Relevance in leadership: you cannot order people back into connection

On 28 October 2026, the Rechtbank Amsterdam ruled that Booking.com's works council could not block a rule requiring staff to spend at least 40% of their working time in the office. Before the case, 40% had been a recommendation. According to the facts the court established, as reported by OR-net, 27% of employees followed it.

The ruling comes with a six-month transition period in which the rule is not enforced, and a hardship clause for people who temporarily cannot meet it. The court did not order anyone back. It found that a works council's refusal to consent was unreasonable, in one company, under Dutch law.

The next afternoon, on our LinkedIn Live, Elsbeth van Lienden read it differently. "This is ultimately so sad that we have to get people back by a judge's call," she said. "So what are you really doing to bring back that humanness, that connection, and that aliveness that people want to be in the office again."

That is her reading, not the court's. It is also the question this piece is about.

A rule that ends up in court can show where the connection went

Be fair to Booking.com first. The court accepted that meeting in person serves collaboration, knowledge sharing, training and team bonding, and that the rule could be reasonable without Booking proving it was necessary. As OR-net notes, the court did not require hard scientific evidence or a baseline measurement first. Notice what that means: a court accepted that connection matters to the business without asking for hard evidence or a baseline first.

Structure is not the enemy of care. Sometimes a rule is how an organisation looks after something it shares.

But a rule that has to be defended in court is the last tool, not the first. Most leaders reading this are not heading to a judge. They recognise the earlier stage: the town hall that lands flat, the recommendation people politely ignore, the hybrid policy on its third rewrite. The usual fix is better policy. Clearer rules, a fixed team day, a better canteen.

Those can help. What they miss is simpler. People rarely come back for a building. They come back for someone.

The mask that got you promoted

Nienke van Bezooijen's line opened the Live: "the impact of a real human is far greater than the impact of a masked human."

Then she offered a test anyone can run on themselves: "Just check for yourself how many times do you show up who you really are, and how many times do you just put a mask on to protect yourself? And the mask I'm talking about is also the performance mask. Look, I did this well."

The performance mask is the one senior people know best, because it works. It is how competence gets noticed, and for many it is how they got the job. Nienke links it to what Brené Brown calls armour: the ways we protect ourselves when we are afraid. The cost of armour is that it keeps out as much as it keeps safe.

She is precise about what the alternative is not. "There's a difference in just pouring yourself out in vulnerability with misery or just saying, I don't know." Taking off the mask is not oversharing. Usually it is smaller than that: one honest sentence where a confident one was expected.

Relevance is the capacity to read what the mask blocks

This is where the office question turns into something underneath it.

By relevance, we mean a leader's capacity to sense and serve what actually moves people in an organisation, not only what the dashboard reports. Nienke put it this way: "relevance in leadership is having the capacity to tap in this whole area of connection."

A mask gets in the way of exactly that. It is built to send a signal out. It lets very little in.

What it blocks is what we call the undercurrent: the layer of trust, fear, loyalty and fatigue that moves beneath the numbers and decides whether the numbers hold. Policy works on the surface. The decision to come in, or to stay, is often made underneath.

Elsbeth described the people who already work at that level. Many organisations have some: the ones "walking between the lines to pick up some people who need it sometimes". Then they step back, she said, with a thought like this: "don't let me show too much of what I'm doing in my humanness because that could cost my job."

When the people who quietly hold an organisation together hide that they do, the leader is often the last to know. Elsbeth's own view is blunt: "it's really rare to be able to be human in an organization." That is a conviction, not a measurement. Many leaders will recognise it anyway.

Why the human part is becoming the job

For a long time a leader could run largely on numbers. "Up till now everything could be like managed through numbers, the KPIs, the productivity and efficiency," Elsbeth said. AI is changing that. It takes on more of the narrow, analytical work many executives were promoted for. What is left is the part a model does not do well: reading a room, holding the whole, deciding what matters.

The psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist argues that the brain's two hemispheres attend to the world differently: one narrows in on parts, the other holds the whole. His claim is about attention, not about logical and creative people. The step from there to AI is ours, not his. We set it out in Your company runs on half a brain. The short version is a metaphor, and we use it as one: organisations, and now their tools, reward the narrow kind of attention and leave the wider kind on the table.

Earlier that day, in a conversation with team partner Sander Boon, Elsbeth and Nienke had arrived at a conclusion. Elsbeth put it like this: "the return to a more humanness in organizations will become a strategy on its own." It is a prediction, and we hold it as one.

None of this argues against the numbers. "There's nothing wrong with having your KPIs and numbers correct," Nienke said. "But that isn't the same as stewardship and relevance in your organization."

From manager to steward

Stewardship was the word the Live kept coming back to. Nienke's working definition, from her own preparation: "stewardship is taking responsibility to take care what you don't personally own." A leader does not own the people, the culture or the future of the company. They answer for all three.

The fear is that this costs authority. Elsbeth answered it directly: "It's not that you lose your leadership role, it's just you become more of a steward". The steward is also not alone. In our experience, many organisations already hold people who are waiting for this kind of leadership. As Elsbeth put it, "it's not something that leadership needs to do alone."

What makes it hard is being seen. Nienke named the choice: "do you hide behind your KPIs". And she named why the choice is difficult: "it's difficult to step up and be seen fully because it requires you are seen fully as well, as a human."

What the mask costs

The cost is rarely dramatic, which is why it is easy to carry. It can be the senior person who leaves, and whose exit interview says nothing useful. It can be the quiet connectors who stop connecting because it felt unsafe. It can be the attendance policy that needs another rewrite, and then a lawyer.

A late friend of Nienke's put the alternative in one line: "Show me you care and that's not over care, but real care."

We nearly put on a mask ourselves

While we were rebuilding our free scan, we drifted toward resilience. How resilient are you as a leader? It is the word everyone uses. Then one of our team partners said, as Nienke tells it: "resilience, resilience, everybody's talking about resilience. That's not the Indigo Elephant."

We listened, and went back to the word we had started with. The scan became the Relevance Scan. It was a small moment, but it held the whole argument. The safe, popular word was the mask. Someone who saw us clearly named it, and we took it off.

What you can start on Monday

None of this needs us. Four things to try this week:

• Count the masks. For five working days, notice the moments you perform competence instead of saying what you see. Nienke's test above is enough.

• Say "I don't know" once, in a meeting where you would normally improvise an answer. Then ask who does know.

• Find the people walking between the lines. Ask them what they see. Do not turn it into a programme.

• Before the next policy, ask what would make people want to come. Then ask whether the honest answer includes you.

"This is not something that we can read in the thousands of leadership books that are out there," Elsbeth said. "We have to write our own stories."

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