How to Become a Better Manager? Start With Your Blind Spot

David Buirs - Leadership Coach & Management Trainer

Why Bad Managers Sleep So Well

David Buirs is a leadership and executive coach in Amsterdam. This article answers the question: how to become a better manager? You will learn why self-image and behaviour drift apart, and how one question asked to four people reveals your blind spot.

Everyone has had one. You barely finish the question and the story is already coming. The nickname the team used in private. The meetings where people went quiet. That heavy feeling on Sunday evening.

Chances are that manager tells a very different story. Busy year, good team, the odd difficult character.

Anyone asking how to become a better manager usually starts with skills. Planning, delegating, giving feedback. While the real work begins somewhere else. In the gap between what you see and what your team sees. As long as you miss that gap, there is no reason to work on it.

The Research That Stings a Little

Tasha Eurich spent years researching this. Around 95 percent of people consider themselves fairly self-aware. Measured against real criteria, roughly ten to fifteen percent qualify.

The gap is also widest among the people least likely to notice it. Spotting a weakness in yourself requires exactly the skill you are missing.

Which is why the manager doing the most damage often sleeps best. While the one lying awake at 2am replaying a single conversation is usually the one the team trusts.

Do you lie awake with questions like that sometimes? Honestly, that is a good sign.

A Blind Spot Says Nothing About Your Character

Still, many managers get defensive right here. Blind spot sounds like an accusation.

In reality it is simple mechanics. You know your intentions from the inside. Everyone else only sees your behaviour. You know you cut that question short because your head was full of tomorrow's deadline. Your colleague only saw someone cutting her off.

That is how you become the manager in someone else's story while doing your best. It happens to almost everyone who leads.

Power makes it worse. Dacher Keltner at Berkeley showed that holding power erodes your ability to read other people. People contradict their manager less, so the daily correction falls away. Nobody frowns at the person who writes their review.

The Question That Closes the Gap

A formal 360 takes months, and by then everything has been sanded smooth. There is a simpler way. Find four people and ask them the same question: "What is the one thing I should work on?"

Someone from your team. A peer. Your own manager. And the person who has been around longest.

Then comes the hardest part. Keeping your mouth shut.

The first answer is almost always polite. Say thank you, wait, then calmly ask: "What else?" That is where the real answer lives.

More happens here than gathering information. Your team watches a manager ask a question with something at stake. That builds more trust than three offsites combined.

What to Do With the Answers

Lay the four answers side by side and look for the common thread. Three people describing three different situations are often describing the same behaviour.

Pick one thing. Really one. Whoever tries to fix five habits at once fixes none.

Then tell your team what you picked. "You said I interrupt people in meetings. I am working on it. Tell me when it happens."

That last sentence does all the work. What used to be discussed behind your back is now a shared project. I have coached managers whose team atmosphere turned around within a quarter. What made the difference was people seeing their manager dare to look at themselves.

The Part That Takes Courage

Some of what comes back will feel unfair. Someone describes a version of you built on that one terrible week in March. Everything in you wants to explain. Hold off. Whoever defends themselves never gets an honest answer again.

Let the comment rest and look for an echo of it in the other answers. Sometimes an unfair comment is a fair one in bad packaging.

And some answers will land hard, precisely because deep down you already knew. Those are the valuable ones.

Joseph Campbell said it long ago: the cave you fear holds the treasure you seek. For managers, that cave is usually just a conversation.

So, How to Become a Better Manager?

The managers who see themselves most clearly have made a habit of it. Ten minutes at the end of a rough week is enough. Which conversation did I avoid. Where did I get defensive. Who left that meeting smaller than they walked in.

Just a manager willing to look in the mirror now and then. That alone puts you in the top fifteen percent.

This kind of work goes faster with someone beside you who has led teams for years. That is the core of leadership guidance: mapping the blind spot together and training what takes its place. For leaders at director level, where honest feedback has often dried up, executive coaching is a logical next step.

Curious about your own blind spot? Plan your free introduction here. Zero obligation.

Climbing the Corporate Ladder Faster by Doing Less

Leiderschapscoach Amsterdam | David Buirs

Climbing the corporate ladder faster by doing less

David Buirs is a Leadership & Executive Coach based in Amsterdam, working with managers, directors and senior leaders. This article describes two routes up in an organisation: one that runs on fear and ego, and one that builds credit with the people around you. Readers learn which four habits quietly hollow out character, and which behaviour leads to promotion and influence over the long run.

