Designing for Agency

Empowerment is Not Working

The term “empowerment” has been trending since at least 2010. Google Trends from 2010 to 2022 indicate a steady rise accelerating through the COVID pandemic. Despite this trend, Gallup indicators reveal that engagement remains pitiful in 2022, with 79% of workers worldwide not engaged and a significant subset of that number (19%) who are actively disengaged.

Engagement, as a key intended result of empowerment, does not appear to be taking hold. Why?

The main problem with empowerment is that the organization’s hierarchical structures loom over the “gift” of power and workers rightly sense its fleeting and fragile nature. Montreal-based coach, trainer and activist Olivier Fortier captured this aspect very eloquently in a 2019 blog post:

“The great problem with empowerment is that this increase in discretion and decision-making power is granted to employees by a hierarchically superior force. A manager can choose to move forward with the empowerment of his employees, usually with the goal of increasing motivation, growth, and performance. Corporate empowerment is often an initiative of management (...)

That being said, what happens if a manager who is a big fan of empowerment leaves and is replaced by someone who is quite less benevolent? No more empowerment. The organization decides that it does not work? No more empowerment. The organization is bought by a multinational corporation that “does not believe in these things”? No more empowerment. And the fallout from these changes of mind will be dangerous. One does not take back the freedom of motivated people without suffering the consequences.

In short, empowerment exists in a relationship of power.”

As nouns, the difference between empowerment and agency is that empowerment is the granting of political, social or economic power to an individual or group while agency is the capacity, condition, or state of acting or of exerting power; action or activity; operation.

Today’s business environment is fogged over, veiling the path ahead. Leaders navigating this journey are blinded by the volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity (VUCA) of the landscape. Agency enables the shift from a ‘predict and execute’ culture to a ‘multi-agent discovery’ culture where employees collectively help navigate various paths to identify and align on a “best chance” path forward.

Designing for Agency

We encourage leaders to evaluate their use of empowerment and consider a design for agency. We offer a few ideas that we hope educate and inspire leaders towards new ways of working. However, this list is not intended to be exhaustive, rather, we encourage sharing and reflection on your own leadership and with your peer leadership team.

Communicating Intent

Pete: When I introduced a change in my organization as described at the outset of this article, I communicated a solution (e.g. Scrum). This led to a bureaucratic decision and direction which removed most of the potential agency. With the benefit of hindsight, I should have shared my intent of using a more team-based and iterative approach to solving complex problems. Proposing an experiment to try Scrum as a starting point with an ability to inspect and adapt (indeed a more agile way forward!) may have allowed the situation to evolve quite differently.

Counter this with an example where I was brought in as an Agile trainer and coach by a leader years later. Upon educating teams on Scrum and giving them shared ownership in their transformation process, I came to realize this leader was incredibly knowledgeable and experienced in agile ways of working himself. I asked why he brought me in when he could have done this himself. His answer taught me a key lesson of agency; he noted that had he introduced the change, the team would do it because he told them to. However, because I was brought in and provided education and coaching, they did it because it was the right thing to do. And because of this their organization thrived in the new way of working.

In his 1989 Master’s thesis(2), Captain Robert G. Walters of the US Army provided an in-depth study of the meaning of the German term Auftragstaktik developed from the early Prussians and leveraged throughout WWI and WWII. This term has since variously been translated as Mission Command or Commander’s Intent, and is now the dominant doctrine in most Western armies. It is based on a philosophy to issue orders only when necessary to allow teams more initiative. This doctrine has been passed onto the forces in Ukraine and we are now seeing the effect of this first-hand. Ukrainian forces are exercising their agency in the service of intent, as opposed to the rigid, command-and-control model prevalent in the Russian army. The Ukrainians, acting in small, tight formations, are trained to think on their own.(3)

Engaging Employees in the Design

William Bridges, subject matter expert on change and author of Managing Transitions, distinguishes change from transition. Change is physical, transition is psychological. Thus, when leaders drive change initiatives, they are often only working on the surface—focusing on processes, tools, dates, requirements, etc. The impact those changes have on people is internal, and that requires a transition—the psychological, mental and emotional change from within. Each person contemplates and processes change in their own way and on their own timeline. Leaders alert to this difference provide space for transition and foster agency.

Daniel: I was called upon by a division lead to help teams adopt an “agile program” to a large body of work. After an initial briefing from the leader, I went on a Gemba walk visiting teams and subteams impacted by the change. Following two weeks of active listening, a picture began to emerge. The projects were nowhere near meeting the criteria defined by the program. So even though there was no ill intent, this program was impacting over 80 people who did not understand the why behind it. The desired change program stalled due to a lack of human transition. 

Following this, I asked teams to propose alternatives—how they thought the work should best be handled. The answers were clear and consistent: “we know what we need to do, and we understand the business imperatives”. The teams defined their own way of delivering on the goals, including the design of intra-and inter-team communications which were much less intrusive without sacrificing effectiveness. 

