How you lead shapes generations
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I was 14 years and nine months old when I started working at McDonald's. It was my first step into the working world and starts don't get much better than a business that has spent decades perfecting how it trains people, markets itself, and develops leaders from the counter up.
The restaurant was run by a man named Philip. He knew the store inside and out, and he knew that his mostly teenage workforce was the thing keeping it running. What I remember most, on reflection, was his patience. Every process at McDonald's is spelled out to the letter, but Philip understood that a process on a laminated card and a 14-year-old learning it under pressure are two different things. He would still be encouraging, still be good humoured, five hours into an understaffed shift when everyone around him had long since stopped smiling.
At the time I didn't think of it as leadership. I thought of it as a job. But something was being imprinted in my mind that I wouldn't recognise for years: people learn differently, and it's on you to adapt how you bring them along, not on them to catch up to your preferred method. It's the lesson of Philip's I've used most, as a CEO and as a parent, decades after my last shift in the drive-thru.
He wasn't the only one
My first platoon sergeant in the Army, Sergeant Parry, led the same way in a completely different environment: clear, exacting standards, and well humoured under pressure.
When I left the military for a bank, an industrial relations man named Tony taught me to think about people and conflict in a way I hadn't been taught before. Different uniforms, different stakes, same underlying pattern. Somewhere along the way I'd started noticing it, then looking for it, then trying to build it myself.
Here's what I've seen less discussed. I've also worked for managers who were narcissistic, insecure, or simply never equipped for the responsibility they'd been handed. I didn't ask to learn from them, and I wouldn't choose to repeat what they modelled. But I'd be lying if I said none of it stuck. When I'm tired, or under real pressure, I can occasionally feel the ghost of a bad manager surface in how I respond to someone, before I catch it and course correct.
How we lead has a long tail
And it doesn't only carry forward the parts worth keeping. It carries all of it, and the parts you didn't choose are often the ones that come to the surface under stress.
This isn't front of mind for most leaders when it comes to their own development. They measure their leadership by what it produces in a year or during their tenure. They rarely stop to consider that the behaviours they model don't stay contained to the walls of their organisation.
The people who choose to follow you at work, and the people in your own family, will carry forward small pieces of how you led and how you related to them, whether you intend it or not. Some of what they carry will be Philip. Some of it will be whoever your version of the bad manager was. You don't get to pick only one.
While this essay sounds like the opening to a memoir, it's really an observation, and one worth taking seriously: leadership was never only an organisational act. It's a generational one. Your habits and behaviours, whether you built them deliberately or absorbed them without noticing, are the raw material someone else is quietly seeing and copying. It could be a direct report, a protégé, or someone at home. They're not waiting for your best day to learn from you. They're learning from your Tuesday.
And that encoding will be passed on to people you and I will never meet, and in the generations to follow.
So, the question isn't whether you're having an impact beyond the numbers. You already are. The question is which version of yourself is being copied right now, and what that person will be leading, or raising, 20 years from now because of it.
That's all for this week. See you next Wednesday.
Phil Hayes-St Clair
PS If this essay helped, Episode 233: What CEOs discover when they get a coach from my podcast is worth a listen. Tune in on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.
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