There are two ways of climbing the corporate ladder faster. One costs you your character. The other builds it. Both take you up. One of them drops you somewhere you never wanted to be.

You probably know someone who got far by making life harder for everyone around them. And you have wondered how that happened.

The more uncomfortable question comes next. Could it happen to you?

How Character Quietly Drains Away

I see the same thing over and over. In my own career, and in the stories of the leaders I coach.

It starts with pressure. A brutal quarter. A reorg nobody saw coming. A colleague going for the same promotion.

And then something changes. So slowly that you only spot it in hindsight.

They cancel their 1-on-1s because there is a board deck that has to shine. Just this once. Then again. Emails from above get answered within ten minutes. Emails from their own team sit there for three days.

They get short with people who need something and have nothing to give back. They walk past reception without saying hello. Then a director walks in and the lights come on.

They start performing importance. In how they talk, in how long they wait before replying, in who gets their time.

I have seen manipulation and I have seen bullying. And what strikes me every time is that the person doing it is acting out of fear. Afraid of losing power. Reputation. Money. The things they somewhere along the way started putting above everything else.

People who end up here, sinking into corporate politics, slide into it slowly. It is never a conscious choice. It happens because it feels like survival.

The Two Routes Up

Most of us do this on autopilot. Your brain picks a target. Make senior. Get the promotion. Hit the number.

You hit it. Brief rush. And then the feeling is gone, and your head goes looking for the next one.

There are two routes up.

On the first route you run on fear and ego. You protect your status. You chase titles. You stack up money as proof that you are worth something.

The second route draws less attention and is worth far more. You build a good career and you do good things for the people around you while you do it. You grow. You learn. You leave people better than you found them.

Both can take you a long way. They just end up somewhere else.

Sit with the question of why you actually want that promotion. Go past the answer you usually give. Find the real one.

What People Regret at the End

Bronnie Ware spent years in palliative care. She sat beside people in their final weeks and wrote down what they told her.

One thing kept coming back. They wished they had found the courage to live a life that was truly their own. They wished they had let themselves be happier. They wished they had worked less. Her observations are here.

That second one sticks with me. Letting yourself be happier. As though the happiness had been lying there all along, with something always in front of it.

Usually that something was fear. Fear of being too little. Fear of losing what they had built. Fear of what other people would think.

Nobody in that bed said they wished they had made VP.

It Happens Piece by Piece

There is no day where you make a decision. There are dozens of moments where you let something go.

You stay quiet in a meeting while someone gets treated badly. You take the credit, because the opening was there. You push your 1-on-1s aside for a deck that makes you look good. You leave a request for help sitting because there is little in it for you.

And every time you promise yourself you will be different once you are one level up.

Then you get there. Same person, fuller calendar.

Four habits do most of the draining.

The first is taking credit that belongs to someone else. Short term you gain ground. Meanwhile you make enemies with long memories.

The second is being warm upwards and cool downwards. People see it. They always see it.

The third is holding information back to protect your position. It feels clever. It wrecks trust in a way that takes years to repair.

The fourth is the slowest. You stop asking people how they are doing. Curiosity costs time, and that time now goes to visibility.

What Actually Works

Ask for feedback. Often. From different people, at different levels. Tasha Eurich studied self-awareness and found that around 95 percent of us believe we are self-aware. In reality something like 10 to 15 percent meet the criteria. Your blind spots are probably no secret at all to the people around you.

Be specific with your manager about what success looks like in their eyes. Have a real conversation about it. Ask what needs to have happened by December for them to say you did well.

Be proactive. See problems coming and bring a proposal. Do it visibly, with your manager, rather than around them. Robert Greene once wrote that you should never outshine the person above you. There is more in that than you would like to admit.

Build credit with people who give you nothing right now. That is the investment with the longest return.

And guard your recovery. Four weeks of grinding turns anyone into a shorter, harder version of themselves. Character erodes fastest when you are spent.

The Trap in the Step Into Leadership

In a new leadership role you want to prove you deserve it. Work harder than everyone. Know everything. Be in every room.

But the step from expert to leader asks for something else. Do less yourself. Make more possible. Give fewer answers. Ask better questions.

Whoever works that out early grows faster than whoever spends years trying to stay the best operator. Hence the title. You get further by doing less and carrying more weight.

