I have written about agency before, as a big multiplier of organizational productivity. It took me years of observation to realize that the most important people on a team were those with high agency. If you were to pick a team, you want to ensure that the single unifying factor is high agency. High agency is just about getting things done, figuring it out. High Agency is about living in solution mode.
And high agency is rare. Because most people have been trained to be told what needs to be done. They always seek permission to move, permission to act. The problem with these kinds of people is that the boat will fill up with water as they wait for someone to give them a go-ahead to drain the water.
And high agency comes through practice. The more things you do, the more you learn to do even more things. Action produces most action. Movement produces more movement. You want to build an incentive system that rewards high agency, that rewards movement. Of course, punishing employees for mistakes of initiative tends to kill this culture. I meet business leaders that keep wondering why this message never gets reinforced among their teams. Well, often it’s because you’ve hired people, and you keep telling them what to do.
You don’t hire people and tell them what to do. You hire people so that they can do what needs to be done. That’s it. Hire for high agency and remove all constraints to that effect. You just want things to get done. You want an employee who will show up all drenched on a rainy day because there was a machine to be installed by a specific time. You want to hear less of why things didn’t happen and more about what was done. Companies are not in short supply of ‘news reporters’, employees that have excuses for why things were not done. Companies are in short supply of highly agentic employees. Look for high agency, and water it wherever you find it in the organization. It’s worth more than brains.