Polish companies are entering a period of profound transformation. For years, management was built on hierarchy, control, and authority derived from position. Managers gave orders, employees followed them, and effectiveness was often associated with strength, decisiveness, and the ability to maintain discipline. This model, however, is losing its effectiveness at an accelerating pace.
The era of feudal management is coming to an end. Younger generations are increasingly unwilling to accept cultures based on fear, distance, and submission. They expect meaningful work, partnership-based communication, authenticity, influence, and respect. Generation Z is often labeled as entitled, but a more accurate term might be assertive. These are people who say “no” more quickly, ask “why?”, and refuse to function in cultures where everyone pretends that everything is fine.
At the same time, two worlds are colliding. On one side are managers raised in a culture of hard work, loyalty, and promotion through obedience. On the other are young people shaped by the realities of TikTok, UGC, Discord, memes, and online communities. This is also the world of Łatwogang, which at first glance may have attracted audiences through distance, absurd humor, or provocative form, yet ultimately proved to be an exceptionally effective leader of online mobilization. Its charity livestream demonstrated a level of influence many formal leaders can only dream of: enormous audience engagement, social mobilization, and the ability to gather people around an important cause.
This is not merely a youth culture curiosity.
It is a signal that authority, influence, and the ability to mobilize people are increasingly emerging outside traditional structures. A leader can now be someone who understands the language of communities, audience emotions, internet culture, and the need for participation. For managers, this is an important lesson: influence can no longer be imposed through position alone. It must be built through authenticity, credibility, relationships, and the ability to inspire people around a meaningful goal.
These shifts are unfolding alongside artificial intelligence, pressure for results, hybrid work, a crisis of trust, information overload, and geopolitical uncertainty. Today’s leaders are expected to make decisions faster, yet more wisely. They are expected to set high standards without becoming oppressive. They must understand technology without losing sight of people. They are expected to build efficiency while simultaneously ensuring psychological safety.
Neurodiversity is also becoming an increasingly significant challenge. ADHD, autism spectrum conditions, high sensitivity, and different styles of concentration, communication, and stress response are no longer treated as private matters, but as part of everyday management. Leaders can no longer assume that everyone works, learns, and stays motivated in the same way.
An interesting analogy can be found in the world of IT and cybersecurity. There, effectiveness does not come from believing a system is perfect, but from continuously searching for errors, vulnerabilities, and risks. Management today requires a similar mindset. Effective leaders should recognize weak signals, anticipate tensions, and protect organizations against problems that have not yet occurred.
Meanwhile, the Polish management model still often promotes the belief that a good manager should be a superhero: strong, resilient, omniscient, always available, and always in control. This model is increasingly failing. In a world of complexity, success no longer belongs to leaders who pretend to know everything, but to those who can build organizations resilient to mistakes, ready to learn, and capable of speaking honestly about what is not working.
The most important question today is therefore no longer: “How do we motivate employees?” A more relevant question is whether Polish managers are capable of building authority in a world that no longer accepts feudal management. Can they ask the right questions, reach the core of problems, examine them critically, and continuously diagnose them? Are they ready to acknowledge that effective leadership is no longer about delivering quick and simple answers, but about understanding complexity that cannot be reduced to old frameworks?
This challenge concerns not only companies, but also business schools. If the world of management is changing so profoundly, managerial education cannot remain limited to repeating outdated lessons on motivation, communication, and leadership. Business schools should address these issues far more boldly in their curricula: artificial intelligence, geopolitics, neurodiversity, new generations of employees, the crisis of trust, leadership under uncertainty, and organizational resilience management.
Geopolitics and understanding the interdependence between countries, markets, institutions, and cultures are becoming especially important. The world has become smaller and now operates like a system of interconnected vessels. Political decisions, regional conflicts, regulatory changes, migration crises, supply chains, technological transformation, and social tensions in one country rapidly affect business strategies in other parts of the world. Managers who fail to understand these interdependencies may still handle day-to-day operations efficiently, but they will become increasingly unprepared to anticipate risks and make strategic decisions.
Companies that understand this transformation more quickly will gain greater trust, lower employee turnover, better use of talent, stronger innovation capacity, and greater resilience to crises. Those that remain attached to the old model will increasingly lose people, engagement, and the ability to adapt to reality.
The new model of leadership is not about leaders knowing everything. It is about their ability to ask the right questions, diagnose problems wisely, and take action when no one has simple answers.
