AI and the Future of Leadership

EY - Future of Work Event Amsterdam

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

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

Here's what I took away.

1. The meta-view

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

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

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

2. Leadership and adaptation

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

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

3. From knowing to interpreting

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

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

4. Culture and data-driven choices

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

Less guessing, more knowing.

5. Empathy and perception

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

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

6. The value of human connection

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

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

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

7. Meaning beyond productivity

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

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

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

8. 2030 and beyond

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

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

9. Fewer people, more responsibility

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

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

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

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

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

What this means for you as a leader

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

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

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

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

How to develop your team as a manager

Leiderschapscoach Amsterdam | David Buirs

This article details how to develop your team as a new manager by shifting from technical execution to people development. It uses mathematical ROI to prove the value of coaching and provides a framework for safe learning environments. The guide emphasizes personal leadership as the necessary foundation for long-term team engagement.

Continue reading

Preparing Leaders for AI: The Skills That Actually Matter

Leadership & Executive Coach | David Buirs

The management skills AI can't replace. And why your leaders need to develop them now.

David Buirs is a Leadership and Executive Coach based in Amsterdam. In this article he examines what AI-driven automation means for new and developing managers: which skills are becoming obsolete, which are becoming critical, and why the bar for every leader is rising fast. Relevant for managers, HR professionals, and organisations considering leadership training for new managers.

Most leadership training programs teach the same things. Goal-setting. Progress tracking. Planning. Running structured meetings. Giving annual reviews.

These are solid skills. And AI is going to automate most of them.

Not completely. Not tomorrow. But the direction is clear, and it is moving faster than most organisations are ready for.

Over the past few years I have had dozens of conversations with senior leaders across industries. Directors, VPs, executives navigating this transition in real time. And a pattern keeps emerging. The technical side of management, the administrative backbone of the role, is becoming less and less what separates a good leader from a poor one.

What remains, and what increasingly cannot be delegated to a machine, is harder to teach. And far more valuable.

What Gallup has been saying for years

Before we get to AI, it is worth starting with a number that should already be unsettling.

Gallup studied 2.5 million teams and found that only one in ten managers naturally possesses the talent to lead well. The other 90 percent need deliberate development to succeed in the role. Gallup also estimates that closing this management gap could unlock close to ten trillion dollars in global productivity.

Ten trillion. And yet most organisations still promote their best individual contributor, hand them a new title, and leave them to figure it out.

The result is predictable. Teams disengage. Performance drops. Your best people leave. And HR is left managing the fallout of a problem that was preventable.

This has always been true. But AI is about to make it much more visible, much faster.

The skills that are becoming automated

In my conversations with senior leaders, there is growing consensus on which parts of management are most exposed to automation. Goal-setting frameworks. Progress dashboards. Meeting summaries. Scheduling and prioritisation. Performance data analysis. Compliance tracking. Even structured feedback templates.

These are things AI tools already do reasonably well, and will do better every year. They are also, coincidentally, the things most leadership training programs spend the majority of their time on.

That is a problem. Because if you are developing managers primarily around tasks that are being automated, you are training for yesterday.

The skills that are becoming more important

The leaders I speak with are consistently clear about what will matter more. Not instead of the basics. In addition to them. But with far greater weight.

Motivating people. Understanding what drives each individual on your team. Creating conditions where people want to do good work, not just perform for an audience.

Building real connection. Not team-building exercises. Genuine interest in the humans you work with. This is what creates psychological safety. And psychological safety is what makes people speak up, take risks, and grow.

Creating and communicating a vision. Where are we going, and why does it matter? Machines can generate roadmaps. Only a human can make people believe in one.

Judgment in complex situations. When the data is ambiguous, when the right answer is genuinely unclear, when values are in conflict. AI can offer options. It cannot own the decision.

Asking better questions. Coaching your team rather than solving their problems for them. Helping people think more clearly instead of just giving them answers. This is one of the highest-leverage things a leader can do, and one of the hardest to develop.

Coaching as a leadership style. Not as a one-off conversation, but as a way of operating. Building people's capacity over time. Making yourself less necessary, not more central.

Navigating conflict and difficult conversations. Not avoiding them. Not softening them into meaninglessness. Having them directly, with care, in a way that strengthens the relationship rather than damaging it.

Communication across ambiguity. Being clear when things are not clear. Keeping people grounded during uncertainty. This is increasingly what senior leaders say separates managers who retain their teams from those who lose them.

None of these are new. What is new is how much more weight they will carry in the years ahead.

The agent economy: fewer people, higher expectations

There is a second change coming that most organisations are not yet talking about openly.

