.jpg)
There comes a point in every founder’s journey when progress feels harder to sustain. The meetings are productive and the metrics look stable, but you can sense the energy shifting from proactive to reactive. Even though your team is capable and you have the right systems in place, somehow everything still seems to wait for your input before moving forward.
That realization isn’t about effort or even speed. It’s about agency.
High agency isn’t just a leadership trait. It’s the underlying force that determines whether your people continue to learn, adapt, and grow on their own or become dependent on your constant direction. When agency is high, people act with confidence. They don’t just execute — they anticipate. They take action, adapt, and improve without you standing right next to them. But when agency is missing, it feels like nothing moves unless you're in the room. And that’s just not sustainable when you’re trying to build something that lasts.
So let’s talk about what it takes to build a company where initiative lives in the culture itself, where ownership, curiosity, and forward motion are simply how things get done.
What High Agency Really Means
Agency begins with a mindset, but it lives through behavior. It’s the internal belief that each of us has the ability to make an impact and that even in the face of constraints, we still have meaningful choices. That belief shapes how we show up, make decisions, and respond when things don’t go as planned.
When agency is high, people don’t wait for direction before taking action. They work from a place of ownership and curiosity. While others look at data and hesitate, high-agency people look at the data, face the same ambiguity, yet somehow keep finding ways to move forward. That’s the difference between teams that adapt in real time and those that pause until someone tells them what to do next.
This isn’t about personality. High-agency people aren’t louder or bolder by nature — they’re simply more connected to purpose. They understand what matters, they trust the system they’re part of, and they see their role as shaping outcomes, not reacting to them.
That’s why agency spreads so quickly in founder-led companies. When the founder models their own agency through clarity, trust, and follow-through, it becomes a part of the way the company runs. People don’t mimic behavior. They absorb belief. They stop asking, “Who’s responsible for this?” and start asking, “What can I do about it?”
Designing for Agency
We can't just demand or expect agency from our people. We have to design for it. The culture we build will either invite ownership or push it away.
Most founders underestimate how much structure agency requires. But when people know what outcomes they own and feel they have the authority to act, they start making smarter, faster decisions. That’s when teams begin carrying their own momentum and become less reliant on us.
Here’s what I’ve found matters most when building a high-agency culture:
- Clear scope: Every role should have a defined set of problems to solve, not just tasks to complete. “Run the campaign” is a task. “Own how we attract and convert customers efficiently” is a challenge to tackle. The difference sounds small, but it changes everything about how people think, prioritize, and measure success.
- Real support: Agency thrives when risk is treated as a path to learning, not a threat to credibility. If thoughtful experiments are punished, people stop experimenting. But if you model and reward curiosity over blame, each attempt becomes useful data. That’s how initiative scales, one safe experiment at a time.
- Consistent reinforcement: What leaders reward, acknowledge, and ignore defines culture faster than any policy. Celebrate initiative when it shows up, even when it creates short-term discomfort. Those small, visible moments tell the team: This is what we value here.
Tools like Ninety help make these possible. When every role, goal, and issue lives in one place, people have the context they need to act with confidence. Clarity, support, and consistency become a core part of how your organization operates.
It's important to remember that high-agency companies don’t just work faster, they learn faster. They keep adjusting and improving without waiting for direction because the system itself makes action possible.
Scaling Beyond Ourselves
As founders, we're high-agency people by nature. It’s how our company came to exist in the first place. We saw something missing in the world and acted. In the early days, we made decisions quickly, solved problems in real time, and carried the organization forward through sheer will and clarity.
But the same drive that fueled our early success can hold us back as we try to grow. When everyone learns to rely on our judgment, every step forward depends on us. At first, it feels efficient because decisions are quick and quality stays high, but over time, it conditions people to wait for us to make every call.
If we let the company run that way for too long, we may think we’re preserving excellence, but we’re really preserving dependency.
At some point, agency has to shift from us to our people. Our role should move from deciding to designing, from being the problem-solver to building systems that make problem-solving everyone’s job.
It’s not about letting go entirely. It’s about replacing control with clarity and trust so initiative becomes inevitable. When that happens, we don’t lose influence — we multiply it. The company starts acting from shared understanding, not constant oversight. And that’s when we know it’s built to last.
Success seems to be connected with action. Successful people keep moving. They make mistakes, but they don't quit.
Founder and State Representative
Creating a Culture of Agency
As your company grows, the culture that carried you through the early days has to evolve. What once created clarity and momentum can start to create dependence if you’re not careful. Building a high-agency culture isn’t about abandoning what worked before. It’s about deepening trust, alignment, and shared ownership throughout the organization.
Here are some ways you can get started in your own company:
- Create space for decisions: When every choice has to go through you, people learn to wait. Delegating authority isn’t losing control. It’s strengthening confidence throughout your teams. Every time you let others decide, you reinforce that initiative is valued.
- Clarify outcomes: Agency still needs standards. When you clearly define what success and high performance look like, people can act instead of hesitate because they know what building something great requires.
- Anchor autonomy in purpose: Agency without alignment leads to confusion, but agency grounded in shared values leads to progress. When people understand why their work matters, they act like owners because they believe in the purpose.
- Balance ownership with support: If you want people to take on more, you have to make sure they have the time, tools, and encouragement to do it well. A high-agency culture thrives when people feel challenged but also know that you care.
It's about creating an environment where initiative feels natural and shared responsibility becomes the norm. When that belief takes hold, people stop waiting for direction and start building the company alongside you.
Leading a Company That Moves Without You
A high-agency culture doesn’t happen by accident. It’s built through thousands of small choices. What we model, what we reinforce, and what we make space for. Over time, those choices compound into something powerful: a company that moves, learns, and improves, whether we’re in the room or not.
That’s the real work of leadership. Not how much gets done through our direction, but how much happens because of the culture and systems we’ve built.
When we design for agency, we’re not just creating a more capable organization, we’re building a more human one. A place where people see themselves as co-creators of the future, not passengers along for the ride.
That’s what I’m working toward every day. Not just building a better company, but one that keeps getting better and better, with or without me.
