Leadership Behavior: Better Leadership Through Workload Visibility

According to EY Work Reimagined 2025, only 48 percent of employees in Germany say they give their best at work. At the same time, the job study shows: 28 percent have left an employer at least once because of their manager's leadership behavior. Both figures are directly connected. Anyone who experiences daily that decisions are made without a data foundation, priorities remain unclear, and overload is ignored will eventually draw consequences.

For an IT services company with 50 employees, this means in purely arithmetic terms: between €280,000 and €340,000 are lost annually because teams are operating in economy mode. No technology investment, no onboarding program, and no team-building budget will offset this loss as long as the leadership behavior at the root remains unchanged.

Where the Problem Originates in Everyday Business

Most leaders in IT services, consulting, and agencies are promoted into their positions because they are technically excellent. The best developer becomes team lead, the strongest consultant takes over project responsibility, the most reliable account manager heads the client team. What is often missing: structured preparation for the new role. And the systems that make this role executable in the first place.

The Transparency Problem in Knowledge-Intensive Teams

In project agencies and IT consultancies, poor leadership behavior often arises from a lack of management foundation. When a leader doesn't know who is currently how busy, which projects are stalling, and where quality issues are emerging, they react automatically. They ask more frequently, pull decisions toward themselves, and check work results in more granular detail. Employees experience this as micromanagement, even when the leader is consciously trying to avoid it.

The result: skilled professionals who want to work autonomously experience a leader who distrusts them. The leader in turn experiences a team that waits for direction. Both sides feel as though the other isn't functioning properly.

Unclear Expectations as a Driver of Frustration

Another problem that is underestimated in practice: leaders communicate goals, but not priorities. Teams in project service companies simultaneously juggle multiple client projects, internal tasks, and ongoing development. When it is unclear what comes first and why, friction losses, duplication, and quiet demotivation arise.

According to the EY Job Study 2025, nearly three in ten employees (28 percent) have left an employer at least once because of their manager's leadership behavior. In the 18–35 age group, this figure is even higher. For companies already struggling with a shortage of skilled workers, this is a structural vulnerability of the highest order.

Leadership Behavior: Definition and Distinction

In leadership research, leadership behavior refers to the concrete, situation-specific actions of a leader in dealing with their employees. It is what actually happens in everyday working life: how feedback is given, how decisions are communicated, how mistakes are responded to, how goals are agreed upon and tracked.

The distinction from leadership style is important here. Leadership style describes the fundamental pattern by which someone leads. Leadership behavior is the concrete execution of that pattern in a specific situation. A leader may claim a democratic leadership style and yet in daily practice make decisions alone, withhold feedback, and fail to involve employees. At that point, stated intent and lived leadership behavior diverge. This gap is exactly what is costly.

Types of Leadership Behavior: The Two Core Dimensions

Leadership research has distinguished for decades between two fundamental dimensions of leadership behavior:

1. ‍Task-oriented leadership behavior aims to create clear structures, define goals, distribute responsibilities, and steer work processes. It asks: who does what by when, and is the result qualitatively sufficient?‍
2. Employee-oriented leadership behavior focuses on relationship quality, appreciation, fostering development, and emotional inclusion. It asks: does my team feel seen, developed, and motivated?

Effective leadership behavior combines both dimensions situationally. Those who lead exclusively in a task-oriented way create distance and inner resignation over time. Those who lead exclusively in an employee-oriented way without creating clear structures lose operational overview and produce chaos. Particularly in project-intensive companies, where workload, deadlines, and budgets vary daily, both are needed.

Characteristics of Leadership Behavior: How Effective Leadership Is Recognizable

Effective leadership behavior can be pinned down to concrete behavioral characteristics:

Leaders give regular, specific feedback that refers to concrete situations. They communicate priorities transparently and explain the decision logic behind them. They delegate tasks with clear expectations and then let go. They take overload signals seriously before absences arise. And they create a climate in which mistakes count as learning moments.

The opposite can be costly — fewer than one in two employees in Germany currently reports giving their best at work. Germany thus lags well below the international benchmark of 54 percent. This gap is not a mentality problem. It is a leadership problem.

Improving Leadership Behavior: Implementation in Everyday Business

This is where the real need for action lies. Three scenarios show what this looks like in practice.

Scenario 1: IT Services Provider with 45 Employees

An IT services provider runs 15 parallel client projects. Team leads take on project responsibility without knowing how their employees are actually occupied. Hours are entered at the end of the month; project budgets are only reviewed during the billing process.

Leadership behavior suffers structurally as a result: team leads cannot make sensible prioritization decisions because the data foundation is missing. Who is currently allocated at 120 percent across which project only becomes visible when that person falls ill or resigns.

With systematic time tracking and resource planning, the foundation changes. Leaders see in real time who is at capacity, which projects are on budget target, and where bottlenecks are forming. Leadership behavior becomes fact-based rather than reactive. Instead of delegating by gut feeling, team leads decide on the basis of workload data. Conversations with employees about overload happen proactively, before sick days arise.

Scenario 2: Management Consultancy with 20 Consultants

In a management consultancy, an experienced project manager takes on a new leadership role. She wants to lead cooperatively and involve her team. In practice, however, this fails because no one knows how much time the individual projects actually require. Estimates and intuition replace data.

The team perceives the leader's decisions as arbitrary because the reasoning is not comprehensible. Who gets which project? Why is consultant A relieved of workload while consultant B remains overloaded? Without transparent time tracking data and project controlling figures, these are not leadership decisions. They are gut decisions.

Step 1: Create transparency about actual project hours — both for leaders and for the team itself.

Step 2: Base regular meetings on data rather than on gut-feel status reports. Project progress, budget actuals, and resource allocation as standing agenda items.