Companies will likely have fewer employees. Not because the work disappears, but because individual employees will increasingly supervise autonomous programs doing parts of that work. AI agents handling research, reporting, drafting, analysis, customer interaction. The human in the loop becomes the decision-maker, the quality controller, the strategic director of that work.

Fewer people doing more. Each person carrying more responsibility. Each leader managing a team of humans plus a layer of automated processes.

This means fewer leadership positions overall. And significantly higher expectations for the ones that remain.

Up or out is coming for everyone

The Big 4 consulting firms have operated on an "up or out" model for decades. You develop, you grow, you take on more, or you leave. There is no comfortable plateau.

That model is starting to spread. The economics of AI-driven efficiency are pushing organisations toward leaner, more demanding structures. The comfortable middle is getting harder to hold.

What this means practically: the managers who are not actively developing their human skills, who are relying on technical expertise and hoping that is enough, will find their position increasingly difficult to sustain. Not in some abstract future. In the next few years.

This is not a threat. It is a description of a landscape that is already changing. And knowing the landscape is the first step to navigating it well.

What this means for leadership training now

The organisations that will come through this transition well are already treating leadership development as something more than a one-day training or an annual offboarding of information.

They are asking different questions. Not just "did the training go well?" But: did anything actually change? Are our managers coaching their teams differently? Are difficult conversations happening earlier? Is the culture around feedback improving?

This is why management training built on learning science, with real attention to transfer and behaviour change over time, produces different results than a standard programme. Not because the content is secret. Because the architecture is different.

And for individual managers navigating this landscape: leadership coaching gives you a dedicated space to develop precisely the skills that cannot be automated. Coaching skills, communication, judgment, self-awareness. The skills that will define your career over the next decade.

If your role sits at a more senior level and you are thinking about leadership impact at the directorial or executive level, executive coaching is a natural fit.

Start now, not when the pressure forces you to

The managers and leaders who will thrive are not necessarily the most talented. They are the ones who took their development seriously before the external pressure made it unavoidable.

Communication. Coaching. Judgment. Connection. These are not soft skills. They are the skills that will be hardest to replace, and hardest to develop quickly if you have not started.

The time to work on them is not when you are under pressure. It is now, while you have the space to build them deliberately.

If you are curious about what that could look like for you or your organisation, feel free to plan a free introduction. No obligation. Just a conversation.

When an Employee Won’t Accept You as Manager

Leadership & Executive Coach | David Buirs

The one single factor that separates great leaders from mediocre ones

David Buirs is a leadership coach in Amsterdam who works with managers on influence, authority, and team dynamics. This article identifies the single factor that determines leadership success and what to do when an employee won't accept your authority. The reader learns how to apply root cause analysis and open the right conversation.

Someone in your team doesn't accept you as their manager.

You see it in the eye contact that breaks a second too early. In the way they respond to your decisions. In what they don't say in meetings when everyone else does.

You've been watching it for a while. And somewhere in the back of your head, a thought keeps surfacing.

I'm the manager. They should listen. If they won't, they need to go.

Hold that thought for a second. Because before we get to what you should do, there is something worth understanding. Something that changes how you read this entire situation.

The success of your leadership is determined by your team's willingness to follow you.

Not your title. Not your experience. Not the quality of your ideas. Whether people actually choose to follow.

Why that one line matters more than most leadership advice

In 2024, psychologists Alex Haslam, Mats Alvesson, and Stephen Reicher published a paper in The Leadership Quarterly that cuts through a lot of what gets taught about leadership. They called it 'Zombie Leadership': beliefs that have been repeatedly debunked by research yet keep circulating anyway.

The most stubborn one: that leadership is about the leader.

Their finding is direct. Leadership is proven by followership. Without it, the title means nothing.

When someone on your team won't accept your authority, that is not just an awkward personnel issue. It is a signal that your leadership, in that specific relationship, is not functioning. And a non-functioning relationship does not fix itself by being ignored or by being forced.

Most managers respond to that signal with defensiveness. The best ones get curious.

Getting curious means asking the right question first

The right question is not: how do I get this person to fall in line?

It is: what is actually driving this?

There are four causes that come up most often.

Your reputation. How do people in the organization see you, before you even walk into the room? Sometimes a perception has formed, quietly, that works against you. Knowing that is not comfortable. It is useful.

Something specific that happened. A decision that landed wrong. A comment in a meeting that wasn't received the way you intended. People file these moments away and draw conclusions from them they never share out loud. The leader who finds a way to surface that gains real information.

