The Cultural challenge - or how to build an empowered Culture

As political environments shifts - recently in Hungary on 12.04.2026 🇭🇺🇪🇺 - corporations and conglomerates must adapt or adjust their internal culture as well. Maintaining competitiveness involves more than simply "hiring new talent," allocating funds for projects, or establishing different KPIs. External changes compel existing structures to evolve internally, fostering adaptability and competitiveness.

We - program managers we know that, change is not the natural part of people and not in highly hierarchic systems. Change starts in our minds - when we would like to understand the rational behind processes, to check the measures which helps to deliver the strategy, to understand how to connect operational activities with different internal intentions reflecting external/macro environment to deliver strategy. After our mind understand the challenges, we should create motivation - externally but better if we have internally - what is our intrinsic motivation. The challenge usually here is the resistance, the low moral and sometimes the adaptive capacity of the over-utilized workforce.

But how to start? Let's begin with a ✅ psychological safety - to develop an empowered project culture, the project environment should promote mutual trust among stakeholders and the project team members. There should be full clarity on individual roles, responsibilities, team agreements, and guiding processes - rules. In psychological safety - employees feel safe to express dissenting opinion which elevates more perspectives - which helps to better identify risks. Early detection of flawed assumptions results higher-quality strategic decisions. Innovation requires experimentation and experimentation includes failure too. Sharing ideas without fear, constructively challenge the processes - accelerating iteration cycles elevates innovation and helps to get faster time-to-market. In psychological safety helps employees feel values and respected which creates higher retention and employee engagement. Better risk management and compliance because employees will more likely not to hide problems, they will flag ethical concerns, and report compliance risks. Psychological safety removes hierarchical and silo barriers, it encourages cross-functional dialogue, it improves alignment between business and ICT, it reduces internal frictions. Overall psychological safety is not a soft concept, it is a performance enabler that directly impacts revenue growth, cost reduction and risk mitigation too.

The second point is ✅ proactivity - which helps project managers to align on Scope, Backlog, Timeline, Budget, Risk and creating plans for know or unknown future challenges. The importance is to reach that level of collaboration when people do not fear to speak up, they empowered enough to share information - in an optimistic way.

Leaders can help to facilitate this, and usually PM brings questions, provides direction, designs experiments, celebrates progress - discovery - learning, asks employees to take bold risks, seeks to please the customer or clients.

✅ Psychological Safety

✅ Proactive collaboration

✅ Diversity

✅ Inclusion - interpersonal skills

✅ Sustainability

The third point is ✅ diversity. A team can be diverse in different ways. A diverse project team can enrich the project environment to create a more inclusive space by bringing together different perspectives. In a global economy, the project team may compromise internal organizational staff, contracted contributors, volunteers, or external third parties. Some project team members may also be brought in for a short term to work on a specific deliverable. Incorporating these key members into a project team may seeks to harness it constructively fosters an atmosphere where conflicts can be managed efficiently.

In my view ✅ inclusion is the usage of our interpersonal skills. Project team members should develop or own a set of interpersonal skills such as initiative, integrity, honesty, collaboration, respect, empathy, and confidence. These competencies and perspectives assist teams in adjusting to the tasks and on another. Coupled with an active involvement of stakeholders from inception to completion, these competencies pave the way for success.

Last but not least I think without ✅ sustainability the earlier points do not work. The change works if the values are owned by the Leaders of the company, and represents them as their own values. (respect, ownership, care, accountability are fundamental values) They should become a role model, they should have intrinsic motivation to keep these values - to elevate the culture. We know that internal and external company communication do their job really well, to create buzzwords which shows a certain picture about a company, but in reality the fluctuation is above than 30% year on year in Hungarian subsidiaries. Creating a picture or work with proud-motivated employees is a very big difference. The cultural change is a differentiator and also a performance accelerator for a company.

