.... Learned Survival?
I come from generations shaped by oppression and suppression.
British colonial rule.
Indentured labour.
Apartheid South Africa.
For generations, survival depended on understanding power.
Stay quiet.
Do not challenge authority.
Do not attract attention.
Know your place.
Protect your livelihood.
Endure.
These behaviours were not weakness.
They were survival strategies.
Oppression shaped the system.
Suppression shaped the behaviour.
Research led by Dr Rachel Yehuda on Holocaust survivors found that trauma responses and survival conditioning can pass across generations long after oppressive systems officially end.
The systems may disappear.
The behaviours often remain.
Then one day you enter the workplace and notice something uncomfortable.
The systems may look different.
Many of the behaviours do not.
Who feels safe speaking.
Who stays silent.
Who protects hierarchy.
Who fears authority.
Who learns politics before truth.
Who is labelled difficult.
Who gets heard.
Who gets ignored.
Many corporate environments speak about inclusion and belonging.
But people do not feel belonging when truth feels dangerous.
They feel belonging when they can speak, challenge, contribute and disagree without fear of humiliation, exclusion or career consequences.
Oppression rarely survives through force alone.
It survives through conditioning.
People who were silenced sometimes silence others.
People denied opportunity sometimes gatekeep access.
People shaped by fear sometimes lead through control.
Not because they are cruel.
Because survival behaviours left unexamined often become leadership behaviours.
Harvard professor Amy Edmondson’s research on psychological safety showed that people remain silent in environments where speaking up carries social or career risk.
Silence at work is not always disengagement.
Sometimes it is conditioning.
That is why leadership is not simply about performance.
It is about awareness.
Because if leaders do not examine the systems that shaped them, they risk carrying old oppression into modern workplaces under new language.
The strongest leaders are not the ones who protect hierarchy at all costs.
They are the ones who create environments where truth no longer feels dangerous.
Because oppression does not always arrive loudly.
Sometimes it arrives quietly through fear, silence, politics and the learned belief that survival matters more than voice.
Linda Reddy