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Working with Catalans: How Decision-Making Really Works in Catalan Business Culture
Meetings may feel aligned, discussions may appear productive — and yet decisions remain unclear or delayed. In Catalan business culture, this is a feature, not a bug. Here’s how decision-making actually works.
Decision-making is one of the most common sources of friction in cross-cultural business. Meetings may feel productive, discussions may appear aligned, and yet outcomes remain unclear or delayed. In most cases, this is not a performance issue — it is a cultural one.
Catalan business culture has a specific approach to decision-making that is frequently misread by international professionals operating in or with Catalan organisations. Understanding it does not mean adopting it — but it does mean being able to work with it rather than constantly against it.
Where Catalan Culture Sits on the Decision-Making Spectrum
Erin Meyer’s research positions cultures on a spectrum from consensual to top-down decision-making. Catalan business culture sits in the middle of this spectrum — leaning toward consensus within specific circles, but with clearer authority structures than, say, Swedish or Dutch culture. Decisions are rarely made by senior figures unilaterally — there is an expectation of consultation and discussion. But they are also rarely made by broad democratic consensus. They are made by the people with authority, after sufficient discussion, when the conditions feel right.
The “when the conditions feel right” element is where international professionals most often get stuck. The conditions include relationship — trust between the parties involved in the decision — and context — sufficient shared understanding of the situation. A decision that arrives before these conditions are met will often stall or be quietly revisited, not because of obstruction, but because the cultural prerequisites haven’t been satisfied.
The Role of Informal Process
In Catalan organisations, significant decisions are typically shaped through informal conversations before they are formalised in meetings. The meeting is often not where the decision is made — it is where a decision that has been built through prior conversation is confirmed and aligned around. Walking into a meeting expecting to make a significant decision from scratch, without prior informal engagement with the key people, is likely to produce a meeting that ends inconclusively.
International managers in Catalan organisations frequently complain that decisions take too long and that meetings produce discussion without resolution. When we look more closely, the pattern is almost always the same: the manager is trying to make decisions in the meeting that the Catalan participants need to make through informal consultation first.
The fix is not to push harder in the meeting. It is to invest in the pre-meeting conversations that create the conditions for the meeting to produce a decision.
How Authority and Seniority Work
Despite the consultative approach to decision formation, authority is real in Catalan business culture. Senior people’s views carry significant weight, and a decision that the most senior person in the room appears to support is much more likely to be accepted than one that doesn’t have that implicit endorsement. This creates a dynamic that can be confusing for international professionals from more egalitarian cultures — the discussion feels open and collaborative, but the senior person’s view is shaping the outcome more than the open discussion suggests.
Understanding this means paying attention not just to what is said in meetings, but to how the senior person responds — their body language, their questions, their level of engagement. And it means ensuring that any significant proposal has been discussed with the relevant senior figures before the formal meeting, rather than relying on the meeting to persuade them.
What International Professionals Can Do
Before any significant decision meeting with Catalan colleagues, have individual conversations with the key people involved. Share your thinking, ask for theirs, listen carefully. These conversations do two things: they give you genuine insight into where people stand, and they give Catalan colleagues the consultative process they need to feel ready to make a decision in the formal meeting.
Extended discussion in Catalan business culture is often not delay — it is the process through which decisions get built to a quality that makes implementation reliable. Pushing for faster decisions without the discussion may produce a faster apparent decision and a slower actual implementation, as the lack of genuine buy-in reveals itself after the fact.
Is this a decision-making meeting, an information-sharing meeting, or a consultation? Stating this explicitly at the start removes ambiguity and helps Catalan colleagues engage with the right expectations. “I’d like to make a decision on X today — here’s what I’m proposing and why” creates a very different meeting from one that starts with open-ended discussion and hopes a decision will emerge.
For the broader context on how Catalan business culture shapes professional relationships, the first article in this series — Working with Catalans: A Practical Guide — covers the foundations. And for international professionals navigating specific decision-making challenges in Catalan organisations, cross-cultural coaching and advisory provides direct support from Barcelona.
Navigating decisions in a Catalan organisation?
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