#551 Why Leaders Must Go To The End-Of-Year Party | Article by Niels Brabandt
Why Leaders Must Go To The End-Of-Year Party
Every winter, the same dilemma returns to calendars across the business world. The end-of-year party looms, and many leaders find good reasons not to attend: a demanding year, family commitments, sports clubs, sheer exhaustion. Niels Brabandt EMBA MBA MSc, executive coach and founder of NB Networks, understands the temptation completely. Yet in the latest episode of his Leadership Podcast, he makes a firm case for why leaders who skip the end-of-year party are making a costly mistake, one that goes far beyond office politics and touches the very foundation of their authority.
Formal Authority Is Not Enough: The Case for Social Legitimation
Every leader arrives at their role with what Niels Brabandt calls formal legitimation: a signed contract, a position on the organisational chart, disciplinary authority handed down by the business. This form of power is straightforward and, crucially, cannot be taken away by circumstance. Social legitimation is different. It is the genuine acceptance a leader earns from their team, built entirely on what they have done rather than what their job title says. Unlike formal authority, social legitimation cannot be granted or assigned. It must be earned continuously, and once it is lost, Niels Brabandt argues, there is no way back into a functioning leadership role.
Trust and the Informal Setting: Where Leadership Credibility Is Built
According to Niels Brabandt, trust rarely develops during formal working hours. A brief exchange in a meeting room, or a scheduled catch-up over email, does little to reveal what genuinely matters to employees. What is required is an informal setting, a relaxed environment where hierarchy briefly recedes and colleagues can see one another as people rather than roles. The end-of-year party offers precisely this kind of space. Whether or not alcohol is involved is, in Niels Brabandt's view, beside the point. What matters is that employees are given the opportunity to see their leader outside the usual context of targets, deadlines and performance reviews.
The Intermission Effect: Why Parties Bridge Business and Private Life
Niels Brabandt draws a memorable comparison between the end-of-year party and the intermission of a theatre performance. During the interval, audiences step outside the formal structure of the show and simply talk, connect and relax, only to return to their seats once the curtain rises again. Workplace celebrations function the same way. They create a deliberate pause between business life and private life, a space in which employees naturally open up about what really matters to them, from childcare logistics to personal ambitions, in a way that rarely surfaces during the working day.
The Inner Mission: Uncovering What Truly Motivates People
During formal appraisal interviews, employees tend to give what Niels Brabandt describes as the socially desirable response: broad statements about contributing value or supporting the organisation's goals. These answers are rehearsed, safe and largely uninformative. The genuine driver behind someone's motivation, what Niels Brabandt terms their inner mission, tends to surface only once trust has been established in an informal setting. It might be a preference for an earlier finish on Fridays to collect children from school, or frustration at missing a hobby due to a fixed schedule. None of this is stated directly. It emerges indirectly, through relaxed conversation, and only once an employee genuinely trusts their leader.
Reciprocity and Absence: The Cost of Not Showing Up
Absence sends its own message. Niels Brabandt is direct on this point: when a senior leader fails to attend the end-of-year celebration without a clearly communicated reason, employees read it as a lack of care, and reciprocity takes hold. If leadership does not appear to care, employees quickly adjust their own commitment accordingly. For leaders in senior, well-remunerated positions in particular, non-attendance without justification carries a disproportionate cost to trust and morale across the wider organisation.
From Awareness to Practice: Why Leadership Training Still Matters
Niels Brabandt situates all of this within a broader concern about the state of leadership development. Citing research from the Chartered Management Institute, he notes that a striking eighty-two per cent of leaders have never received any form of formal leadership training, a gap that would be considered unthinkable in almost any other regulated profession. Understanding concepts such as social legitimation, the inner mission, and models including Maslow's hierarchy of needs, Herzberg's motivation-hygiene theory and the job characteristics model is not, in Niels Brabandt's assessment, optional theory. It is the scientific foundation that, combined with real-world practice, separates leaders who are merely appointed from leaders who are genuinely followed.
