High Agency Is Not a Hiring Problem — It's a Systems Problem

BLUF/Summary

Most leaders want a culture of high agency — people who take ownership, solve problems without being asked, and push the organization forward. But they treat agency as a hiring trait rather than a design choice. You don't get a high-agency culture by finding high-agency people. You get it by building systems — goals, accountability rhythms, quality standards, and incentive structures — that make agency the path of least resistance. The organizations that consistently produce ownership-driven behavior aren't lucky in recruiting. They're intentional in design.

The Trap

George Mack's brilliant essay High Agency in 30 Minutes (HighAgency.com) struck a nerve when it came out, and for good reason. The concept is magnetic: high-agency people find a way when others find an excuse. They treat obstacles as variables, not verdicts. I've written about the concept before because it captures something critical that I've seen play out across every organization I've led, invested in, or advised.

But here's the trap I see leaders fall into after reading Mack's essay (or anything like it): they treat high agency as a trait to screen for rather than a culture to build.

The thinking goes like this: "If I could just hire more high-agency people, my organization would run better." So they adjust their interview rubric. They look for scrappiness, initiative, entrepreneurial energy. And sometimes they find those people. But then something strange happens. Those same high-agency individuals — the ones who were resourceful and relentless at their last company or in their own ventures — settle into the same reactive, permission-seeking patterns as everyone else.

It's not that the people changed. It's that the system is designed to produce low agency.

Why Systems Eat Agency for Breakfast

If you've spent any time around organizational culture, you've heard the line attributed to Peter Drucker: "Culture eats strategy for breakfast." It's true. But there's a deeper version that matters here: systems eat culture for breakfast.

You can talk about ownership all you want in your all-hands meeting. You can put "accountability" on a poster in the break room. But if your actual operating environment sends a different signal, the environment wins every time. Here's what low-agency systems look like in practice:

Too many goals. When everything is a priority, nothing is. I've watched organizations set over 100 annual goals and metrics across a leadership team and then wonder why nobody takes ownership of any of them. If a leader has seven strategic goals, three client escalations, and a full calendar of status meetings, they don't have the bandwidth to drive anything to the finish line. They're in survival mode. High agency requires margin — and margin requires ruthless prioritization of goals.

No real accountability. This is the big one. Many leaders talk about accountability but don't actually have a mechanism for it. Goals are set in January and reviewed in December. There's no monthly or quarterly check-in cadence where someone has to stand up and say, "Here's where I am against my commitments." Without that rhythm, goals become aspirations, and aspirations don't produce ownership. They produce hope — and hope is not a strategy.

Leaders who talk first. There's a classic organizational behavior trap where a senior leader makes an offhand comment — "I think we should look at our pricing" — and the entire organization starts working on a pricing initiative. Nobody asked if it was a priority. Nobody challenged whether it was the right move. The leader's words carried implicit authority, and the organization reflexively complied. High-agency cultures benefit from leaders who listen first. If your people know that the boss's casual opinion becomes marching orders, they learn very quickly to wait for orders rather than exercise judgment.

Abdication disguised as empowerment. This is the mirror image of the previous problem, and it's actually worse. Some leaders, often after reading about servant leadership or "founder mode," decide to step back entirely. They stop setting expectations. They stop enforcing standards. They call it "trusting the team." In reality, they've created a culture vacuum. When leaders abdicate, they don't get empowerment — they get confusion, politics, and inconsistency. Somebody fills the vacuum, and it's usually not the person you'd choose.

