For almost two decades, I led teams.
For almost four years now, I have coached them.
And I keep coming back to one word:
Agency.
I have to admit, when I first started hearing people use it, my reaction was something along the lines of:
What the heck does that mean? What have the Millennials come up with now?
So naturally, I looked it up.
At its simplest:
agency is our capacity to act, to make choices and affect what happens next.
And once I understood it, I started seeing it everywhere.
More specifically, I started seeing what happens when people feel like they don’t have it.
Teams would tell me they were stressed.
Spread thin. Frustrated. Exhausted by work that, on paper, didn’t always seem like it should be quite that exhausting.
Sometimes the answer was workload. Sometimes it wasn’t. Sometimes the deeper issue sounded more like:
A lot is being asked of me, and I don’t feel like I have much ability to shape what happens next.
That distinction matters more than I originally realized.
Allow me to nerd out for a moment
Agency is not a new idea.
Philosophers have been wrestling for centuries with questions about intentional action, free choice, and our capacity to affect what happens around us.
What feels newer is how much the idea has entered everyday language.
We talk about reclaiming our agency. Losing agency. Giving people agency.
And somewhere along the way, I think we have also started confusing agency with control.
They are not the same thing.
Control says: I determine what happens.
Agency is closer to: I can see where I have choices, and my actions can make a meaningful difference.
That distinction has become increasingly useful to me because there are two very different ways agency can disappear at work:
- Sometimes leaders take too much of it away.
- Sometimes we overlook the agency we still have because we are focused on what we cannot control.
Both can make work feel much heavier than it needs to.
What the research is telling us
A 2026 study published in Applied Psychology looked at something researchers call participative leadership.
That sounds more complicated than it is.
Participative leaders actively involve employees in decisions affecting their work. Importantly, this does not mean employees make every decision or leaders give up authority.
The researchers describe participative leadership as sharing influence and granting autonomy while the leader still retains ultimate authority.
That definition immediately got my attention. Because that is agency.
Across two time-lagged studies, employees who perceived more participative leadership consistently reported greater job satisfaction. Relationships with burnout were also found, although they were less consistent across the two studies and different levels of analysis.
That distinction is important.
Giving people more voice is not some magical burnout-prevention formula. Burnout is far more complicated than that.
Yet participative leadership appears to provide several resources that can change the way people experience their work: voice, autonomy, recognition, and influence.
Other research points in a similar direction. A systematic review and meta-analysis of working conditions found moderately strong evidence connecting greater job control with lower emotional exhaustion.
In other words: How much work we have matters.
And so does how powerless we feel while doing it.
I have watched this play out in real time
Advertising agencies and consultancies can be incredibly process-oriented. There is a good reason for that.
When you do similar kinds of work repeatedly, the better you become at learning from one project and improving the process for the next, the more efficient and effective the organization can become.
So we scope. We estimate. We hold post-mortems. We conduct retrospectives. We refine the process.
And one tension comes up over and over again.
The people who will actually do the work want more say in how the work is scoped.
They want to hear the client’s conversation firsthand. They want to understand the context. They want an opportunity to say:
- Here is what I think this will actually take.
- Here is what concerns me.
- Here is the assumption I think we’re making.
And the understandable response from an account leader or project manager can be: Do we really need another expensive person sitting on that call?
Fair question.
Yet… after watching enough projects go sideways, I learned to ask a different one: What might it cost us not to have them there?
Maybe it “costs” 30 minutes for someone to join the discovery call.
Maybe another 30 minutes afterward to talk through what they heard, raise concerns, and help shape the approach.
Now compare that with what can happen later. The assignment reaches the person doing the work and suddenly:
- There isn’t enough time.
- There isn’t enough clarity.
- The scope doesn’t account for something important.
- The person closest to the work sees a problem everyone else missed.
- Or perhaps they simply never understood or bought into the approach in the first place.
Now we’re revising. Reworking. Renegotiating. Adding hours. Or worse, disappointing the client.
And somewhere inside all that frustration is often a sentence like: If someone had asked me earlier, I could have told you this.
That is not necessarily someone asking for control. They may simply have been asking for agency.
For their knowledge and perspective to have somewhere meaningful to go before the important decisions became difficult to change.
Listening does not mean agreeing
This is a distinction I talk about in both my leadership work and my speaking.
Sometimes the change still needs to happen.
- The deadline may still be the deadline.
