High Agency: Quality that Sets Leaders Who Win From Those Who Whine Apart

High agency is such an elusive trait in life and one that profoundly impacts your success at work. Undeniably high agency is important at every step of the career, but it’s even more crucial as you ascend the ladder and take up a leadership position in an organization. 

Leaders are required to make tough decisions without accurate information. They need to deal with high pressure situations that require them to think clearly and make trade-offs. They need to look past the obstacles, evaluate their circumstances, reflect on the challenges and opportunities they are confronted with on a daily basis, make creative decisions and act in ways that open opportunities that didn’t seem possible earlier. 

They are required to make the best use of resources to create solutions to problems and to drive forward an agenda. None of this would be possible without exercising their agency. 

For a leader, vision and ability aren’t differentiating factors anymore. An ambitious vision for the future only sets the direction. It’s the high agency that gives life to that vision and makes it possible. It’s the high agency that sets a leader apart. 

Once a leader learns to recognize and cultivate it, high agency turns into their secret weapon for leadership effectiveness. 

Leaders with high agency are known to practice the 3 R’s:

• Relentless: They are relentless in the face of adversity.
• Resourcefulness: They know how to leverage their resources to turn adversity into opportunity.
• Resilience: They do not let minor disappointments turn into major setbacks.

Take Steve Jobs for example who was known for his reality distortion field – his ability to push himself and others to do the impossible. He believed more in his own agency – his power to change and effect things – than relying on conventional wisdom or other people’s opinions. 

The best example of him practicing high agency comes during the development of Macintosh computers in 1984. Jobs asked Larry Kenyon, an engineer, to reduce the Mac boot time by 10 seconds. Kenyon replied that it wasn’t possible to reduce the time. So Jobs asked him “If it would save a person’s life, could you find a way to shave 10 seconds off the boot time?” Amazingly, the simple reframing made Kenyon say that he could do it. So, Jobs went to a white board and pointed out that if 5 million people wasted an additional 10 seconds booting the computer, the sum total of all users would be equivalent to 100 human lifetimes every year. A few weeks later Kenyon returned with a rewritten code that booted 28 seconds faster than before.¹ 

While Steve Jobs didn’t call it high agency, this is exactly what he meant when he said – 

“Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact: Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you and you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use.”

What’s High Agency?

High Agency is the ability to navigate unknowns and challenging circumstances to carve your own path to success without waiting for the conditions to be perfect. It’s a sense of control over your own behaviors, decisions and actions in shaping up your life as opposed to relying on external circumstances, conditions and environment to decide what you can and cannot do. 

Instead of considering other people’s limits as their own limits and fitting inside a box based on what others deem possible, high agency people expand their boundaries of influence, push themselves to navigate the uncharted territory and do the work that’s necessary to succeed.

They don’t have special talents or knowledge. What differentiates them is their ability to turn adversity into opportunity. What makes them push ahead when many others pull back is their relentless drive to look for solutions instead of complaining about the problems. When they fail or make mistakes, they feel disappointed much like everyone else, but they don’t let that disappointment get in the way of taking action or making progress.

Many people mistake high agency with toxic positivity. High agency isn’t about dimissiming negative emotions by saying things like: “Be positive!”, “Get over it and move on!” or “Look on the bright side.” It isn’t about hiding uncomfortable feelings or providing false reassurances. High agency is the optimism needed to navigate difficult circumstances. It’s the courage to act despite feeling those feelings. Staying optimistic while staying real. 

High Agency vs Low Agency

To understand this better let’s look at the difference between the attitudes and behaviors of leaders who practice high agency and those who don’t.

High Agency leaders:

• Work on self instead of worrying about the conditions, thereby influencing the conditions in which they operate. 
• Do not let life happen to them but feel more in command of their lives. 
• Take radical responsibility by evaluating the situation, considering different options and making a choice.
• Turn obstacles into opportunities.
• Put their time and energy into gathering resources and creating possibilities. 

Low Agency leaders:

• Rely on blames and excuses to justify their outcomes, spiral in despair when faced with challenges and setbacks and feel paralyzed when required to make tough decisions.  
• Turn into passive observers accepting the story given to them by others without questioning it. The attitude to abdicate responsibility and push blame on others creates a toxic spiral of negativity which leads to avoidance and inaction. 
• Instead of making plans to find a solution, they let problems fester for long, spending time constantly worrying about things not getting done. They assume that they have no support thereby believing in their own self defeating stories and feeling exhausted when they absolutely see no sign of progress in their work and life. 
• When it’s time to make a decision, they may procrastinate, obsess over minor details, or worry excessively about the outcome. Lack of confidence and being risk-averse impacts their thinking and makes them either outsource their decision making to others or delay it. 

Why is High Agency Important for Leaders? 

Let’s look at leaders across these two dimensions – agency and skills. 

High Agency, High Skilled

Highly skilled, high agency leaders are “growth drivers” for their teams and their organizations. Their ability to craft a compelling vision combined with their agency to execute that vision makes them highly effective and valuable for their organization.  

High Agency, Less Skilled

Less skilled, high agency leaders are “go-getters”. They may not have all the skills to stand out as a leader, but their positive attitude and enthusiasm combined with their flexibility and curiosity to adapt to changing circumstances enables them to build the skills required to be a great leader some day.

Low Agency, Highly Skilled

Highly skilled, low agency leaders are “brilliant moaners.” They have all the skills to do well at work, but fail to drive positive outcomes for their organization because they operate with a victim mindset. Without an inner sense of control over their own behaviors, decisions and actions, they spend more time complaining and feeling frustrated and less time putting their skills into constructive action. 

Low Agency, Less Skilled

Less skilled, low agency leaders are “diminishers” who push their teams and their organizations down. Lack of skills and agency leaves them ineffective and useless to fulfill their responsibilities as a leader. 

It’s better to be a go-getter (with high agency who’s less skilled) than a brilliant moaner (with low agency who’s highly skilled) because a go-getter can use their high agency to get better at their craft and improve their skills, while a brilliant moaner without high agency will end up wasting their own potential and that of their team.

Clearly, to be an effective leader in any organization, your agency matters more than your talent. 

Want to know how to become a high agency leader? Check out my online course here. In this course, you will learn:

1. What is high agency and why it matters.
2. Strategies and tactics to cultivate high agency. 
3. Practices for turning high agency into a habit.

Got questions? Write to me at vinita@techtello.com.