Agency is trainable
Proven techniques to make your team more proactive.
Published: 2024-01-10 | Last updated: 2026-01-09 by Luca Dellanna
High-agency people get things done, even in the presence of obstacles and unknowns. They constantly look for a way forward and own their mistakes and outcomes.
Conversely, low-agency people follow the default path. When faced with an obstacle, they wait to be told what to do. Because they only work on someone else’s to-do list, they do not own their mistakes or outcomes.
Obviously, you would like your team to be high-agency.
However, most managers believe that agency is not a trainable trait, and hiring is the only way to increase their team members’ agency.
They are wrong. Not about hiring – that’s still the most effective way to get higher-agency people on your team – but about whether agency is trainable. It is largely trainable. You just need to know how to do it (it’s because most managers do not know how to do it that it appears untrainable).
The trick is to understand how agency works.
How agency works
“When you’re told that something is impossible, is that the end of the conversation, or does that start a second dialogue in your mind, how to get around whoever it is that’s just told you that you can’t do something?”
That second dialogue is agency.
Having that second dialogue is an action, albeit a mental one, and like any action, it is gated by motivation.Put another way, you only have this second dialogue if you believe it’s worth having, which depends on your previous experiences with it.
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.How to teach agency
First, let me tell you how you would do it in an idyllic world.
- 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 feasibility.”
- Make it explicit that you expect them to use agency. For example, “I expect you to tackle any unexpected problems.”
- Provide a concrete example illustrating the previous point. “For example, if you do not know how to do any part of the task, I expect you to google that, and only if Google doesn’t have the answer, ask a colleague.”
- Get them to work on the task.