- The budget may still be the budget.
- The strategy may already be decided.
A leader’s responsibility is not to make every decision negotiable.
It is to understand the difference between: This decision is mine to make.
And therefore, there is no reason to listen.
Those are not the same thing.
People can be heard without getting everything they want. They can disagree with a decision and still understand why it was made. They can have meaningful influence over one part of the work even when another part is fixed.
Before we move forward, we can make room to understand what matters to someone else, clarify what is and isn’t open to influence, and make sure they understand what comes next.
That is often enough to create a very different experience of the exact same decision.
Pressure makes this harder
There is another reason leaders should pay attention to this.
When pressure rises, our instincts do not always lead us toward more participation. They can lead us in the opposite direction.
Classic organizational research on what is called the threat-rigidity effect found that under threat, people and organizations can restrict the information they consider and tighten control.
That makes sense.
- A deadline gets tighter.
- A client gets nervous.
- Revenue falls behind.
- The board starts asking questions.
Now is not exactly when most of us instinctively think: Let’s invite more perspectives.
We think: We need to move.
And sometimes we do.
Yet this is also where efficiency can quietly become drift.
We stop asking because asking takes time. We make decisions for people because we believe we are protecting them. We ask for input after the meaningful choices have already been made. We give someone responsibility for an outcome while holding tightly to the decisions required to produce it.
From the leader’s chair, it can feel like decisiveness. From the other side, it can feel like: My perspective is welcome, as long as it doesn’t change anything.
Burnout is too late
This is why I keep coming back to something I say in my keynote: Burnout is too late.
By the time someone is exhausted, disengaged, struggling to perform, or considering leaving, we are looking at the downstream problem.
I am much more interested in what happens before that.
The small shifts.
- The leader who becomes slightly more controlling because everything feels urgent.
- The employee who stops offering an opinion because experience has taught them it won’t matter.
- The team that begins waiting for answers instead of exercising judgment.
No dramatic culture crisis. No terrible boss. Just capable people adjusting to pressure. That is where the drift begins.
There is another side to agency
There is one more part of this conversation that matters. Leaders have a responsibility not to remove more agency than a situation requires. Yet the rest of us have a responsibility, too.
We cannot confuse agency with the belief that everything around us should be ours to control.
- A client will make a decision we dislike.
- A leader will choose a direction we did not recommend.
- A reorganization will happen.
- A deadline will move.
- Another human being will behave in a way we wish they wouldn’t.
And our brains can spend an extraordinary amount of energy arguing with reality.
- They shouldn’t have done that.
- They should have asked me.
- This isn’t fair.
Sometimes those reactions point to something that genuinely needs to change. Speak up. Challenge it. Raise the issue. Use your influence.
But after that, there is still another question: Given what I cannot control, what is still mine to shape?
That is also agency.
- Not pretending the system is fine.
- Not accepting bad leadership.
- Not positive-thinking our way through legitimate problems.
Simply refusing to surrender the choices that are still ours because we don’t have control over all of them.
Control. Influence. Agency.
Here is the distinction I have started using:
- Control: I determine what happens.
- Influence: What I do may affect what happens.
- Agency: I recognize where I have choices and take action within them.
We don’t always have control. Yet lack of control does not automatically mean lack of agency.
And leaders have tremendous influence over whether the people around them can see and exercise theirs.
Which leaves us with two questions worth asking.
- When you are frustrated with something happening around you: What can I actually shape here?
- And when you are about to make a decision that affects someone else’s work: What part of this decision does not need to belong only to me?
One question helps us reclaim agency we may have surrendered.
The other helps us return agency we may have unnecessarily taken.
After almost three decades of leading and coaching teams, maybe that is why I have become so attached to a word I once rolled my eyes at.
Agency doesn’t promise us control.
It reminds us that some choice is still ours.
Research referenced
Sijbom, R. B. L., & Grutterink, H. (2026). Participative leadership and workgroup commitment as multilevel resources for employee well-being: A cross-level examination. Applied Psychology.
Read the open-access study
Aronsson, G., et al. (2017). A systematic review including meta-analysis of work environment and burnout symptoms. BMC Public Health.
View the PubMed record
Staw, B. M., Sandelands, L. E., & Dutton, J. E. (1981). Threat-Rigidity Effects in Organizational Behavior: A Multilevel Analysis. Administrative Science Quarterly.
View the study on JSTOR