The conclusion Niels Brabandt draws is unambiguous. The end-of-year party is not an optional social extra to be skipped when diaries are full. It is one of the few moments in the working year where social legitimation is built, tested and, if leaders are not careful, lost. Attending, and attending with genuine presence, remains one of the simplest and most effective actions any leader can take before the year closes.
Niels Brabandt
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More on this topic in this week's videocast and podcast with Niels Brabandt: Videocast / Apple Podcasts / Spotify
For the videocast's and podcast's transcript, read below this article.
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Podcast and Videocast Transcript
Niels Brabandt EMBA MBA MSc
At the end of the year we celebrate, and yes, you know that, and of course leaders go there. Well, you might now say, "Look, Neils," Mr. Revant, Neils, I got a really stressful year. I got family, I got other appointments, you know, with my sports club, with my hobbies, with whatever I have, the gardening union, or whatever else. Sorry, I— I just can't go there. I have so much stress. I really need a day off there. Good party for the others, but as a leader I just don't show up there.
Niels Brabandt EMBA MBA MSc
And first things first here: I can emotionally understand that. We have stressful times, lots of work to do. You have to align all of that with your private life, your family life, your hobbies. Everything you have in your life needs to be aligned. And suddenly someone says, "Oh God, another evening appointment," and often Friday evening or Thursday evening, so you're completely done for the next day. You didn't have enough sleep and whatnot else, and you might think, "Yeah, not really what I like to do."
Niels Brabandt EMBA MBA MSc
And first things first, as promised, I can emotionally understand that, yet it is of crucial importance that you show up to the end of your party. And that's exactly our topic today. Some might now wonder, "Why is this a leadership topic?" And you know at the end of this episode why it is.
Niels Brabandt EMBA MBA MSc
Very important here is: if someone now is going to start the angry "Oh, why do you call it end-of-year party? It's a Christmas party, it's a Christian tradition, is it illegal to say Christmas now?" So first, no, you can say Christmas party if you like. Second, there are most likely people in your company who do not celebrate Christmas, so if you don't want to be in touch with them as a leader, that's your decision. Doesn't make you a better leader. Doesn't make anything better in your organization. It's a constitutional view against being a better leader. Your thing, not mine. It is the end-of-year party to me, if you want to call it differently, call it differently. However, when you say that a Christmas party is a Christian tradition, just look up the history of Christmas, hint: it isn't in its history as Christian as you think it is.
Niels Brabandt EMBA MBA MSc
The situation now is: we have to see, why do leaders need to turn up and go to the end-of-year party? Because you could think, "Look, this is a social event where maybe it's even beneficial when leaders don't show up. People are in a social setting." And that's exactly the point here. You probably heard me saying there's something we just called the social legitimation. Leadership is a completely social construct. No one needs to follow you by law. If you tell someone, "Could you please, could you please send these couple of emails," and they say no, you can't call the police and make the police or a court do them to send these emails. It's a purely social construct. So everything you have as a leader is the social legitimation.
Niels Brabandt EMBA MBA MSc
As soon as you lose that, because the formal legitimation is already there. You are assigned a leadership position, you have disciplinary leadership, you signed the papers, got the contract, in the org chart, you're high up, and that's why you're a leader, formally. However, you all know these leaders, probably, and you experienced them, where people say, "Yeah, yeah, we got that leader. No one's listening to them anyway. We self-organized a long time ago." And that's something you do not want to have. The social legitimation simply means you are able to be accepted by your people, even in the most critical situations, due to what you've done. Social legitimation needs to be earned. It can't be given. It can't be put on you. It can't be gifted to you. You need to earn it. And it's very important: when the social legitimation is gone, your leadership role is done, you're off. That was it. No way back.
Niels Brabandt EMBA MBA MSc
And of course, in the moment you are in this social setting, things might get very personal. And people say, "Oh, do you mean because people drink?" Well, they sometimes alcohol plays a role, but it doesn't need to be. So that's not important here. But when you really want to know what really personally motivates your people, that's what they only tell you in the break room at work, or during working hours, or in the office in front of other people. They only tell it to you in a so-called informal setting.
