Agency is trainable

Principle

Low agency is a learned reaction to a past experience that taught them that it’s not worth it to be high agency.

How to teach agency

First, let me tell you how you would do it in an idyllic world.

1. Assign one of your subordinates the smallest task requiring agency you can think of. It has to be job-related and meaningful, but it doesn’t have to be big. In fact, the smaller, the better. For example, “Find two ways we can lower our costs and verify their feasibi

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If someone has low agency, it’s usually because, in the past, having that second dialogue led to bad experiences.

You teach agency by letting your people experience that having that second dialogue leads to good outcomes.