In seeing the energy and enthusiasm that teams put into their proposed design, the leaders dropped their approach without reservation or implied threat of “taking back control”. They witnessed agency in action, and over the course of several months their letting go of the illusion of control paid off through improved value delivery and higher than expected quality of work.

Leadership as a Task

Pete: A key agency killer organizations employ today is what I call ‘role inflation’. Role inflation evolves role ladders to create more opportunities for employee growth and seeks to retain key employees through promotion up the ladder. However, while these measures do indeed incentivize and retain individuals, they also reduce and remove agency across the organization. Let me explain. 

As a VP of Engineering, one of my key employees approached me with the news he was quitting for a more senior position at another company. While he enjoyed our company and was effective in his role as a system administrator, he was lured to a promotion as an systems architect at the new company. A few years later our paths crossed and I asked about his experience. He admitted to me that “everyone” in their organization was given the title “architect”, and making decisions was even more difficult because each individual was granted ownership over limited parts of the system. This organization was inflicted with role inflation and too many chiefs.

While I see role inflation in Europe more than in the US, it is fairly universal in today’s competitive employee marketplace. In Europe, government employee protections ensure employees stay longer in organizations requiring more internal promotion needs. In the US, organizations require incentives for employees to stay and thus the same phenomenon plays out. According to Gallup(4), employee engagement in Europe is far less—at 14%—than in North America at 33%. I recall running a workshop for a European client where every participant who joined had the title “Head of…”. In preparing the participant list I imagined some very powerful leaders joining, only to find out each participant had a fragment of ownership and responsibilities. 

Coplien and Harrison identified an inverse pattern between the number of roles and levels within an organization and their collaboration. The more roles, the less collaboration among the roles. This happens because the rules limit who can talk to who, and who can make decisions. Overall, role inflation deflates agency. Leaders seeking to leverage agency in their design are encouraged to look to task-based leadership versus role-based leadership. Paying people more for their value than their role also reduces the Peter Principle, where employees get promoted for their incompetence.

Foster a Unity of Purpose

For organizational agility to take hold, the system cannot be divided against itself. There are many ways that we have found to encourage unity of purpose, and they all rely on establishing empathy amongst system actors. 

Daniel: I recall a very specific and successful instance of the power of fostering Unity of Purpose. As a member of both the corporate PMO and the Agile Centre of Excellence at a large organization, I was approached by the leadership of a large project that was about to go through an internal compliance audit. The sense of trepidation—of “us” versus “them”—that this leadership team was experiencing was palpable. After over two years of experimenting and continuously improving their ways of working, both the leadership and the team were gravely concerned that an official audit would find faults with their agile approach and mandate a return to more traditional ways. After listening to their concerns, I simply said, “Why don’t we make the auditor a part of the team?” 

Once the initial shock had worn off, that’s exactly what we did. We met with the auditing function and extended the invitation, suggesting that the assigned auditor should sit with the team every day and complete her work in situ. To more surprise, they agreed! What happened next was that the auditor did not have to shuffle through documents and send endless emails and requests for clarification for weeks on end. She was shown exactly what the teams’ processes were live, as they were being executed, and had the opportunity to ask questions and receive immediate responses. Three weeks later, the audit was done, with the mention, “This is the clearest, most transparent, most auditable process that I have ever seen here. I highly recommend that it be studied and adapted elsewhere in the organization”.



Thus, in the end, Auditing and Compliance were invited to take part as equal partners, instead of being viewed as external interlopers. The business, delivery and control functions were united in a common purpose.

Conclusion

Moving past the pretense of empowerment to true agency requires a few key ingredients: 

1. First, we recommend an honest evaluation should be made of how empowerment is deployed versus how it is perceived and acted upon.
2. Second, we encourage leadership teams to discuss the impact that greater agency would have in their organization’s context. Consider agency not as an on/off switch, but rather as a dial to tune.
3. Third, we urge leaders to seek education for themselves, not just for their teams. Without a leadership mindset shift, likely nothing else will change. 
4. Fourth, we hope leaders design from the bottom-up, as opposed to top-down. As Daniel’s example showed, leveraging teams closest to the problem to design their structures and processes is a great place to start. 
5. And finally fifth, we ask leaders to not be afraid to dismantle existing systems— structures, policies and measures—that will likely limit any shifts toward agency.
   

Authors Note: Taking Personal Agency

You have agency, regardless of what your organization or its leaders say—it’s not all on the organization. As much as empowerment is gifted, agency is taken. Patty McCord, Chief Talent Officer at Netflix and co-creator of their culture, in her book Powerful shares her dislike of the word “empowerment” because it assumes that those with the power gift it to those without it. Her philosophy is that everyone has power and it’s the leader's only job to create outstanding teams that act on their collective power.

If you don’t find yourself in a culture that fosters agency, be a self-author of your career and your life—resolve your personal journey and make choices that support and grow you as a human. Create an emergency fund to provide you options when all else fails, and be prepared to move on.