Unprocessed loss. Did this person want the role you now hold? That kind of disappointment rarely shows up as disappointment. It shows up as resistance. Leaders who recognize this respond with acknowledgment rather than pressure, and that changes the entire trajectory of the relationship.

Frustration that was never really about you. Sometimes you are the nearest visible face of an organization someone has grown to resent. Mediocre leaders take that personally. Great leaders ask what is underneath it.

Getting clear on the cause is what makes the next step possible. Without it, you are solving the wrong problem.

The conversation that great leaders don't postpone

Once you have a read on what's driving the resistance, you have the conversation.

Crucial Conversations, the book by Patterson and Grenny, offers a principle that applies directly here: before you name the problem, name what you both want. Shared purpose first. Then the difficult part.

"I want this team to work well. I think you do too. And I've noticed something between us that isn't working. I'd rather understand it than leave it."

Then you name it. Directly, calmly, without loading it with accusations.

This takes more courage than escalating to HR. It also builds something that authority-on-paper never could: genuine influence. The kind that doesn't depend on your title.

Teams notice when a manager faces something uncomfortable with curiosity and courage. That noticing changes how they see you. And over time, it changes how willing they are to follow you.

The impact of this over time

Every leader faces this at some point. The ones who handle it well come out with something the others don't: a clearer sense of how influence actually works.

Because influence is not the goal. It is what makes the goal possible. When people genuinely follow you, you can start doing what you actually became a leader for: guiding your team toward something meaningful, helping them grow, or any other positive goal worth achieving.

If this is something you're in the middle of right now, you're welcome to think it through with someone who has been there. Start with a free conversation at davidbuirs.com/en/contact/.

Managers who want to build this kind of capability more structurally will find a good home in leadership coaching. For organizations that want to make it part of how their managers operate, a leadership training program tends to be the more lasting investment.

Source: Haslam, Alvesson & Reicher (2024). Zombie Leadership: Dead ideas that still walk among us. The Leadership Quarterly.

Leadership Consultancy Amsterdam

David Buirs | Leadership & Executive Coach

The Leadership Gap That Shows Up When You Start Growing

David Buirs is a leadership consultant and coach based in the Amsterdam region, working with managers, executives, and organizations in both Dutch and English. He offers one-on-one leadership coaching, in-company management training, and strategic advisory for HR and senior leadership teams. This article explores why leadership development gets deprioritized during periods of growth, what the data says about the cost of that choice, and what it looks like to close that gap in practice.

There is a specific moment most scale-ups can recognize.

It is not a crisis. It is quieter than that.

It is when someone says: "I do not know who to talk to about this anymore." Or when a decision that used to take 20 minutes now involves four meetings. Or when a manager comes to you because they do not know how to handle someone on their team, and you realize you do not quite know either.

The company grew. The structure did not keep up.

The people managing teams in the middle are doing their best with tools that were designed for a smaller, simpler organization.

From everyone-does-everything to actual departments

In the early days of a company, the flatness is an advantage. No one waits for permission. Information flows because everyone is in the same room. The founder knows everyone by name.

Thirty people in, that changes.

You need specialists. You need structure. You need managers who can actually manage, not just coordinate tasks or relay information up and down.

The problem is that most of those managers grew up in the culture where none of that was necessary. They were promoted because they were great at their work. Because they delivered. Because people liked working with them.

And suddenly they are responsible for performance reviews, conflict resolution, motivation, feedback conversations, and figuring out why someone is not performing. Without a handbook. Without real training. Often without much support from above.

That is not a personal failure. That is a structural gap. And it shows up in established organizations just as much as in scale-ups. Leadership development is rarely treated as a strategic priority until something breaks.

What Gallup found

Every year, Gallup publishes its State of the Global Workplace report. The 2025 edition made headlines in the HR and leadership world, and the findings are hard to ignore.

Global employee engagement fell to 21% in 2024. The main driver: managers are disengaging, and that disengagement cascades. Seventy percent of team engagement is directly tied to the manager. When managers struggle, their teams follow.

The cost came to $438 billion in lost productivity. Globally. In a single year.

Gallup also found that fewer than 44% of managers worldwide have received any formal management training. Among those who have, active disengagement rates drop by half.

The two clearest recommendations from the report: train your managers, and teach them to coach.

Managers who learn coaching skills see their own engagement rise by up to 22%. The engagement of their teams goes up by up to 18%. Those are not marginal improvements. That is a different kind of organization.

Safety, voice, and why it matters for growth

Here is something worth sitting with.

When people feel safe at work, they speak up. They flag things that are not working. They try approaches that might fail. They bring problems before they become crises.