Where to say NO, if you want to change/improve the company culture:

❌ Power distance - Say no to power distance because it keeps the silos in your company! This concept of cross-cultural management introduced by Geert Hofstede - and he described how much inequality in power and authority is accepted within an organization or society. Meaning less powerful employees accept herarchical order and avoiding to connect with Leaders - this is questioning their authority and limiting the upward feedback. In these organizations employees tend to avoid challenging leaders and their concepts - visions.

❌ Threatening - Avoid making threats, as your employees may quickly resign and begin working elsewhere by the next day. They might also build legal cases against your company if evidence arises. This is a major warning sign in a company. 🚩 Many leaders experience burnout and operate in toxic environments, leading them to make significant, unnoticed mistakes. This basic reflex shows that Leadership is weak, and they do not understand the rational behind the changes.

❌ Disrespecting others - Say no disrespectful behaviors because it kills the moral, and also destructing the company reputation in seconds! This is a clear sign when your strategy misses the belief system and boundary system. This impolite behavior is very rare but it can happen easily with young employees with overconfidence empowered with offensive behavior. Articulating the values and ethical norms are the baseline of every company and a clear leadership responsibility to intervene. If leadership does not intervene, employees are leaving the boat in short term.

❌ Humiliating - Say no to humiliation, because intelligent employees will not tolerate the creation of fear. Disrespecting others are not tolerated and this is just improving the fluctiation of your workforce.

❌ Internal Agent issue - Say no to internal agent issue - this can be one of a common behavior in incumbent and hierarchical organizations because of the institutional conditions - or in other words the conflict of interest (COI). This issue can stay under the water for a long time. In some companies, especially in highly hierarchical companies, sometimes the brakes and counterweights / boundary systems are weak or partially missing. This a leadership responsibility and a strategic issue. This issue can be explored with cross checking tenders, empowering controlling departments and strenghtening internal rules. With clear vision, mission and strategy it is easy to check strategically and financially if something or somebody is an outlier. Weak rules creates exceptions, which can be rationalized easily. Create smart rules which improves the competition.

❌ Preferred selection - Say no to preferred selection. Preferred selection (i.e., pre-selecting a supplier/vendor before a competitive process) often weakens outcomes because it reduces competition, transparency, and leverage, which are the core drivers of value in procurement. It is reducing the competitive pressure, when a supplier is preferred - other vendors may not participate seriously or withdraw entirely, or the preferred vendor faces less prices and innovation pressure. The result is higher costs and weaker proposals in procurement. In a competitive process Vendors sharpen pricing and differentiate on quality, delivery, and innovation. With preferred selection the chosen vendor has no incentive to optimize the offer fully, so owner is going to risk missing better technical or commercial solutions. Preferred selection introduces confirmation bias, perceived unfairness among bidders, potential reputational or compliance concerns. The situation especially critial in regulated sectors. It creates weaker negotiation position - because negotiation becomes one-sided and supplier knows they are the likely winner. Its limiting the innovation, because it narrows exposure to one vendor's thinking - limiting alternative approches, new technologies, process improvements. It improves the governance and compliance risks - because procurement require fair, auditable competition. Preferred selection can violate internal governance frameworks, and it can trigger audit findings or legal challenges. Preferred selection can make sense in time-critical situations (incident recovery), highly specialized vendors (limited market), strategic partnerships with proven perfomance, continuation of existing systems (high switching cost) even these examples we use benchmarking or shadow competition. Competition creates value. Preferred selection tends to erode cost efficiency, quality, and fairness, unless carefully governed and justified.

❌ Power distance

❌ Threatening

❌ Disrespecting others

❌ Humiliating

❌ Internal Agent issue

❌ Preferred selection

Dear leaders, dear managers there are quality minimums in corporate culture. If these minimums are not respected, it creates cognitive dissonance, emotional activation, (frustration, anger, insecurity, anxiety) and defense mechanisms. But when empowered culture is the goal it creates motivated, positive and empowered solution seekers. The difference is huge, which can elevate or destroy a company. It is always on you - which side you stand - but it is your responsibility to elevate or destroy.

God bless you!,

Peter