are working on that, there is less room for the voice telling you that you will fail. Your mind has a job. You are focused on the outcome and on the human in front of you, instead of on your own insecurity.

This is no trick that makes the nerves vanish. The tension drops because your attention goes somewhere useful.

A Model That Gives You Something to Hold On To

I work a lot with leaders who have these conversations every day. Giving feedback. Delivering bad news. Addressing someone's behavior. A conflict in the team.

One of the models I teach is Crucial Conversations. It was built for exactly those moments when emotions run high and a lot is at stake. It gives you a structure to stay safe, to be honest, and to keep the other person with you without the talk escalating.

What I appreciate about this model: it works together with everything above. A calmer body and attention on the other person form the foundation. The model then gives you the words. For leaders from team lead to senior manager, this is one of the most valuable skills to master, and it is part of my leadership coaching. For leaders at director level, coaching for senior leaders is a natural deepening.

Practice in a Safe Setting

Nobody handles these conversations flawlessly from day one. It is a skill. And like any skill, it improves by practicing in a place where the stakes are not yet high.

That is exactly what we do in coaching. We look at what happens inside you during these conversations. We train the body awareness, the focus on the other person, and a model like Crucial Conversations. After that you practice it in real life, step by step. For a leader who wants to train these skills in a focused way, a 1-on-1 leadership course is a logical next step.

You become calmer. And your conversations become more honest and more effective.

Does this sound familiar, and do you want to start having these conversations with more calm and steadiness? Interested or curious? Let's chat. Plan your free introduction here. Zero obligation.

How Leaders Use AI (And Where It Goes Wrong)

David Buirs - Leadership- & Executive Coach

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

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

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

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

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

Start With the Planning

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

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

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

Read What Your Engagement Data Tells You

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

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

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

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

Let an Agent Prepare Your Conversations

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

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

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

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

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

Help Yourself Set Goals

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

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

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

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

Guard the Line on Personal Data

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

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

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

The Email You Are Better Off Writing Yourself

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

Promoting your best employee: a costly mistake

David Buirs - Leadership Coach & Management Trainer

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

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

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

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

It is the most common mistake in talent management.

What happens next

Your best employee becomes a manager. And struggles.

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

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

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

Technical excellence says nothing about leadership potential

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

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

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

Those are the indicators.

The question that rarely gets asked

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

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

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

Give potential a small assignment first

Do not promote based on performance. Test for potential.

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

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

That tells you more than three years of performance reviews.

Make it explicit in your organisation

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

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

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

And when someone does have the potential?

Then the real work begins.

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

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

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

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

Coaching for Directors

David Buirs - Leadership Coach & Management Trainer

The higher you rise, the less you hear

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

You made it. You are a director now.

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

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

A fish rots from the head

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

"A fish starts rotting from the head."

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

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

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

The higher you rise, the less feedback you receive

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

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

And at that level, honest feedback dries up.

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

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

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

The loneliness nobody talks about

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

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

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

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

What the research shows

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

That is not a soft finding. That is strategy.

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

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

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

I know what it feels like

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

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

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

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

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

When does coaching for directors make sense?

Not only when things are going wrong.

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

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

That is allowed. That is smart.

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

Managing a Negative Employee as a Manager: What Works

David Buirs | Leadership Expert

Managing a Negative Employee as a Manager

David Buirs is a leadership coach based in Amsterdam who works with managers and leaders at all levels on handling negativity within their teams. This article helps distinguish between temporary frustration and damaging patterns, and explains why the manager’s own mindset is often the deciding factor in how the conversation goes. Practical scripts make clear how to step in without escalation.

Someone on your team is negative. Every meeting, they have a complaint. Every decision gets an eye roll. Every new initiative gets a “yeah, but…”

Do you say something? Ignore it? You do not want to shut people down, but you also cannot pretend this is not happening.

Managing a negative employee as a manager is not optional. It is part of the role.

Why managers wait

Most managers see it and do nothing. You worry about making it worse. You worry they will get defensive. You worry it will look like you cannot handle feedback.

So you wait. And hope it gets better.

It will not.