When they do not feel safe, they go quiet. They do what is asked and nothing more. They save the real feedback for their next employer.

In a company where speed and innovation matter, that silence is expensive.

Psychological safety does not mean a comfortable, frictionless workplace. It means people trust that if they raise a concern, try something that does not work, or say something difficult, they will not be punished for it.

Building that trust is a manager skill. It shows up in how a manager responds when someone brings bad news. How they run a one-on-one. How they handle a disagreement in a team meeting.

These things can be learned. They just need to be taught.

How I work with organizations and leaders

I am a leadership consultant and coach based in the Amsterdam region. I work in both Dutch and English, with individual leaders and organizations across the Netherlands and internationally.

For leaders who want to develop more intentionally, I offer leadership coaching. One-on-one, focused on the real challenges you are facing. Whether you are new to the role and figuring out what it actually requires, or years in and ready to lead with more intention and less friction.

For organizations, I offer management training built around your actual context. A program designed from your specific challenges, with measurable outcomes. Not generic content dropped into a room.

And for HR directors and senior leadership teams, I work as a strategic sparring partner. Someone to think with about culture, manager development, and what is actually driving the patterns you are seeing in your organization.

If any of that sounds relevant, I am happy to talk. Plan a free introduction here. No pitch. No proposal. Just a clear conversation about where you are and what might help.

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.

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.

Addressing Recurring Performance Issues as a Manager.

David Buirs - Leadership Coach & Management Trainer

Why won’t he just do it?

David Buirs is a leadership coach in Amsterdam for new managers with 0 to 4 years of experience. This article explains how to address recurring performance issues by first examining your own role before drawing conclusions about the employee. It covers the Golem effect, the right questions to ask as a manager, and when a Performance Improvement Plan is a fair and honest step.

There is someone on your team who has not been delivering for a while.

You have talked about it. Maybe twice. Things improve briefly, then slide back. The same mistakes. The same patterns. The same conversation on repeat.

At some point, the thought arrives: why won’t he just do it?

That feeling is understandable. And it is also exactly the moment things can go wrong.

The Golem effect: how your frustration makes the problem worse

In psychology, the Pygmalion effect describes how high expectations improve performance. Researchers Rosenthal and Jacobson demonstrated this in 1968. Teachers who believed certain students were high-potential saw those students genuinely improve, with no objective difference between them and their peers.

The Golem effect is the opposite. Low expectations lead to lower performance. Not because the person lacks motivation. But because your attitude shapes their behavior.

You ask fewer questions. You explain less. You check in with a slight impatience. You give more critical feedback and less encouragement. Without realizing it, you are sending a signal: I no longer believe you can do this.

And the other person feels it. People are finely tuned to how others perceive them.

The result: the employee pulls back. Takes less initiative. Makes more mistakes. And you see that as confirmation that you were right all along.

Frustration reinforces itself. A performance problem grows while you believe you are addressing it.

The question most managers skip

Before you ask anything of the employee, there is a different question to answer first.

What role have I played in this?

That is not self-blame. It is the most practical question you can ask. Because if you have contributed to the problem and do not address that, nothing changes.

Work through it honestly:

Have I clearly explained what I expect? Not in broad strokes, but concretely. What does success look like? When is something good enough?

Has this person received the right training and resources to actually do this job? Or am I assuming they already know?

Have I given regular, constructive feedback? Or do I only speak up when something goes wrong?

Have I asked how they see their own work? Do they even know I consider this a problem?

Have I asked what they think the reason is? They might see something you do not.

This is not doubt. It is just good management. You cannot change anything in someone else while there are still variables on your side you have not examined.

Curiosity as a tool

The trap of frustration is that you start explaining. You already have a theory. He does not care enough. She is not motivated. He is not cut out for this.

Curiosity asks something different. What is going on for this person? What makes this difficult? What do they need that they currently do not have?

That conversation is uncomfortable to start, especially when frustration has been building for weeks. It feels like walking in the wrong direction.

But it is exactly the conversation that matters. Not to let someone off the hook. But to understand what is actually happening.

Sometimes something personal is going on. Sometimes there is ambiguity you have allowed to persist. Sometimes the person has felt like they are failing for months and does not know how to say it.

And sometimes you discover that the intention is there, but the skill is not. That is very different from unwillingness. And it calls for a completely different response.

When curiosity is not enough

Say you have done all of this. You have clarified expectations. You have offered training. You have had the conversations. You have asked what they need.

And nothing changes.

Then there is an honest question you have to ask: does this person meet the minimum standard for this role?

