Agency as the Core of Thriving Leadership

Leaders often confuse vigilance with vision. In VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous) environments, the instinct is to grip harder and to confuse control with competence. This reflex, formed over millennia, was once highly useful and adaptive for our ancestors. Heightened vigilance could be the difference between life and death in a savannah filled with predators, but in boardrooms or Zoom calls, that same response instead blinds perspective and corrodes judgment.

Neuroscience reveals that under sustained stress, the region of the brain responsible for decision-making and planning, called the pre-frontal cortex, becomes inactive, while the brain’s alarm circuits remain active, prioritizing survival over reasoning (Arnsten, 2009). Physiologist Bruce McEwen (2007) coined the term allostatic load to describe the cumulative wear and tear of an emergency system that never resets. The human body can rally to escape a fire, but it is ill-equipped to live indefinitely as though the fire still burns. In organizations, chronic allostatic load manifests as weak planning, risk aversion, reduced candor, and a decline in creativity.

It is tempting to attribute survival mode leadership to weak character or poor skill, but research suggests otherwise: the human brain is designed with a negativity bias, giving more weight to potential losses than equivalent gains (Baumeister et al., 2001). Ironically, when we perceive constraint, whether of time, money, or bandwidth, our mental resources narrow, limiting problem-solving precisely when we need imagination most (Mullainathan & Shafir, 2013). These biases are universal features of cognition, not failures of willpower, and when left unchecked, they ripple outward into organizational culture.

From Survival Mode to Thriving

Thriving leadership is defined by the presence of agency. Thriving, as Spreitzer and colleagues (2005) define it, is the experience of vitality and learning combined: energy paired with growth. Fredrickson’s (2001) broaden-and-build theory demonstrates how positive emotions widen attentional scope, enabling leaders to perceive possibilities that stress alone conceals. Deci and Ryan’s (2000) self-determination theory suggests that when autonomy, competence, and relatedness are supported, intrinsic motivation and persistence are more likely to follow. Bandura’s (1977) work on self-efficacy reveals that belief in capability predicts resilience under uncertainty. And Edmondson’s (1999) research on psychological safety establishes that candor is a precondition for innovation. Taken together, these strands suggest that thriving is a way of relating to pressure that expands rather than constricts, and at the core of that idea is agency.

Agency, across disciplines, refers to the capacity to act intentionally and exert influence in the environment. For Anscombe (1957), it was established through intentional action. For Frankfurt (1971), it was expressed in second-order volitions or the ability to reflect on what one wants to want. Psychology operationalized agency through constructs such as self-efficacy (Bandura, 1977), locus of control (Rotter, 1966), and intrinsic motivation (Deci & Ryan, 2000). Giddens (1984) defined agency as the ability to have acted otherwise, always situated in structures that enable and constrain.

I propose that agency most supports thriving when it is sustainable and widely distributed. Sustainable agency endures across time and contexts, and distributed agency ensures that it is not hoarded by a few but shared across people and levels, enabling collective action. Without these qualities, agency can just as easily fuel exploitation as it can innovation.

Leadership Through the Lens of Agency

If survival mode is characterized by vigilance without vision, thriving leadership is characterized by agency designed into systems. This changes the question from “How can I be more agentic?” to “How can we create organizations where agency is durable and shared?” One framework for doing so is AIR: Awareness, Inquiry, Reframing.

Awareness interrupts autopilot and enables leaders to recognize their stress responses and assumptions. Inquiry introduces rigor, surfacing hidden beliefs and testing appraisals. Reframing deliberately shifts perspective and creates new choices without denying constraints.

Initially designed for individuals, AIR can be scaled to leadership teams and organizations. A senior team might begin meetings with two minutes of Awareness, naming the pressures in the room. They can practice Inquiry through premortems that ask “What are the team strengths we can leverage to accomplish what we want to accomplish?” and close with Reframing, requiring each initiative to identify a learning goal alongside performance targets. When AIR becomes a collective practice, agency moves from private resource to public good. The effect is accelerated learning and climates of trust.

The empirical case for agency-rich design is strong and remarkably consistent across literatures. Decades of engagement data link autonomy and high-quality recognition with retention and performance, a pattern that persists across regions and economic cycles: people stay and thrive where their agency feels real (Harter et al., 2023). The job-strain literature is sobering, as low control under high demand is associated with higher cardiovascular risk and mortality, a reminder that the human nervous system does not care about revenue targets if the system remains unlivable (Kivimäki et al., 2006). Meta-analytic evidence links psychological safety to information sharing, voice, and innovation, outcomes that leaders say they want but can only emerge from climates where candor is not punished and errors are handled as learning opportunities (Frazier et al., 2017). Job crafting research indicates that when individuals influence the design of their roles, engagement and well-being increase, and organizations benefit (Wrzesniewski & Dutton, 2001).

More concrete practices are also supported by compelling evidence. Premortems, the deliberate practice of imagining a future failure and working backward to surface risks and weak assumptions, reliably surface issues earlier and improve the quality of planning (Klein, 2007). Pairing learning goals with performance goals reduces the narrowing effects of evaluation pressure on creativity and improves performance in uncertain environments (Deci & Ryan, 2000; Fredrickson, 2001).

