Bridging Leadership Gaps by Addressing Generational Conditioning

Leadership quality can make or break a company’s success. After all, the way leaders in your company seek to motivate their teams directly impacts employee satisfaction and engagement, which in turn directly impacts your organization’s ability to deliver on your brand promise.

Unfortunately, with more than 75% of all employees either actively disengaged or quiet quitting, one thing is clear: most companies can and should do a better job when it comes to developing leaders—especially conscious leaders who can motivate their teams.

It’s certainly not out of a lack of desire from HR or emerging leaders. It’s also not just about hosting workshops or regular evaluations to help people improve. Candidly, those are valuable tools in the leadership skill-building toolbox, but one of the most critical aspects of developing strong leaders is overlooked far too often.

Fostering leadership skills in your organization requires helping individuals learn how to dig deeper to understand—and address—how their unconscious patterns affect their interpersonal and professional relationships and, therefore, their ability to lead. Let’s be clear—this approach to leadership isn’t about playing the blame game or shaming people for poor leadership ability. It’s about attempting to understand where these behaviors and patterns come from so you can take steps to counteract them. 

While tackling these learned behaviors, also known as Generational Conditioning, doesn’t happen overnight, adopting a “Slow and steady wins the race” approach can create lasting change.

What is Generational Conditioning? 

The process of inheriting a genetic or psychological set of beliefs, body habits (somatic patterns), and behavioral traits from our role models that influence how we see and experience the world. These behaviors often show up unconsciously, affecting decision-making, communication styles, and leadership practices.

Before we continue, let’s define “Generational Conditioning.” Generational Conditioning is the process of inheriting a genetic or psychological set of beliefs, body habits (somatic patterns), and behavioral traits from our role models that influence how we see and experience the world. These behaviors often show up unconsciously, affecting decision-making, communication styles, and leadership practices.

And because they’re ingrained with our identity, it’s often challenging to differentiate between what we’ve learned and who we are at the core. There is no dividing wall between the two, personally or professionally. I often say, “How we do one thing, is how we do everything.”

For example, if you often display controlling tendencies at home, chances are your colleagues also experience you this way. What stands between you and the leader you aspire to be is understanding how this shows up in your life and recognizing the triggers so you can make changes.

Because our generational conditioning is so ingrained in our worldview that it’s often a blindspot, yet a big one that influences how we:

•  Communicate with one another
•  Handle conflict
•  Respond to change management
•  Develop trust
•  Form relationships
•  And more…

Failing to address it is problematic because it can hamper individual career progress and organizational culture. With that in mind, truly helping leaders reach their potential requires more than acknowledging generational conditioning. We must equip them to make conscious changes—and doing so means helping them adopt a systematic, thoughtful approach.