There are a few windows of time in Austin where the weather is nice, and the mosquitos haven't arrived yet. At least around my house, now is one of those times.
This past week it's been around 74F/23C with a nice breeze. I've been eating lunch outside, and even finding time to work out on the deck in the afternoon. I work from home, and this is a big perk!
Being in nature has such a positive impact on my mental state.
If you get the chance, go outside. Look past your computer monitor. Listen to the birds. Steep yourself in awe for a moment. 🐦☀️
If you can't do that during work, see if you can find another way to experience some nature this week.
Enjoy yourself!
Kevin
A Quote
“
If you are no longer growing in that environment, your immediate boss is not stretching you, you’ve run out of opportunities to broaden your thinking and skills, and you’re not succeeding at getting things changed, face it. Don’t wait until the job becomes an energy drain or stay at the company only because of its marquee name. That’s when it’s time to seek your next opportunity somewhere else.
— Ram Charan in "The High Potential Leader"
Three Things
1 - 💼 Turning Pro - I really enjoyed this book from Steven Pressfield, who also wrote “The War of Art”. It’s a super quick read; 148 pages, and many chapters are one page, so it flies by. “What we get when we turn pro is we find our power. We find our will and our voice and we find our self-respect. We become who we always were but had, until then, been afraid to embrace and live out.”
2 - 📦 Box One by Neil Patrick Harris - Trailer here. Are you interested in playing a game made for one person? You play it one time, like an escape room. I haven’t played it myself, but I’ve been checking it out this past week and am definitely intrigued. Reviews are quite positive. Let me know if you’re already done this!
3 - 🪜 Ladder Toss Game - This is a surprisingly fun outdoor game! I played it for the first time at a solar eclipse party last year. For my kids birthday we got a set for the house. It’s a great little encouragement to get outside if you wanted a new option at your own house. Sets range from around $30-90 on Amazon.
(Enjoy this 9️⃣ minute read)
Deep Dive on Agency
An agent is someone who chooses to act, rather than being acted upon.
They make decisions instead of waiting for direction. They take responsibility for shaping their environment. They see possibilities, instead of just constraints.
Do you know anyone like that?
What could you get done if your team had more agents in it?
Today I’ll walk you through the topic of agency. We’ll explore how one comes to have agency, and why it’s actually quite hard!
I’ll also share one of many mistakes I’ve made, one that relates to trying to leverage agency when it wasn’t there yet.
“What if we lived our lives with a deeper and more conscious awareness of the fact that we get to create our experience of life at any moment? Imagine what our lives, our careers, and our relationships would look like if we stopped blaming our experience on other people or on external circumstances. We would free up a great deal of positive energy and take back so much of our personal power.”
Agency is not granted by a leader, it must be developed in the individual
Have you ever given someone responsibility to act in a broad an ambiguous area, and they freeze? They look at you like a deer in the headlights. Nothing happens. They don’t know what to do.
"You want me to do what?"
Situational Leadership might say that that’s because the person doesn’t have task-relevant skills, but that’s not really the whole story.
This reaction comes when someone hasn’t yet developed the capacity to act as an agent. And the reason has to do with something I know of as forms of mind (which we covered here previously).
As a quick primer, there are four forms of mind that describe our ability to navigate mental complexity; self-sovereign, socialized, self-authored, and self-transforming.
You generally progress from one stage to the next over the course of your life, but it’s optional, not mandatory. You can be 25 and still self-sovereign. You can be 80 and still socialized.
In fact, 60% of the population - the majority! - operate with either the self-sovereign or socialized form of mind.
This is important for our topic today because agency doesn’t develop until the self-authored stage, which means it’s in the minority.
In self-sovereign, you act, but it’s more like a reaction to input stimuli than a reasoned choice (think of a toddler in a tantrum). In socialized you also act, but typically only based on what “revered others” tell you it’s okay to do.
They are performing actions, but not yet agents in the world using our definition.
It’s only when you get to self-authored that you begin to develop your own frameworks and values that you operate against. You make a reasoned choice about how to move forward.
All of this means two things: 1️⃣ Assuming an equal distribution across the population, the numbers of agents in your team will be the minority. 2️⃣ As a leader you can’t give agency to someone, they have to have developed it in themselves first.
Those points dovetail quite well into my mistake.
My Mistake
Do you have an employee engagement survey in your org? We did.
Every six months (at the time of my mistake) the company would send out an employee engagement survey and as a leader you’d get a report of how your team was doing across many dimensions.
I want companies - and definitely my own team - to be places of human flourishing. If a score on the survey was sub-par, I’d want it to improve. I’d also want the team to take part in making it better.
If you say that last sentence another way, it might sound like: “I want the entire team to act as agents.”
Oops!
I can’t expect people to act as agents if they haven’t developed into a self-authored form of mind.
I can’t…but I did!
I’d say things like, “the survey is a mirror, not a bullhorn,” because that’s how I thought of it (meaning, look inward instead of complaining outward).
For example, when answering a question on the survey, I’d personally ask myself the power question, “how am I contributing to the situation I don’t like?” and come up with ideas for what I’d do to improve my situation.
In retrospect, using forms of mind, that advice is not helpful for the majority of people!
In my case, it was ineffective. Agents don't need me to say that, and those operating with a socialized mind are confused or frustrated that they're being asked to improve their situation - they consider that the boss's job.
There are two logical next steps from this awareness; in the short term, take a better approach given the mix of forms of mind, and in the long term, help people develop agency.
Today I'll share my thoughts on the latter.
To start, I want to mention an important point; you don’t learn agency overnight. You can’t go to “agent bootcamp” for three days and come back a fully fledged and self-authored agent in the world.
