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Leadership and Hierarchy in Catalan Business Culture: What International Managers Need to Know
Catalan working culture can feel deceptively familiar to Northern European managers — until the moment it doesn’t. Understanding where hierarchy actually sits in Catalan organisations prevents the most common and costly misreading.
The first few weeks of managing a Catalan team often feel comfortable to international managers from Northern European backgrounds. Meetings are relatively informal. People use first names. There is a collegial atmosphere. The manager concludes that hierarchy is low and that the team operates like a flat, egalitarian structure.
Then something happens. A decision gets made in the meeting and nobody implements it. A concern surfaces through an unexpected channel — not from the person who was in the room, but from someone else entirely. An initiative stalls in ways that feel inexplicable given how much apparent agreement there was. The manager revises their initial assessment: this is not as flat as I thought.
Both readings are partially right. Understanding why — and what the Catalan approach to authority and hierarchy actually is — is one of the most practically important things an international manager in Catalunya can develop.
Catalan Hierarchy: Informal in Form, Real in Substance
Catalan professional culture has lower formal power distance than many of its Mediterranean neighbours. Titles are used less, physical symbols of status (reserved parking, corner offices) are less pronounced, and the cultural expectation that a senior person will be addressed with elaborate deference is weaker than in, say, French or German organisational culture.
What this informal surface conceals is that authority is still real, still expected, and still respected — it is just expressed through different mechanisms. In Catalan organisations, authority tends to be demonstrated through competence and track record rather than title alone. A manager who does not know their brief, who cannot answer the questions their team raises, or who makes commitments they cannot keep, will lose authority quickly regardless of their formal position. A manager who knows their subject deeply, delivers on commitments, and operates with visible integrity will carry genuine authority regardless of how informally they present.
Northern European managers, seeing the informal surface, conclude that Catalan teams want to be managed like egalitarian Scandinavian teams — maximum autonomy, minimal direction, flat decision-making. They give the team space and wait for self-organised progress.
What they often find is that the team is waiting for direction — not because they cannot think for themselves, but because the cultural expectation is that the manager will provide the frame within which the team operates. Autonomy within a clear frame is the Catalan default. Autonomy without a frame tends to produce uncertainty rather than initiative.
How Decisions Actually Get Made
The formal decision-making meeting in many Catalan organisations is not where decisions are primarily made — it is where decisions that have been shaped through prior conversation are confirmed and aligned around. This is not unique to Catalan culture (it is characteristic of many relationship-oriented cultures) but it is consistently misread by international managers who expect the meeting to be the place where the discussion happens.
The practical implication is that if you want genuine input from Catalan colleagues before a significant decision, you need to create the conditions for that input to arrive before the meeting — through one-to-one conversations, through informal discussion with key people, through giving the team enough notice to form views rather than arriving cold. The meeting then becomes a confirmation of a direction that has already been shaped collaboratively, rather than a debate that produces a decision in real time.
For more on how this dynamic plays out across cultures generally, the article on leadership and hierarchy across cultures covers the full egalitarian-hierarchical spectrum.
What International Managers Should Do Differently
The most effective management approach in a Catalan context is to be explicit about what you are asking for — the goal, the constraints, the timeline, the quality standard — and then give the team genuine autonomy to determine how they will get there. Do not micromanage the how. Do be clear about the what. This combination of directional clarity and operational autonomy tends to produce good performance and engaged teams in Catalan organisations.
Build informal consultation into your management practice before significant decisions. Talk to key people individually. Ask for their views directly — in a one-to-one setting where they can be honest — rather than waiting for them to volunteer their view in a group meeting where they may not. Use the meeting to align around a direction that the key people have already shaped, rather than to generate that direction in real time.
In Catalan organisational culture, a manager’s authority is significantly a function of their perceived competence. Know your subject. Answer questions accurately. When you don’t know, say so and find out rather than guessing. Make commitments you can keep and keep the commitments you make. These behaviours build the kind of authority that makes leadership in a Catalan team genuinely effective — not the authority of the title, but the authority of the person that the team can rely on.
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