Italian culture draws a sharp line between personal authority and institutional authority. People who lead through relationships, competence, and care are respected. Systems that attempt to lead through rules, processes, and impersonal mechanisms are distrusted.
If you rely on policies, procedures, and organizational structures to do your leading for you—without investing in personal engagement—Italian colleagues will comply minimally and resist quietly. They will find workarounds, they will defer to the person they trust rather than the process you designed, and they will give their real loyalty to whoever provides the personal leadership the system does not.
This does not mean systems are useless; it means systems must be animated by personal leadership to be effective. The system serves the relationship, not the other way around.
Comments