Leadership · June 2026

You already know.
You just haven't found the silence to listen.

Thirty years of working with leaders under pressure, distilled into six honest questions.

In 30 years of coaching leaders, I have heard a version of the same sentence more times than I can count.

“I knew it was getting too much. I just kept going anyway.”

Not because they were careless. Because they cared too much. About their team, their results, their responsibilities. Because stopping felt like failing.

Leadership is not temporarily demanding. It is structurally so. You hold things together for everyone else, often whilst holding very little together for yourself. That is not a flaw in your character. It is a flaw in how we design the role.

The numbers are getting worse

Gallup 2026 records the largest single-year drop in manager engagement ever measured: five points in one year. The engagement premium that was visible across decades of research has vanished. Managers are now as disengaged as the people they lead.

In the Netherlands, more than one in five employees report burnout symptoms. Among managers, the figure is higher. Only 44% of managers worldwide have ever received any formal leadership training. Yet we keep treating burnout as a personal failing.

It is not. It is a gap between what we ask of people and what we give them to work with.

Six questions worth sitting with

I have put together a guide. Not a framework. Not a toolkit. Six questions that I have used in coaching for years, backed by the latest research, written for leaders who are already good at what they do and want to sustain it.

The guide includes the latest Gallup 2026 and TNO/NEA 2025 data, and is available in both English and Dutch. It is free. No strings attached.

Choose one question. Answer it honestly this week. That is enough to start.

Still learning. Still moving forward.