Higher up, the trap changes shape. There it becomes influence without formal power, decisions made on half the information, and the weight of a call that touches hundreds of people. For leaders at director level who want to keep climbing the corporate ladder faster in a way that is good for the people around them, executive coaching is where that work usually happens.

One Question to Take With You

Think of someone you genuinely admire. Someone who got far and stayed warm along the way. Someone you would call a good person without hesitating.

You probably have someone in mind already.

Ask yourself what makes that person different. I would bet it has very little to do with a job title.

That is the second route. Climbing the corporate ladder faster and being able to look yourself in the eye go together fine, as long as you choose deliberately. On autopilot they come apart.

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

Will AI Replace Managers? The Bad News. And the Good.

David Buirs - Leadership- & Executive Coach

Will AI Replace Managers? The Bad News. And the Good.

David Buirs is a leadership and executive coach in Amsterdam. This article looks at whether AI will replace managers, how automation shrinks teams and absorbs administrative management work, and which leadership skills keep you valuable. Readers learn where to focus their development for the years ahead.

I keep coming back to one image. A company that used to need ten people, now running on three. The work stayed. Most of it just gets handled by AI agents that decide, send the email, book the ticket, process the refund, upload the data. Nobody has to ask them.

Helping managers become great leaders is my work. It is the thing I love most. So this is a future I find uncomfortable. Still, I would rather look at it clearly than pretend it is not coming. The question I hear most often these days is simple. Will AI replace managers?

Here is what I see. The more repetitive a role is, the easier it becomes for an agent to do it faster and cheaper. Work that once took ten people can now be done by one person managing ten agents. And what counts as repetitive keeps moving. A year ago an agent could handle a simple, predictable task. Now it runs a whole process, with steps and judgment calls along the way. Every month the line moves further. Work we thought was too complex ends up inside it.

Companies Are Getting Smaller

This is happening across the board. Some sectors get hit harder than others, but the direction is the same everywhere. What took ten people might soon take three. Teams shrink and output climbs. When a company only needs three people, it really matters which three.

Two Things Happen to Management at Once

When companies get smaller, managers are impacted too. A smaller organisation needs fewer managers to run it. That alone thins out the management layer.

Then add a second effect on top. A lot of classic management work is administration in disguise. Tracking progress toward KPIs. Scheduling and planning. Forecasting. Pulling numbers into a report and passing them up the chain. This is the structured, repeatable work that AI handles well.

Middle management feels this hardest. So much of that role is moving information upward and aligning people with targets. That is exactly the part AI does well. Roles heavy on coordination and reporting are most exposed. Think operations, finance, logistics, customer service, administrative layers in tech and corporate environments. The more a job is about passing information along, the more of it can be automated.

So two forces stack. Fewer managers are needed because companies are smaller. And the managers who remain see their administrative tasks absorbed by AI. What is left is the leadership part. Each leader ends up with more direct reports, supported by AI for the coordination that used to fill the week.

What Survives Is Leadership

The human skills survive. Motivating people. Coaching them. Inspiring a direction worth following. Connecting individuals into something that works together. An agent can draft your forecast. It cannot sit with someone who has lost their confidence and help them find it again. As the administrative work gets absorbed, these become the core of the job rather than the soft edge of it. This is where leadership coaching earns its place, building the skills that AI cannot touch.

There is judgment too. Knowing which AI output to trust. Knowing what to ask in the first place. Becoming more AI savvy than the people around you. These compound over time. For leaders at director level, where the decisions get heavier and lonelier, coaching for senior leaders is a logical next step.

The Skill Most Leaders Skip

Self-awareness. Research by organizational psychologist Tasha Eurich, published in Harvard Business Review, found that while 95% of people claim to be self-aware, only 10 to 15% actually fit the criteria. That gap is where your blind spots sit, out of view. Interestingly, her work also found that senior leaders are often less self-aware than they assume, partly because honest feedback gets harder to find the higher you climb.

This is workable. Find your blind spots, work on them, and you give yourself a real head start while everyone else assumes they are already fine.

And yes, an executive coach telling you to invest in your own development. I see the optics there. I believe this is coming anyway, however much I dislike the idea. For most of us it comes down to upskilling or being left behind. I happen to think most of us are capable of the upskilling. For organisations that want to build these skills across a whole team, a management training programme is a practical way to start.

Where to Start

I work with leaders at every level, from new managers to directors, helping them get ready for what the next few years will ask of them. We look at where you stand, where your blind spots are, and which skills will keep you valuable as the work around you changes.

