After more than 35 years of coaching leaders, Pam Manfredo Curtis has come to believe that some of the most consequential workplace habits begin long before anyone enters a workplace. Her book, The Origin of a Leader: Transforming Family Patterns into Leadership Power, explores how early experiences can shape adult behavior. The leadership question is what happens after a person recognizes the pattern: Can they change what colleagues experience?

Curtis has interviewed thousands of leaders about their childhoods and compared their accounts with assessments, feedback and behavior at work. She sees recurring connections in how people respond to authority, handle disagreement, seek approval and protect themselves. A leader who learned that disagreement threatened a relationship, for example, may avoid a necessary conversation decades later.

She estimates that childhood may account for as much as 80% of how someone shows up as a leader, but is careful about what that figure means. “That figure reflects my judgment from more than 35 years of coaching, rather than a controlled research finding,” she said. Temperament and later experiences matter, too. Her point is that people spend years observing and practicing ways of relating to others before those habits acquire the label leadership style.

That history can become visible when a response seems out of proportion to the event that prompted it. A question about a proposal brings on humiliation. A disagreement creates an urgent need to prove oneself. Curtis encourages leaders to examine both what happened and what they made it mean. As she put it, “Your colleague may be asking a reasonable question, while you are hearing the voice of a parent who never thought you were good enough.”