In today's issue:
(read this as a blog post)
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 on hiring – that’s still the most effective way to get higher agency people in your team – but on 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 looks untrainable).
The trick is to understand how agency works.
In the words of Eric Weinstein, “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.
In other words, you have this second dialogue only if you believe it’s worth having it – which depends on your previous experiences with having that second dialogue.
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.
First, let me tell you how you would do it in an idyllic world.
Bam, that’s it. Doing this a couple of times with each of your subordinates should be enough to transform 50%-80% of them into high-agency people.
The problem is that, in the real world, if you ask low-agency people to do something high-agency, they might still try to do it the low-agency way.
Hence, there are three things you should be paying attention to:
If you follow all three points above, the chances are that you will succeed. It won’t work all the time, not with all your employees, but it will work most of the time with most of them.
Keep in mind at all times that low agency is a learned reaction to a past experience that taught them that it’s not worth it to be high agency.
Your job is to make them undergo experiences that teach them the opposite.
The team at The Art Of Quality (John Candeto, Will Oliver, Ferdi von Bennigsen, and Paul Higgins) interviewed me on Quality.
It's always been a fascinating topic for me. That was my father's life work (he chaired the European Organization for Quality), but then died when I was too young to understand what his job was. However, he left behind a full bookshelf of books on the topic, which I read avidly some years later, between high school and university.
Then, I graduated with a thesis on quality and I crafted and have been promoting the concept of Managerial Quality.
Quality has always been a big passion of mine, and I'm grateful for John to have interviewed me on this as a part of a larger project on quality he's been running. Thank you, John!
I just launched a daily publication that's a short review of the best tweets of the day, fully handpicked by me (no algorithm).
Many thanks to Jed Trott for having inspired the idea.
It's free. Check it out!
P.S.: I decided to give it a try with daily issues for a week or two; then, depending on the interest gathered, I will decide whether to continue it or not.
For this one edition of this newsletter, I won't post any tweets and quotes here, and instead encourage you to check the Twitter Magazine above, which contains many more.
on human behavior, management, and economics
I increase revenue through better people management.
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