Niels Brabandt EMBA MBA MSc
By the way, an important add-on here: in the informal setting, there's one thing you must have gained before, and that is trust. If you didn't gain the trust, it doesn't help you to go to the end-of-year party. Sit around there. No one's going to talk to you anyway. If you didn't gain their trust, and by the way, you can gain their trust during these kind of end-of-year parties, because often people say, "Hey, my leader is always a bit serious about everything," and suddenly they see you at the end-of-year party and think, "Wow, this person actually has a life besides work. I didn't think that they could be that much fun." So here you are. The informal setting means it needs to be informal, needs to be relaxed. However, they need to trust you. If they don't trust you, they're not going to tell you anything.
Niels Brabandt EMBA MBA MSc
You have to assume, and you have to see it in a certain way, when you— because often people say, "Is it really that important now to do it in this setting?" The end-of-year party, or the summer party, any kind of party which is outside the usual thing you do at work, is like an intermission between work and private life. And let's say you go to a theater, or to a musical, or whatever event. You always know what happens when you leave for the intermission. In the intermission, people socialize, and suddenly it becomes a bit more fun. You talk about anything, how do you like things. You talk about everything. Not only the show, you talk about everything.
Niels Brabandt EMBA MBA MSc
This intermission is extremely important. You need to have the intermission between business life and private life, and use it wisely. Because as soon as people tell you something, maybe that someone says, "When you look, it could be really beneficial if I could have a shorter Friday, work the other days a bit longer, but have an early finish on Friday because, you know, I can pick up my kids from school." Or someone says, "I'd like to start a bit later because I have 4 kids to bring to different schools." Or someone says, "Look, I have this really important hobby where on Wednesday we always have early training. I can never join, which I'm not part of the main team. That really demotivates me because I'm really good at it." All of that can be immediately used, of course, within the means of the organizational needs, which needs to be served as well.
Niels Brabandt EMBA MBA MSc
But what you see here is the so-called inner mission. The inner mission is what is really motivating people to get out of bed in the morning. And of course, now some leaders say, "Look, I will not do it that way. I will simply ask them during the annual appraisal interview, 'What's your inner mission?'" And yeah, you can do that. I mean, scientifically speaking, you can't ask for the inner mission, because what you get is the so-called socially desirable response. When you say, "Okay, what motivates you?" the usual answer will be, "Oh, I want to be a value-contributing part of this organization to actually establish and extend our market share to the benefit of the customer and best customer service at all times." And then bad leaders say, "Great answer. You're the person to be promoted."
Niels Brabandt EMBA MBA MSc
People rehearse these answers. People very quickly learn which topics are always the hot topic of the day, what's the flavor of the month. And people also know which are the couple of topics you better never touch, although it's desperately need to talk about that, but we know that management just doesn't like it, so we don't address it until everything escalates. And in this moment here, in this informal setting, the intermission between business and private life, people talk about everything. Of course, in the informal setting, they need to trust you, but as soon as you know their inner mission, which they will not tell you during the annual appraisal interview, you can motivate them way better.
Niels Brabandt EMBA MBA MSc
And by the way, it's always indirect. It's always indirect. People will never say, "Oh, yeah, you addressed my individual needs very well, so on the Maslow pyramid I felt myself very well connected, and the Hertzberg factors were very well, so I think you really understood the job characteristics model." No one is going to tell you anything about the scientific bit here. However, the scientific aspects I just mentioned are crucial to understand for leaders. If you do not understand them, please do not be surprised that you are unable to motivate people. Or if you ignore them, you are unwilling to motivate people because you simply do not seem to care a tiny bit.
Niels Brabandt EMBA MBA MSc
So what you first need— everything here will be indirect. People will see, "Oh, something has changed. I trust you more. I like you more suddenly." And people will behave differently then. I'll give you a very simple example. Let's say you have some sort of— you have some sort of extra service that people are on call. And you call them and say, "Look, someone called in sick. Can you please go to the customer?" And it's Sunday afternoon, and people say, "Look, it's a really nice sunny day. I like to sit in my garden, or on my balcony, or in my flat, or basically anywhere instead of going to work."
