First Names for Everyone, Except When They Aren't: Hierarchy in Finland and Kenya

🇫🇮 Finland · 🇰🇪 Kenya

By Priya Mehta, The Global Office

In Finland, it is entirely normal for an intern to grab coffee with the CEO and call them by their first name without a second thought — Hofstede's data puts the country at a power distance score of just 33, among the flattest hierarchies measured anywhere, a culture that historically never built the large feudal power structures that produce steep organizational pyramids elsewhere. In Kenya, that same intern addressing a CEO by first name unprompted would likely read as a genuine breach of etiquette — East Africa's Hofstede power distance cluster sits at 64, nearly double Finland's, and Kenyan workplace guides consistently note that consulting lower-ranking staff on decisions is often considered unnecessary, even inappropriate, precisely because supervisors are assumed to have earned their position through superior experience. Neither approach is more "professional" than the other. They are simply optimized for opposite failure modes.

Do's & Don'ts

🇫🇮 Finland

🇰🇪 Kenya

Finland's flat structure isn't merely a stylistic preference — it's a genuinely load-bearing part of how work gets done. Managers are expected to lead through competence and clear communication rather than positional authority, employees are trusted to run their own projects without close supervision, and the entire system depends on people actually speaking up in meetings regardless of rank, because a Finnish organization that relied on top-down direction the way a steeper hierarchy does would functionally stall — no one at the top is positioned to make every call alone, nor expected to. This connects directly to Finland's famously direct communication style: if your structure depends on everyone voicing real opinions, indirectness becomes a systemic liability rather than a social nicety, which is part of why Finns are known for simply saying what they think.

Kenya's steeper hierarchy is likewise load-bearing, just for a different set of goals. With power flowing top-down and consultation with junior staff often considered genuinely unnecessary rather than merely undesirable, decisions move faster in a crisis and accountability is unambiguous — everyone knows whose call it ultimately was. This coexists with something Western hierarchy models don't always predict: a described paternalistic warmth, where managers are expected to show real personal interest in the people they lead, and where, per multiple business-culture guides, "Kenyans do not have a clear demarcation between business and personal relationships" — colleagues become friends, and friends become business partners, often in that order. The cultural concept of Harambee — literally "pulling together," a term embedded deeply enough in national identity that it appears on Kenya's coat of arms — reframes hierarchy not as domination but as a structure for collective effort, with the boss's authority legitimized partly by their role in organizing that collective pull rather than by title alone.

The reckoning: Finland's flatness demands that you generate your own direction and speak up without being invited to; Kenya's hierarchy demands that you show visible respect for direction that's handed down and raise disagreement through private, relationship-preserving channels rather than open challenge. A newly arrived Finnish manager transplanted into a Kenyan team who waits for staff to volunteer opinions unprompted will get silence, not consensus. A newly arrived Kenyan manager transplanted into a Finnish team who expects deference and unquestioned execution will get pushback, not efficiency. Both are correctly reading their home culture's signals — the trouble starts only when you assume the other country's employees are reading the same signals you are.

The Part the Brochure Left Out

Quora — Answering "what is it like working in Finland as a black foreigner," one respondent described the flat hierarchy and directness as generally positive once inside a company, but noted that simply getting hired in the first place was a much harder and more opaque process than the egalitarian internal culture would suggest — a split between "Finland is fair once you're in" and "getting in is its own separate battle."

Quora — Someone asking how hard it is to find a job in Nairobi got the blunt reply that Kenyan job-hunting is "hard and then again it is not" — success depends heavily on personal networks and demonstrated skill rather than formal process alone, a dynamic several other commenters tied directly to how relationship-driven Kenyan workplaces are once you're inside them too.

Expat.com (Helsinki guide) — A guide to corporate culture in Helsinki highlighted that CEOs at some companies hold informal coffee chats open to any employee regardless of rank, but cautioned newcomers that this informality is not an invitation to skip genuine substance in meetings — Finnish colleagues expect first-name casualness to be matched with real, well-prepared contributions, not treated as license for a more relaxed standard of preparation.

K24 Digital (Kenyan lifestyle outlet) — A piece on what makes Kenyan work culture "both remarkable and exhausting" described the constant blending of personal and professional obligation — checking in on a colleague's family, attending life events, informal financial support networks among coworkers — as both a genuine source of workplace warmth and a real source of fatigue for employees who never quite clock fully out of their professional relationships.

Conclusion

If you're moving to Finland, practice having an opinion and saying it plainly — the flat structure isn't being generous by asking, it's structurally depending on you to fill the space. If you're moving to Kenya, practice patience with top-down decisions and invest genuinely in the relationship side of the job, because the hierarchy there isn't cold bureaucracy, it's a different, and in its own way more personal, way of organizing trust. Neither system is waiting for you to fix it — they're both waiting for you to learn which questions are actually yours to ask.