If you want to be one of the people who comes out of this stronger, let's have a chat. A free introduction, zero obligation.

My Team Does Not Take Ownership. What Now?

David Buirs | Leadership Coach & Management Trainer

My Team Does Not Take Ownership. Why Is That?

David Buirs is a leadership and executive coach in Amsterdam. This post is about teams that do not take ownership. You will learn why more control backfires, how clear agreements and short update moments bring ownership back, and how to respond when someone fails to keep an agreement.

You probably know the feeling. You hand something off, and then you have to chase it constantly. A reminder here. A check there. And still it sits there until you jump on top of it again.

You start to think you should just do it yourself. Faster, easier, done.

But then you are caught in a pattern that feeds itself.

This is one of the topics I work on most often with people. Team leads, managers, board members, VPs. In coaching this theme keeps coming back. And almost all of them tell me the same thing after we have worked on it: it gets easier and easier to let people take things on themselves.

The More You Stay on Top of It, the Less They Do

This is the painful paradox. The more you control, the less ownership you get back.

It seems illogical, but it sits deep in how people work. Research into micromanagement shows a clear mechanism. Too much control removes autonomy, and with it the felt responsibility for the outcome.

And then something subtle happens. When you become the owner of their task, your employee's brain senses that sharply. They start acting to satisfy your instructions. People then follow the rules to avoid getting the blame, rather than trying to make the work genuinely better.

So you have literally taken the ownership over. And then you wonder why no one picks it up.

The way out lies in something other than pushing harder.

Make Agreements Instead of Giving Instructions

Telling people what to do feels efficient. It rarely works, though.

What does work: making clear agreements together with your people. An agreement that two people commit to.

Do you doubt whether someone can handle it? Then ask a question.

"What is your plan? Walk me through it, so I can give you a tip if you need one."

Now two things happen at once. You hear whether the plan holds up. And you leave ownership where it belongs: with them. They present their approach to you, not the other way around. It is their plan.

The Update Agreement That Changes Everything

Here is where many managers gain the most. The way you hand off an important project.

Look first at how it often goes.

"The deadline for this project is in two weeks. Will it work out?" "Yes, it will be fine." Two weeks later: "Oh, I completely forgot."

Now you are empty-handed. Too late to steer anything.

Compare that with this approach.

"This project is important, because a lot depends on it for [reason]. I want to ask you to do this, because I believe you can. Will you help me with this? How you carry it out is up to you. I am curious though: what is your plan? Walk me through it. And because so much depends on it, will you send me a very short update every two days?"

Do you feel the difference?

You explain why it matters. You give trust. You leave the execution with them. And you build in a safety net. If you hear nothing after two days, you can steer right away. From now on you avoid surprises.

The short update works as a rhythm in which you keep course together.

And When Someone Fails to Keep the Agreement?

It happens. The question is how you respond.

The first time: take it on yourself. "Maybe I did not explain it clearly enough." This keeps the relationship open. People come out of their defensiveness, so they can really listen.

The second time: be clear and warm at once. "Last time it may have been on me. This time I explained it clearly. I want you to succeed in your role. I have little appetite for attaching a consequence to a broken agreement. But I do need to be able to rely on you. What can we do so that this goes well from now on?"

And then the most important part. If you name a consequence, follow through when it goes wrong again. Otherwise you lose your authority. Your words become cheap. Everyone on your team sees that you threaten without follow-up.

A boundary you guard is the only real boundary.

Two Things That Help Here

Always make the why explicit. People take things on when they understand why it matters. "Just do this" gives you an executor. "This matters because customers drop off otherwise" gives you an owner. The same task, a completely different sense of involvement.

Celebrate it when someone does take ownership. We mostly name what goes wrong. But behaviour you pay attention to grows. Do you see someone take initiative? Say it out loud. Just honestly. "Good that you picked this up yourself, that really helps me." That way you make ownership attractive.

To Close

A team that takes things on itself grows through steering differently. Through agreements instead of instructions. Through trust with a safety net underneath.

It feels awkward at first. You give up control you were used to holding. But that is exactly where the room sits in which your people can grow. Want to work on this personally? This is exactly the kind of theme I help with in coaching for managers. For leaders at board level, executive coaching amsterdam is a logical next step. And for organisations that want to address this structurally, a leadership development program is a solid move.

And you finally keep your hands free for the work that truly matters. Interested or curious? Let's chat. Plan your free introduction here. Zero obligation.

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.