Development of Senior Leaders Rests on One Thing

Leadership & Executive Coach | David Buirs

Development of Senior Leaders Rests on One Thing

David Buirs is an executive coach in Amsterdam. This post is about the development of senior leaders and why an open, curious attitude is the opening to growth. You will read how the ego treats constructive feedback as a threat, and how to break that pattern.

The higher you climb, the fewer people around you say what they really think. That makes the development of senior leaders harder than it looks. There is plenty of room to grow, but the signals that show you where become rare. Anyone who wants to keep developing at director level needs one thing first, before any specific skill comes into play. An open, curious attitude toward your own blind spots.

The power that dulls your edge

The psychologist Dacher Keltner studied power for years. He called his finding the power paradox. The very qualities you need to reach the top, empathy, attention, careful listening, get weaker once you hold that power.

Keltner compares the effect of power to a mild brain injury. You become more impulsive. You read other people less well. And you judge your own impact worse than you think.

For senior leaders this is daily reality. Your environment adapts to you. People weigh their words. The feedback you get becomes more polite, vaguer, safer. At the exact moment you hold the most influence, you receive the least honest information about yourself.

Why almost no one knows themselves well

Research by organizational psychologist Tasha Eurich shows a striking gap. Around 95 percent of people consider themselves self-aware. In reality only 10 to 15 percent meet the criteria. Nearly everyone believes they know themselves well, while most people are wrong about it.

That gap grows with experience and seniority. You have a track record. You have been right, often. So why doubt yourself anymore? This is how you get a leader who is technically strong, and who slowly loses sight of who they are.

The ego that protects itself

To understand why this is so stubborn, it helps to look at the ego. We all build an identity. A story about who we are. The sharp strategist, the connecting leader, the one who always solves it. We defend that story with everything we have.

When feedback comes in that clashes with that image, it feels like an attack. Your body reacts as if there is danger. The defenses go up and the curiosity disappears. This is how constructive criticism, really a gift, gets treated as a threat.

The painful part is that this very reflex holds your development back. The leader who pushes criticism away to keep their self-image intact pays for it over time. They stay at the level where they once became successful, while the world around them moves on.

Development of senior leaders is personal

Many senior leaders look for that one point. That single skill gap that, once closed, solves everything. In practice it rarely works that way.

Leadership development at this level is deeply personal. There are shared themes. The move from operational toward more strategic leadership. The realization that clear communication and giving context matter more as you climb the corporate ladder. But which theme comes first for you differs a lot from person to person.

For one leader the growth is in communicating with more empathy. For another it is in being more concise and direct. For one it is thinking more strategically or commercially. For another it is about more confidence and leadership presence. And someone else grows mostly by daring to let go and delegate better.

What all these leaders share is the entry point. Anyone who dares to look at themselves with an open, curious attitude finds where the growth is on their own. That attitude is the opening to everything that comes after.

Good as you are, and still developing

There is a tension here that many people find hard. Two things are true at the same time.

You are good as you are, as a person. You do not need to be repaired. And at the same time, every one of us has parts of our personality and skills that can grow further. Those two go together fine.

Anyone who keeps both in mind stops hearing feedback as a verdict on their worth. It becomes plain information. Useful information about where the next step is. In that attitude, development gets moving again, even at the highest level.

Hiring a coach is a sign of strength

Some leaders think that bringing in a coach means something is wrong. As if it exposes a weakness. The opposite is the case. It is a sign of strength.

Look at elite sport. The better the athlete, the more likely they have a coach. The best in the world work with several coaches at once. They know a sharp outsider sees what they can no longer see themselves. In leadership it works the same way.

With executive coaching I work with senior leaders on exactly this point. We look at how your ego operates, where you protect yourself, and how you find that open attitude again. If you want to train specific skills in a focused way rather than a broader track, a 1-on-1 leadership program is a logical next step. Interested or curious? Let's chat. Plan your free introduction here. Zero obligation. We look together at where your development is right now.

Management Team Development

David Buirs - Leadership Coach & Management Trainer

The Fish Starts Rotting at the Head

David Buirs is a leadership coach and management trainer based in Amsterdam, specialising in management team development. This article explains why organisational problems often start at the top, not in middle management. It covers the power paradox (Keltner), psychological safety (Edmondson, Project Aristotle) and strategic misalignment as core challenges in management team development.

The fish starts rotting at the head.

It sounds harsh. But it is not an attack on leaders. It is an observation about systems.

When an organisation struggles with low engagement or a culture of politics and self-protection, the cause is rarely middle management. The cause sits one level higher.

And yet most development investments go to the managers. Not to the management team itself.

A collection of leaders is not a leadership team

Patrick Lencioni puts it plainly. Most management teams are not teams at all. They are groups of individuals who happen to attend the same meeting.

Everyone defends their own domain. Heads nod, decisions get "made", and an hour later everyone goes back to doing exactly what they were doing before.

That is not collaboration. That is coexistence.

And the irony? Those same people expect their managers to create psychological safety and move forward as one team.

You cannot give what you do not have.

The power paradox

Management team members reached their position because of what set them apart. They listened well. They built trust. They knew how to bring people along.

Dacher Keltner, psychologist at UC Berkeley, describes what often happens next. The experience of power changes behaviour in ways most people do not see coming. Leaders become less empathetic, less inclined to listen, more focused on their own priorities. Not through bad intentions, but through what power does to the brain.

The paradox: the qualities that brought you to the top are precisely the qualities that power slowly erodes.

What else goes wrong

Three things I see time and again.

No shared vision. Research by MIT Sloan across 124 organisations found that only 28% of executives responsible for executing strategy could name three of their organisation's strategic priorities. More than half of senior executives disagree with each other on what those priorities even are. Not bad people. But no shared compass either.

Reward structures that punish collaboration. When someone's performance is measured on their own department's results, there is no rational reason to proactively help colleagues. The system rewards islands.

No time for development. The agenda is always full. Development gets postponed until there is a crisis. But development that only happens in a crisis is not development. That is firefighting at a higher level.

Psychological safety starts at the top

Amy Edmondson, professor at Harvard Business School, spent decades researching team performance. Her conclusion is consistent: psychological safety is the single most important factor in whether a team functions well. Not talent, not budget, not structure.

Google confirmed this through Project Aristotle, a large-scale internal study into what separates high-performing teams from the rest. Psychological safety came out on top. Above everything else.

But if the management team does not model this itself, it spreads downward. Middle managers sense what is happening above them. They mirror it, even when they are not aware of it.

Two levels of development

Management team development works on two levels. Both are necessary.

The first is individual. Every management team member brings their own blind spots and patterns that show up in collaboration. That requires individual attention. Leadership coaching does this work. It addresses the person doing the leading, not just the role they occupy.

The second is collective. Shared language, shared norms, shared behaviour. You do not learn that alone. You learn it together, in a well-designed programme aimed at the team as a whole. For organisations that want to work on this structurally, management training at the MT level is a logical next step.

In closing

The healthiest organisations I know have one thing in common. The management team functions as a real team. They hold each other accountable, say what they think, and consciously choose shared success over individual scorecards.

That does not happen by itself. But it can be developed.

If you want to explore what that could mean for your management team, let's have a free introductory conversation. No obligation.

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.