Common Traps and How to Avoid Them

Well-intentioned leaders stumble in predictable ways. One trap is performative agency, where town halls and surveys appear slick, but decision-making rights do not actually shift, and dissent carries a heavy cost. People learn quickly whether agency is genuine or theater.

A second trap is safety without standards, where leaders equate psychological safety with comfort and stop naming gaps, which erodes a different kind of trust. Edmondson’s (1999) original framing suggests that safety protects candor in the service of quality, but it is not the absence of accountability. Instead, it is the presence of learning, supported by clear expectations and timely feedback.

A third trap is autonomy as neglect, where leaders withdraw under the banner of empowerment and leave teams without coaching or guardrails. Agency needs scaffolding, a shared purpose, boundaries that clarify where discretion lives, and support that builds capability over time.

Avoiding these pitfalls requires design choices. Make decision rights explicit and visible, who decides what, informed by whom, and by when. Map decisions by reversibility and consequence, then push reversible ones closer to the edges so people can move without permission. Build dissent into the process, not into personalities, with rotating red-team roles or short premortems on material bets. Pair learning and performance goals to keep curiosity in the room when metrics tighten. Measure climate for voice and agency to see where information flow is stuck, track idea rates, error reporting, and rework as leading indicators of safety and learning. The pattern to notice is that each practice treats agency as something a system can possess, not something individuals must manufacture from within themselves through grit alone.

Agency is also an equity concern. When decision rights and discretion are unevenly distributed by function, geography, or identity, organizations replicate historical patterns of voice and silence, access, and exclusion. Leaders who care about equity must ask not only who is at the table, but who gets to decide, whose knowledge counts, whose dissent is welcomed, and who bears the cost of candor. Practical steps include broadening design teams for critical processes, investing in capability building where agency will be extended, and publishing decision maps so power is visible and discussable.

Measurement that Matters

Leaders often ask how to measure progress without turning culture into a dashboard game. One answer is to choose leading indicators tied to information flow, learning, and action, and to complement numbers with narrative. Useful signals include idea submission and adoption rates, time from surfacing a material risk to decision, error reporting and near-miss trends, rework linked to decision quality, and pulse items that track whether people feel they can raise concerns, influence their work, and see their effort connect to impact. Pair these with short qualitative cycles, like two questions at the end of a month or quarter, “Where did you see agency working here?” “Where did you see it get stuck?” Then, fix the small things quickly so that people can experience the system learning.

Importantly, measurement should be used to steer, not to judge alone. When a metric dips, respond as you would to any performance signal: increase curiosity, get closer to the work, ask better questions, change one thing at a time, and learn publicly. That posture is itself a message about agency, it says that reality can be spoken, that numbers are a way of listening, and that leaders will act on what they hear.

What this Looks like on an Ordinary Tuesday

Large ideas need small moves. Imagine a week built around two or three simple practices:

• Begin Monday’s leadership meeting with one Awareness round (e.g., pressures in the room, hopes for the week, worries that might distort decisions).

• Run a ten-minute premortem before you lock the quarter’s top bet. Suppose it is six months from now, and this failed badly. What happened? What did we miss? What assumption proved soft?

• Add one Reframing field to every initiative brief. Beyond the target, what are we trying to learn? How will we know? How will we protect that learning when the metric tightens?

• Close Friday with two questions to the team: What became clearer this week? What will we try differently next? Then, choose one experiment and make it trivially easy to get started.

None of this is heavy or expensive. The cost is attention and the humility to change how rooms work, and the gain is speed with judgment, dissent that feels helpful rather than hostile, decisions that are impactful because they were made closer to the problem, and a culture that remembers how to breathe when conditions tighten.

The future of leadership will be profoundly influenced by whether leaders continue to mistake vigilance for vision, or whether they reimagine leadership as the craft of building agency-rich systems where people can speak, decide, risk, and learn together. Agency is not the icing on the cake of leadership. It is the yeast. Without it, organizations may rise briefly under heat, then collapse under sustained weight. With it, they adapt and renew.

If agency is linked with systems, then the challenge for leaders is to build organizations that protect it without collapsing into chaos, to distribute power without abdicating responsibility, and to cultivate conditions where individuals can act freely while also enhancing a culture that sustains collective thriving.

References

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18. Wrzesniewski, A., & Dutton, J. E. (2001). Crafting a job: Revisioning employees as active crafters of their work. Academy of Management Review, 26(2), 179–201. https://doi.org/10.5465/amr.2001.4378011

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With over two decades coaching Fortune 500 executives and global teams through deep transformations, Jon Rosemberg has learned firsthand that growth begins when we courageously reclaim our agency. His personal journey, forged by immigration, loss, and career reinvention, inspires him to blend hard-won business insight with cutting-edge research to guide others toward greater meaning. Driven by his belief in human potential, Jon co-founded Anther, a firm dedicated to transforming uncertainty into possibility. He previously led high-impact initiatives at Walmart, Procter & Gamble, Indigo, and GoBolt. Jon holds an MBA from Cornell University and a Master of Applied Positive Psychology from the University of Pennsylvania, where he serves as an assistant instructor. Originally from Caracas, Venezuela, he now lives in Toronto with his wife, Adriana, and their two sons.