Niels Brabandt EMBA MBA MSc
And if they really are just on a formal level with you, if there is no social legitimation with you as a leader, they will say, "Look, I think my neck hurts a bit. Sorry, can't do that. Bye." And if they actually trust you, and when you are a socially legitimated leader, they will say, "Look, I know it's not great, but I'm going to do this because we can all become sick at some point. I want that others help me, and I help them right now." It's always indirect. But what you need first is, amongst leaders on all levels, including the highest level of leadership, you need an awareness.
Niels Brabandt EMBA MBA MSc
Because we have one issue— there's a whole generation of leaders out there— when you look at the Chartered Management Institute and their survey, that 82% of leaders never had any kind of leadership training. In no other job you would allow that to happen. If I work for a company that produces electricity and I say, "Hey, you know, I'm not an engineer and I never learned this, but I like to install things. I like to, like, fiddle around with electricity. Do you have a job?" they would say, "Bit of foundation would be good. You need to get the training first." At leadership, we say, "Yeah, there are people, and good luck from here with no qualification whatsoever." And then we wonder why people are not motivated.
Niels Brabandt EMBA MBA MSc
Who could have thought? Or leaders do wrong things, and employee turnover goes through the roof, or sick leave goes up every single year. The awareness needs to be there that leadership training, coaching, and whatnot else around it is a must-have, because otherwise things go south from there. And I know there's a whole generation out there that, one, never had training, coaching, or anything. Second, were shamed for it. Because back in the days, long time ago, they said, "Oh, you went to leadership training, so you're not— oh, so you had problems, right? Hmm, nah, you don't have to tell me. I know that you had problems because when you get this training, nah, not great for your career, right?"
Niels Brabandt EMBA MBA MSc
And today it's vice versa, but you have a whole level of high-level leadership out there who never received any kind of training. And third, some people simply don't know that this is a thing. They never had it. Now they are on a high level, and they think, "Yeah, this is more for, like, the low-level team lead, isn't it?" No, it's not. You need professional training and coaching. I learned leadership. Others learned leadership. Every skill gets learned. And when you say, "Oh, there are some people who are just born leaders," no, they are not. But due to different levels of empathy, some people are able to serve inner missions way better than others.
Niels Brabandt EMBA MBA MSc
Still, there are a ton of other things around there that you have to learn before you are a really credible leader and socially legitimated. And besides the real-world practice, you need to have the scientific theory. It's not dry, it's not boring, it's not a lecture where someone sits there only reads slides to you. That's really bad training. You don't need that. As soon as someone says, "Oh, here are my PowerPoint slides," things usually go south from there. So you need to have the scientific backing, but you also need the leadership practice. If you bring all of that together, you will be a socially legitimated leader.
Niels Brabandt EMBA MBA MSc
And all of that— all of that, by the way— happens as well during the end-of-year celebration. If you don't turn up there, the sign you send is, "I really couldn't care less." And if you sent the sign telling people, "Look, I don't turn up for the annual Christmas or end-of-year party," people will consider this a, "I don't care," and reciprocity kicks in, and they say, "When you don't care as a senior leader, look, I don't care either."
Niels Brabandt EMBA MBA MSc
And even if you say it's a bit of a burden, when you are on a high level of pay range, when you are in a high position in the organization, you don't turn up there. You must have a really good and well-communicated reason. Otherwise, please turn up. Because when you turn up and do what we discussed here, your company and your organization will be a better one due to your excellent contribution of leadership. And I wish you all the best putting this into your organization.
Niels Brabandt EMBA MBA MSc
And when you now say, "Oh, that's quite a bit, isn't it? I think I have, like, 28 questions." Yeah, feel free to contact me anytime. So first, when you watch me on YouTube at the moment, feel free to leave a like there. And of course, you can also just subscribe to my channel. I'm looking forward to seeing you there. And of course, leave a comment if you like. Thank you very much for doing so.