That is not an attack. It is a professional reality. Every role has a floor. Below that floor, the team does not function, colleagues carry extra weight, and results are missed.

If someone is consistently below that floor, and you have genuinely tried, there is a next step.

The Performance Improvement Plan: a last resort, not a first reaction

A Performance Improvement Plan, or PIP, is a formal process. You document in writing what the expectations are, what the current situation is, and which specific goals need to be reached within a set timeframe. Usually three to six months.

The plan also describes what support you will provide. And what happens if the goals are not met.

A PIP is not a punishment and it is not a goodbye. It is a clearly structured opportunity. With agreed milestones, support, and consequences.

But it only works if the process is honest. If the expectations are realistic. If the support you commit to is real. And if you are using it to give someone a genuine chance, not to build a paper trail for dismissal.

Use a PIP only after months of conversations, feedback, and concrete attempts to improve the situation. Not as a first response to a problem you have not yet fully understood.

Addressing recurring performance issues as a manager starts with yourself. Not because you are always at fault, but because you are the only variable you can directly change.

That takes honesty. And sometimes a conversation you have been putting off.

If you want to work on how you handle situations like this, you can read more about business coaching for leaders or explore what a structured leadership track for your organization could look like. Interested or curious? Let’s chat. Plan your free introduction here. Zero obligation.

Why Don’t Our Managers Show Leadership?

Leadership & Executive Coach | David Buirs

Why Don’t Our Managers Show Leadership?

David Buirs is a leadership coach and trainer based in Amsterdam, specializing in managers with 0 to 4 years of experience. This article is written for HR managers and senior leaders who notice their managers are not leading effectively. It explains why this happens and what structural change actually looks like.

You see it every day. Managers who are present, but not really leading. Teams that bring every decision to you. Conflicts that never get resolved on the floor, but land on HR’s desk instead. Meetings without direction. People quietly disengaging, while nobody says a word.

It is tempting to think it is a motivation problem. That they simply do not want to lead. But that is almost never true.

Most managers genuinely want to lead. They just do not know how.

You promoted your best people

Most managers ended up in their role because they were exceptional at their job. The best developer became team lead. The top sales rep became sales manager. The sharpest analyst became department head.

That is a logical choice. And a costly one.

Being good at your craft has very little to do with being good at leading people. They are two fundamentally different skill sets. The first is about technical knowledge and personal output. The second is about people. About having conversations that feel uncomfortable. About setting direction without having all the answers. About building trust instead of doing everything yourself.

Most new managers never get properly taught that second skill set. They are thrown in at the deep end and expected to figure it out.

The forgetting curve beats the training

At some point, the organization sends them to a training. Two days at a conference hotel. A deck of slides. A handful of models with acronyms. And a satisfaction score that comfortably lands above an eight.

A week later, they work exactly the same as before.

This is not a lack of good intentions. It is neuroscience. The psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus showed in the nineteenth century that the brain forgets newly learned information rapidly without repetition. Within a week, most of it is gone. Within a month, almost nothing remains.

One-off trainings are not an investment in behavior change. They are an investment in the feeling that something is being done.

Knowledge is not the problem

Ask your managers what they should do when someone is underperforming. They can probably tell you. They know the steps. They know what a good conversation looks like.

But they do not have the conversation.

Because giving feedback is uncomfortable. Addressing a former colleague feels personal. The risk of damaging a working relationship outweighs the abstract knowledge that things would be better if they just said something.

Behavior change does not require more information. It requires practice. Repetition in a safe environment. Reflection on what worked and what did not. And guidance that lasts long enough for new habits to actually stick.

That is what most trainings are missing. Not the content. The architecture.

What actually works

Leadership develops over time, not in two days. That sounds obvious. But the implication is rarely taken seriously when designing a training program.

What works is a program that runs over several months. That connects to the manager’s day-to-day reality. That links theory to concrete situations on the floor. And that builds in space for reflection between sessions.

Not a program you roll out. A program you build around the specific challenges in your organization.

That is the core of my approach to in-company management training. Every program starts with one question: what needs to concretely change here? The design follows that question, not a standard catalogue.

The real question

Your managers are not showing leadership. Not because they do not want to. But because the organization promoted them without supporting the transition. And because the trainings that followed were too short to change anything that lasted.

That is fixable. But it requires looking further than a one-off intervention.

The question is not: how do we make sure our managers know what leadership is? The question is: how do we make sure they actually do it?

Curious whether a program like this fits what is happening in your organization? Let’s have an honest conversation about it. No sales pitch, just a good look at what is needed. Plan your free introduction here.