The hidden impact of leadership behavior on Gen Z teams

I once had a marketing lead who was slowly disengaging—not in any obvious or dramatic way. She still met deadlines, still turned in decent work, still showed up to meetings. But the spark was gone. There were no more proactive ideas, no cross-functional pushes, no energy in the room when she spoke. I chalked it up to burnout, maybe just a rough quarter. It wasn’t until her junior—fresh, eager, straight out of university—began showing the exact same signs that I realized what was really happening. The younger team member didn’t stop caring on her own. She was taking cues. And her cue was her manager. This wasn’t an isolated case of disengagement. It was a ripple effect. And it started with me.

Founders often believe that leadership is about pushing forward. We tell ourselves that if we build the product, close the funding, and hire fast enough, the culture will hold. But culture doesn’t scale off documents or all-hands decks. It scales off what people imitate when they’re unsure. And younger workers, especially those early in their careers, are watching more closely than anyone else. Not because they’re trying to critique, but because they’re trying to calibrate: What matters here? What behaviors get rewarded? What feels emotionally safe to say out loud?

In early-stage startups, the team is small, and the distance between the founder and a junior hire is often one or two layers, max. That means every micro-behavior ripples. If I skip a 1-on-1 without context, the team learns that consistency is optional. If I ignore a mistake instead of naming it constructively, the team learns to avoid conflict. If I celebrate late-night grinds with silent admiration instead of reinforcing healthy pacing, the team learns that overwork is valorized—even if I say otherwise in our onboarding manual. This is the part that most founders miss. Younger workers are not being “entitled” when they disengage or hesitate. They are responding to patterns. Not once-off events. Patterns.

When you’re early in your career, you don’t have a deep backlog of work experiences to compare against. You are building your sense of what’s normal—what’s professional, what’s encouraged, what’s worth raising your hand for—based on your immediate surroundings. You are learning how leadership works not from what your boss says, but from how they behave. In this environment, every leadership behavior carries outsized influence. That’s the leadership ripple effect.

The idea itself isn’t new. Leaders have always set the tone. But what’s changed is how much weight that tone carries for a generation that came into adulthood during instability, pandemic-era loss, and institutional breakdown. Gen Z is the most skeptical, value-driven workforce we’ve ever seen. They don't expect leadership to be perfect, but they expect it to be legible. And the easiest way they evaluate whether they can trust a workplace is by watching how leaders act when things go wrong.

One moment I’ll never forget was when we were behind on a major product rollout. We were up against a funding milestone, and I was trying to maintain optimism without feeding false promises. During a sprint review, I emphasized resilience and grit. It sounded good in my head—something about bouncing back, about the power of showing up under pressure. But no one spoke. The room was quiet. Cameras off. Eyes cast down. I asked if anyone had feedback, and someone messaged me privately on Slack later that day. She wrote: “It felt like we weren’t allowed to name the stress.” That line haunted me. Because I thought I was motivating the team. But what they experienced was performance pressure. What they heard wasn’t “we’ll get through this.” It was: “If you can’t push through quietly, maybe you don’t belong here.”

I had modeled emotional suppression. That was never my intention. But the ripple had already reached them.

The hardest part about being a founder is realizing that everything you do, consciously or not, becomes part of the operating manual for your team. And your youngest team members are the most attuned to these signals. They haven't learned to shrug off hypocrisy or rationalize executive inconsistency. They are still deciding whether leadership is worth trusting. Whether this is a place they can grow. Whether their voice matters or if they should just fall in line.

The leadership ripple effect can work in your favor—but only if you’re willing to do the inner work first. It starts with taking inventory of your unspoken behaviors. Do you cancel check-ins with junior staff more than senior team members? Do you reward visibility over impact? Do you speak calmly about failure in public but privately react with urgency and anxiety? These inconsistencies, no matter how small, become amplified across generational lines. And once the pattern is set, undoing it requires more than a town hall or a reorg. It requires modeling a different way of being.

What shifted for me wasn’t a single “aha” moment. It was a series of small course corrections. I began naming my own moments of uncertainty in meetings. I started offering narrative around decisions instead of just announcing them. I said things like, “I was wrong about that timeline—I pushed too fast without enough context,” or “I realized I’ve been responding with impatience lately, and I want to fix that.” These weren’t confessions. They were signals. And they changed the tone of the room.

Younger team members began raising ideas again. Some even challenged assumptions in planning meetings—politely, but firmly. One product associate, who had never spoken up in two quarters of meetings, asked during roadmap review, “Are we building this because it’s what users want, or because it’s what leadership wants to see?” That question would’ve felt like an attack six months earlier. Now it felt like the most honest moment of clarity we’d had as a team.

That’s when I knew the ripple was shifting.

Founders often feel pressure to maintain an image of composure, vision, and decisiveness. And yes, those things matter. But in a team setting, what matters more is what you make safe. Younger workers don’t need you to be a hero. They need to know that mistakes won’t get them quietly benched. That rest is a right, not a reward. That saying “I’m not sure” won’t cost them opportunities. And the only way they learn that is if they see you doing it first.

Leadership, especially in a startup, isn’t about charisma. It’s about system design. And the system is culture. If you model reactivity, your team will default to silence. If you model overwork, your team will learn that boundaries are performative. If you model quiet repair, thoughtful reflection, and shared responsibility, your team will internalize those values too. They will act in ways that reinforce—not contradict—your intended culture.

What I’ve learned is that younger workers crave alignment. They want to believe in where they work. They want to be challenged, included, and taken seriously. But none of that is possible if the signals they receive are contradictory. You can’t say “this is a place for innovation” while shooting down new ideas in the name of speed. You can’t say “we value wellness” while sending Slack messages at 11pm. You can’t say “you belong here” while only rewarding voices that sound like yours.

The ripple effect means that your leadership isn’t just what you say—it’s what others absorb and reflect back, often in ways you won’t see until much later. By then, you’ll be facing disengagement, misalignment, or attrition—and wondering where it started. It started with you.

And so the invitation to founders is this: become aware of your ripple. Watch how your presence—or absence—shapes what others believe they’re allowed to do. Reflect on what behaviors you accidentally glorify, and what patterns you’ve allowed to settle into the team’s bones. Leadership isn’t the story you tell yourself about the kind of founder you are. It’s the experience your team has when you’re not in the room.

Especially for younger workers, your behavior becomes the blueprint for what is acceptable, what is admirable, and what is survivable. You can’t fake that. You can’t scale that through words alone. You have to show it. You have to model it. You have to live it when it’s hard—not just when it’s convenient.

There’s no leadership off-switch. Your choices ripple. Your silences ripple. Your tone in crisis ripples. So choose them with care. And if you want to lead a team that thinks for itself, challenges ideas, and shows up with heart, then you need to be the kind of leader that shows what it means to be real, responsive, and human.

That’s the ripple effect worth building.