The oil stain effect

One person starts complaining. Then someone else joins in. Before long, half your team is focused on what is wrong instead of what is possible.

Negativity spreads. Meetings turn into complaint sessions. Good ideas get shot down before they get a chance.

That said, negativity is sometimes useful feedback wrapped in frustration. Your job is figuring out which one you are dealing with. That is exactly what leadership coaching helps managers work through.

Is this a bad day or a pattern?

Watch for a bit. Is this person having a rough week, or is this who they are every day?

One bad day does not make someone negative. Even a bad week does not. People get frustrated. That is normal and human.

But if it has been three weeks and every conversation is negative, you have a pattern. Patterns do not fix themselves. The longer you wait, the harder the conversation gets.

When to step in

Step in when the behavior is a pattern and not a one-off, when it is affecting other people on the team, and when it is about attitude rather than legitimate concerns about a specific problem.

Let it go when someone is having a bad day, when they are raising valid concerns even if the tone is not perfect, or when the criticism is aimed at a problem and not at people.

The difference: “This process is broken because X” is feedback. “Everything here is terrible” is negativity.

Start with yourself, not with them

Here is something most people do not say out loud: before you go into the conversation, it matters to be honest about your own state of mind.

If you have been irritated by this person for weeks, you may barely notice it anymore. But the irritation is there. And it leaks. In how you look at them. In a silence that runs just a beat too long. In a tone that sounds just a little too flat.

People pick up on that. Especially people who are already on edge.

If you walk in with a hidden verdict, “this person is just difficult,” they feel it. And the conversation becomes a confirmation of what they already suspected: that you have already made up your mind about them.

Try seeing the behavior as a puzzle you want to understand, not a problem you want to get rid of. What makes someone react this way? What has this behavior gotten them in the past? What does it say about what they need?

That shift, from judgment to genuine curiosity, changes everything about how the conversation goes. You might ask the same questions. But you mean them differently. And they feel that.

How to have the first conversation

Pull them aside privately. A casual conversation, no formal setting.

“Hey, I’ve noticed you seem frustrated lately. Is everything okay? Is there something I can help with?”

No accusations. No “you’re being negative.” Just genuine curiosity. And that last part is not a technique. You have to mean it. If you are internally thinking “I’m doing this because I have to,” that is exactly what comes across.

Real curiosity opens things up in a way no script can. Maybe there is something going on you did not know about. Listen. Do not defend yourself or explain anything. Just hear them out.

If there is a real issue underneath, work on it together. “What would make this better?” Now you are solving something, not managing an attitude.

If nothing changes

Sometimes the gentle approach does not work. They seemed better for a day. Then they slipped back into the same behavior.

This is when you set a boundary.

“We talked last week and I thought we’d made some progress. But I’m still hearing a lot of negativity in meetings. I need to be direct: this is affecting the team. When Sarah suggested the new process yesterday, you immediately said it would not work without hearing her out. That makes it harder for everyone to stay focused.”

Be specific. Not “you’re always negative,” but a concrete example of when and what.

Then: “I want to support you, but I also need this to change. What do you need from me to make that happen?”

You are still supportive. But you are making it clear this cannot continue.

Your team is watching

Your team is paying attention to how you handle this. It is a core part of what organizations build through management training: protecting the culture of the team. That matters more than being liked.

Let negativity run unchecked and people learn that complaining is fine. Shut down all criticism and they learn to never speak up again.

Managing a negative employee as a manager is really managing the culture of your whole team. Handle it well and everyone benefits. Avoid it and everyone pays the price.

What to do this week

If you have someone who is consistently negative:

  1. Decide whether this is a pattern or a rough stretch.
  2. Ask yourself honestly: have I already passed judgment? If so, set that aside first.
  3. Schedule a casual one-on-one. No agenda, no formal tone.
  4. Start with genuine curiosity: “I’ve noticed you seem frustrated. What’s going on?”
  5. If nothing changes after two weeks, have the boundary conversation with a specific example ready.

Your team needs someone willing to have uncomfortable conversations when it counts. And who goes into them wanting to understand, not just to correct.

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