If only it were as easy as going to agent bootcamp for a few days.
These transitions take years, if they happen at all.
Not only do transitions take a long time, but they may never happen! Not everyone wants to go through the transition into being an agent. It can be difficult and painful.
All you can do as a leader is make space for agency to develop. It’s up to others to choose to walk through.
Do you believe in your team?
I’ve met many a cynical leader who thinks their team is prone to error, prone to slacking off, and they need to be protected from themselves. It’s kinda gross.
They talk down to the team. They put policies in place to prevent errors from happening.
All that does is prevent people from developing agency. And if you want your organization to evolve as your customers, the market, and the business changes, you’ll need more agents, not fewer!
I’d rather operate with the assumption that my team is extremely capable. My job is create conditions where they can be amazing. Yes, there will be errors, but that’s the cost of doing business (and you can design ways to minimize errors, etc.).
The point is; your mindset as a leader matters. Be a Multiplier, not a Diminisher. You get what you expect, so expect the best from your team.
“Power to translates to giving everyone on your team agency and acknowledging their unique potential. It is ‘based on the belief that each individual has the power to make a difference, which can be multiplied by new skills, knowledge, awareness, and confidence.’”
As you know, “good people operating in a bad system create bad outcomes.” You might have a lot of agents in your team, but if you’ve got a lot of awful processes and policies, people will be stuck. You’re making it so hard to get things done that the effort to change it is too high.
Don’t immediately assume that a lack of agency in the team means the team hasn’t developed there yet. You might have a really bad system! Fix that first.
Teach Systems Thinking
Alright, now that you believe in your team, and are sure everyone’s operating inside a reasonably good system, now we can focus on developing agency. One of the best ways is to teach systems thinking.
This works because you’re showing the man behind the curtain. The systems in which people operate aren’t magic! There’s usually just some goofball with a bunch of knobs and levers that created it.
Exposing the goofball takes some of the mystery and power away; everything we use was created by people just like us.
Systems are created by people. Anything created can be recreated in better form.
The more you teach mental models, frameworks, and systems thinking disciplines, the more you’re showing your team that the world is a construct that can be influenced.
People begin to see their agency, and develop the tools to be confident affecting the systems in which they work.
“So long as I saw the problem in terms of events, I was convinced that my problems were externally caused—’they let me down.’ Once I saw the problem as structurally caused, I began to look at what I could do, rather than at what ‘they had done.’”
Model agency for your team, and talk about what you’re doing.
Many a time I’d be working with my direct reports, and I’d suddenly realize we were acting like victims, not agents. We’d be hemming and hawing over what someone else might do. We’d talk about how a decision might be made, but not actually make one.
When that happened, I’d just say, “We’re the bosses.” It was a reminder that we are, in fact, agents in the universe. We have the capacity to make things happen, instead of letting things happen to us.
So that’s what we did. Feel free to steal that phrase of make up your own. If you realize you’re not acting as an agent - which happens! - use this phrase to snap yourself out of it.
“In contrast, Impact Players take charge of situations that lack leadership. When they see an opportunity for improvement, they don’t wait for permission to act. They step up, volunteering to lead long before higher-ups in the organization ask them to do so. They are disruptors of the status quo who choose to lead rather than let things be.”
As a leader, it’s not uncommon for everyone to be staring at you, waiting for a decision or an action plan.
You can, of course, give your answer - but you’re limiting learning and development.
Assuming there’s time - and there is usually time - ask people in your team what they would do to resolve the situation.
In some people you’ll notice a change. They’re a little uncomfortable and uncertain. If they’re in a socialized form of mind, they expect other people to tell them how to think, so it’ll feel really weird to be asked what they would do. You’re essentially asking them to practice being an agent, which is the new form of mind.
Tread lightly and wear your coaching hat. Ask follow up questions. Expose assumptions.
This is practice so that they’ll learn to do this themselves naturally later.
Give Ownership
Nothing teaches people to be agents better than giving them space to act as agents. You’ll be surprised by what your people are capable of.
Find something for them to own that’s appropriate to their level, experience, and the downside risk.
When helping guide someone through this, remember that the “why” behind their execution matters. If you ask why they did something and the answer contains anything like, “[So and so] told me…,” that means they’re not fully acting as an agent yet. They’re passing through instructions from someone else.
That’s fine, it just means there’s more work to do on the path to agency. Ask them… - whether they agreed with that guidance and why. - what other options they considered. - what they would do differently next time. - what assumptions were inherent in the guidance from the other person.
You’re helping them develop their own frameworks and values. You’re teaching them agency.
“The more people are given control over their own projects, the more ownership they feel, and the more motivated they are to do their best work. Telling employees what to do is so old-fashioned, it leads to screams of 'micromanager!' 'dictator!' and 'autocrat!'” - Reed Hastings in “No Rules Rules”
As a leader, if you… - Believe in your team - Remove barriers in the system - Team systems thinking - Model agency - Ask people what they would do, and - Give ownership
…you’re going to be well on your way to developing agency in your team.
Call to Action
This week, don’t worry about taking action. It’s okay to do nothing.
Ahahahaha. Just a little agency joke for your Monday. Of course we should take action this week.
One task you could do is just put on the lens of agency this week and observe. Where do you notice agency? Why? Where do you notice its absence? Why?
If you feel really comfortable with that already, take an inventory on the extent to which you’re supporting and encouraging agency in your team. Are you doing a lot of top-down decision making? See where you can back off.
Spread the love and either delegate a decision, or at least make sure you’re probing your team’s thinking.
As always, have fun with it. Let me know if you have any questions or want to share what you’re up to. heykev@kevinnoble.xyz.
Kevin
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