Landing in Hungary

LandingPad · Field notes on executive transitions · №1

There is a moment — usually in the third or fourth week — when a newly appointed executive in Hungary realises that the company they were hired to lead is not quite the company they were shown. The strategy is the same. The numbers are the same. What has quietly shifted is everything that was never written down.

A modern city skyline showcasing diverse architecture.

I tend to watch this moment from the corner of the room, where coaches usually sit. It looks like mild surprise, sometimes like something closer to panic. And it is almost never about competence. The person in front of me can read a balance sheet in their sleep. What they cannot yet read is the room.

After enough of these landings, a few patterns repeat. I offer them not as rules — Hungary is far too contradictory for rules — but as things I keep noticing.

The org chart is a polite fiction

The formal hierarchy will tell you who signs off. It will not tell you who decides. Real authority here runs along older, quieter channels: the engineer who has been with the firm for twenty years, the assistant everyone trusts, the founder’s former classmate on the board. New leaders who manage the chart and overlook the channels spend their first half-year puzzled that approved decisions keep mysteriously stalling.

Silence is a full sentence

Hungarians are high-context communicators — we say a great deal without saying it outright, and we assume the listener is clever enough to catch it. A Hungarian team that disagrees with you will rarely announce it in the meeting. They will say it afterwards, in the corridor, to one another. An executive trained to treat “no objections” as “agreement” mistakes courtesy for consensus. The disagreement was there. It simply wasn’t addressed to them.

Trust comes before the task, not after it

In much of Western corporate life, you earn trust by delivering results. In Hungary, you more often earn the right to deliver by first becoming someone worth trusting. This inverts the usual sequence and unsettles leaders who arrived with a hundred-day plan and a quarterly clock. The unhurried coffee before the meeting is not a delay before the real work. For your Hungarian colleagues, it often is the real work.

The returning Hungarian is not coming home

Some of the hardest transitions I see belong to the returning diaspora — Hungarians who left at twenty-two and come back at forty-five, fluent in global method and, to their own surprise, rusty in the local code. Everyone assumes they will be fine; they speak the language, after all. But re-entry into a culture you once left is its own kind of foreign posting, and the absence of any obvious difference makes the real differences far harder to name.

Founders don’t retire — they relocate

In Hungary’s first-generation family businesses, now reaching their great handover, the founder rarely disappears. They step back from the title but not from the emotional centre of the company. (I have written elsewhere about the Chief Emotional Officer — usually the mother — who quietly holds that centre.) An incoming executive who treats the succession as a clean swap of one leader for another has misread the most important relationship in the building.

The organisation rarely sees any of this while it is happening. It surfaces around month six, in a phrase I have heard in a good many HR offices — he isn’t quite landing, she hasn’t really settled in — usually offered with a small shrug, as though it were weather. By then the assignment has been running long enough that correcting it costs a great deal more than anticipating it would have.

None of this is a Hungarian flaw to be corrected. It is a system with its own internal logic, shaped by a particular history — decades of having to read between official lines, of trusting people more readily than institutions. The executives who land well here are not the ones who arrive with the strongest plan. They are the ones who arrive curious, and who treat the first months as fieldwork rather than performance.

I think about this best over coffee, which in Hungary is small, strong, and taken sitting down — slowly, with someone, rarely alone at a desk. An executive who learns to do that one thing well has already understood more about landing here than any onboarding deck could teach.

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If you have someone landing in Hungary this autumn — or someone who landed six months ago and hasn’t quite — I’d be glad to hear how it’s going. Reply and tell me.

Márta Farkas   ·   LandingPad, executive integration