Niels Brabandt EMBA MBA MSc
If you listen to me on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, please leave a review, 5 stars. Thank you very much for doing so. We put a lot of research into this, scientific backing, research, recording. There's a ton of effort, and we offer it all free of charge. Happy to do so. If you like it, 5 stars. I much appreciate it. We received a couple of 5-star reviews recently, and I'm very happy and look forward to seeing more of these. Of course, please recommend this channel amongst friends, colleagues, anywhere you like, online, offline, social media, anywhere.
Niels Brabandt EMBA MBA MSc
And of course, you can also— and that's very important— when people say, "Look, this is a weekly thing. Do you have, like, a daily thing that reminds me of the best things in leadership?" Yes, we do. And not only me. We also have external experts who I interviewed, the so-called YouTube Shorts, which we started at the beginning of the year, because people contacted me and said, "Is there something that gives me tiny bits of 60 seconds or less, often roughly 30 to 45 seconds? What's the best in leadership?" And yes, we have that. The YouTube Shorts are the ones. You see them right here.
Niels Brabandt EMBA MBA MSc
As you see by the name, they're only available on YouTube. So it pays off not only to subscribe to the channel, but also put the tiny bell in there, because then you get a tiny notification as soon as something new is on there. Usually, there's at least one tip per day. I promised you one tip per day, so 365 this year. We are already way past this. So if you want more, we have a lot of things to come, and I'm looking forward to seeing you there. You can, of course, also follow me on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Thank you very much for doing so.
Niels Brabandt EMBA MBA MSc
And when you now say, "Well, we need someone who really helps us here, either online or on site, we need a trainer, speaker, coach, consultant, mentor, project intro manager, speaker for our event," feel free to contact me anytime. nb-networks.biz. You see what I do for a living on there. And of course, you can contact me via email anytime: nb@nb-networks.com. I'm looking forward to seeing you from there and hearing from you there so we can get in touch and see. If you only want to exchange ideas or have questions, feel free to contact me as well. It doesn't need to be a booking. I'm open for any kind of contact. Looking forward to seeing you there.
Niels Brabandt EMBA MBA MSc
And of course, if you now say, "Hey, do you have live sessions?" Yes, we do. Go to expert.nb-networks.com. Put your email address in there, because our live sessions are only communicated via the leadership letter. No exception. Only there. And no worries. It's only about content. I answer every single question you have about leadership and anything around that. And only via the leadership letter we communicate date, time, and the access link. You only receive— no worries— one email every week. Only one email. Wednesday morning, it's 100% content, ad-free guarantee, with full access to all the podcasts, articles, video casts, the live sessions, everything in there, but only via the leadership letter. We don't post this anywhere. It's only available there.
Niels Brabandt EMBA MBA MSc
And of course, feel free to connect with me on social media. Feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn. Do the proper connect. Don't do the follow thing. Properly connect with me. And of course, you can follow me on Instagram. You can, of course, leave a like on Facebook, or you subscribe to my YouTube channel. I'm looking forward to seeing you, most likely on all four. So I hope I see you all over the place there so we can be in touch at any point in time given.
Niels Brabandt EMBA MBA MSc
The final bit, of course, is always— by the way, if you contact me, no worries. I answer every single message within 24 hours or less. So if you didn't get an answer within 24 hours, probably your message ended up in spam or somewhere. Feel free to contact me anywhere else. I always answer within 24 hours. Absolutely no exception. I'm looking forward to hearing from you.
Niels Brabandt EMBA MBA MSc
The final bit is always the most important one. Apply, apply, apply what you learned in this podcast, because only when you apply what you heard, you will see the positive aspects that you obviously want to see in your organization. I wish you all the best doing so. Feel free to contact me anytime. I'm looking forward to hearing from you. And at the end of this podcast, as well as at the end of this video cast, there's only one thing left for me to say: thank you very much for your time.