Step 3: On this basis, the leader and employees jointly agree on priorities. This strengthens individual accountability and simultaneously reduces leadership pressure.

Scenario 3: Digital Agency with 30 Employees

In a mid-sized digital agency, leadership behavior is characterized by ad-hoc decisions. New orders are accepted immediately without checking whether capacity is realistic. Project leads are constantly under pressure because client commitments and team capacity diverge. The team experiences leadership as chaotic and unreliable.

This makes it clear: poor leadership behavior often has structural causes. When resource planning and project controlling exist only in people's heads or spreadsheets, no leader has the information foundation for well-considered decisions.

What changes: As soon as resource planning, project budgets, and time tracking reside in a central system, leadership behavior changes almost automatically. Decisions about new proposals are made on the basis of actual capacity. Project leads can justify to management why a project is not staying within budget. And teams experience leadership decisions as comprehensible because they are grounded in numbers.

From Leadership Principles to Measurable Leadership Behavior

Making Leadership Behavior Visible: Why Self-Perception Deceives

When asked about their own leadership behavior, leaders consistently rate themselves more favorably in studies than their employees do. This is a structural problem: anyone who makes decisions, gives feedback, and works with teams every day develops blind spots. Behaviors that are perceived internally as quality assurance are experienced by employees as interference. What counts as clear communication arrives as an instruction with no room for discretion.

That is why improving leadership behavior always requires two components: self-reflection and external feedback. Regular 360-degree feedback sessions, in which employees structurally assess leadership quality, create a foundation that goes beyond subjective impressions. They reveal patterns: leader A gives good feedback in one-on-ones, but in team meetings consistently overrides objections. Leader B is substantively precise, but communicates decisions so late that teams cannot work in a plannable way.

Both patterns are barely recognizable through self-reflection alone. They become visible when leadership behavior is systematically captured.

Operational Data as Leadership Feedback

In knowledge-intensive companies, there is a second feedback source that is rarely used in the leadership context: operational project data. When a team consistently records overtime in certain project phases, this points to planning patterns. When individual employees are regularly booked at more than 100 percent, this signals the leader's prioritization behavior. When projects are structurally under-budgeted and then require supplementary budgets, this is a pattern in proposal management.

These signals are not accusations. They are leadership information. Companies that centrally evaluate project hours, resource utilization, and budget history give leaders a mirror of their operational actions. This creates a factual basis for development conversations that requires no indictment.

ZEP provides exactly this data foundation: utilization reports at the employee and project level, real-time budget tracking, and absence overviews integrated into resource planning. Diffuse leadership gut feelings become analyzable management knowledge. This fundamentally changes the quality of leadership decisions.

Leadership principles such as transparency, appreciation, and clear communication sound compelling in every leadership training session. In practice, they regularly fail due to a structural root problem: leaders in project-intensive companies have no reliable information foundation.

How is a team lead supposed to communicate honestly and proactively when she herself doesn't know which projects are on track? How is a project manager supposed to distribute workload fairly when utilization data is missing or weeks out of date? How is a managing director supposed to make strategic staffing decisions when project profitability only becomes visible at the year-end close?

Good leadership behavior requires reliable data. This is especially true for the areas of resource planning, project control, and absence management. Systems like ZEP create this data foundation by mapping project hours, budget consumption, vacation planning, and resource utilization in real time. Leaders thus receive precisely the overview that effective leadership behavior requires. Integrations into existing accounting systems such as DATEV or Lexware ensure that the same data foundation that strengthens leadership is also directly usable for billing and tax advisory purposes.

This means that improving leadership behavior is not solely a matter of goodwill. It is a matter of the right system support.

Leadership Behavior and Turnover: The Underestimated Cost Factor

Turnover is recorded in most companies as an HR topic. In reality, it is a direct measuring instrument for leadership quality. The EY Job Study 2025 shows: 28 percent of employees have left an employer at least once because of their manager's leadership behavior. In the IT and telecommunications sector, general willingness to change jobs stands at 33 percent.

Run the numbers for a 30-person company: at an annual turnover rate of 15 percent, each departure generates between €30,000 and €60,000 in costs through recruiting, onboarding, and productivity loss. If every third resignation comes down to leadership behavior, these are costs that could be avoided through better leadership.

The crucial point: willingness to leave rarely announces itself loudly. It shows up in declining initiative, less intrinsic motivation, more sick days. Leaders who have access to utilization data and project histories recognize these patterns earlier. Anyone who first hears about overload in an exit interview has structurally led too late.

Conclusion: Leadership Behavior Requires System Support

Leadership behavior improves through three concrete prerequisites:

1. A clear definition of expectations: What does good leadership behavior mean in the specific company context? Which behaviors are binding when it comes to goal-setting conversations, feedback, and delegation?
2. A structured data foundation: Leaders who don't know how their teams are occupied, which projects are on track, and where capacity bottlenecks are arising simply cannot answer these questions in daily practice. Investments in project time tracking and resource planning are therefore direct investments in leadership quality.
3. A feedback system: Leadership behavior that is never measured and discussed barely changes. Regular conversations about leadership quality, 360-degree feedback, and clear development goals for leaders are not an HR luxury. They are a business necessity.

For companies in IT services, consulting, and agency work, the first concrete action is: check whether your leaders today have the information foundation that effective leadership behavior requires. If it is missing, the first lever lies in the systems.

Leadership development and operational system support are mutually dependent. Training leaders in appreciative communication behavior while simultaneously giving them no reliable planning foundation creates frustration on both sides. A good PSA system alone does not create leadership quality, but it gives leaders the information from which good decisions can emerge for the first time.