The Four Levers of Organizational Agency

If you want high agency in your organization, you don't wish for it. You build for it. Here are the four systems-level levers I've seen work:

1. Constrain your goals to create ownership

This sounds counterintuitive — wouldn't fewer goals mean less ambition? No. Fewer goals mean deeper ownership. When a leader owns three meaningful goals instead of twelve, they have the capacity to think creatively about how to achieve them. They can see obstacles as problems to solve rather than reasons to update a status report. At Halfaker, when I led the CIO Group, we wrestled each year with being ambitious in our goal setting, but not so optimistic that the team couldn't succeed. The result was that leaders actively owned their goals, instead of helping their boss advance the goal. The shift was palpable: instead of asking "what should I do about this?" they'd come to a senior leader with "here's what I'm doing about this and here's what I need from you for this approach."

I wrote recently about how aggressive your goals should be — whether you target 70-90% completion of stretch goals or insist on 100% completion of conservative ones. That tension is real. But regardless of where you land on that spectrum, the prerequisite is that each leader has few enough goals to actually own them.

2. Build an accountability rhythm that makes the system the "bad guy"

One of the most powerful things a leader can do is establish a transparent accountability system — and then let the system do the enforcement. When you establish quarterly strategy reviews, monthly goal check-ins, and weekly progress rhythms, and everyone has agreed to participate in those cadences, the system holds people accountable. Not you. Not your personality. Not your mood on a given Tuesday.

This matters because it depersonalizes accountability. When someone misses a target, the conversation isn't "I'm disappointed in you." It's "we all committed to these goals, and the dashboard shows this one is red — what's happening and what do you need?" The system becomes the standard, and the leader becomes the coach. I've seen this transform teams. People stop dreading accountability because it's no longer personal — it's structural. And structure creates safety, which ironically creates more agency, not less.

3. Enforce excellence and quality without apology

High-agency cultures are not "anything goes" cultures. They're cultures with high standards and high autonomy. You get to decide how you solve the problem — but the solution has to meet the bar.

This means investing in quality reviews, customer experience standards, and double-checks that are built into your process, not layered on as afterthoughts. At Halfaker, we ran formal quality reviews, client satisfaction tracking, and internal audits — not because we didn't trust our teams, but because the standards gave teams something to aim at. When you define what "excellent" looks like, people rise to it. When you leave it vague, people default to "good enough," and good enough is the enemy of agency.

The key insight: enforcing excellence isn't micromanagement. Micromanagement is telling people how to do the work. Enforcing excellence is being clear about the standard the work must meet and then giving people the space to figure out how to get there. That's where agency lives.

4. Promote and reward the behavior you want to see

This is the lever most organizations pull last, but it's the one with the most gravitational force. Your promotion and incentive decisions are the single loudest signal your organization sends about what it actually values.

If you promote the leader who checked every box but never took a risk, you've told the entire organization that compliance matters more than agency. If you reward the person who identified a problem nobody asked them to solve and then fixed it, you've told the organization that ownership is the path to advancement.

This isn't just about formal promotions. It's about who you celebrate in meetings, whose work you highlight in all-hands, and what behaviors you reference when you explain why someone earned an opportunity. High-agency cultures are built through hundreds of these micro-signals over time. They compound.

The Keel Connection

In the Keel Framework, I describe the Enterprise Operating System as the stabilizing structure that lets an organization carry more sail. The systems that produce high agency — goal discipline, accountability rhythms, quality standards, and aligned incentives — are core components of that operating system.

Here's the irony: leaders who skip the systems work because they want a "less bureaucratic" culture end up with the opposite of what they intended. Without structure, you don't get freedom — you get chaos, politics, and learned helplessness. The keel isn't the thing that constrains the boat. It's the thing that lets the boat handle more wind.

A high-agency culture is an organization with a heavy keel — one where the systems are strong enough that people can take risks, exercise judgment, and push forward without the organization tipping over. The structure creates the safety. The safety creates the agency.

Where to Start

If you're reading this and recognizing low-agency patterns in your own team, here's a concrete starting point:

This week, look at your leadership team's goal list. If any leader has more than five strategic goals, cut it down. Consolidate, defer, delegate further down the org chart, or reassign until each person owns a small enough portfolio to actually think creatively about it.

This month, establish (or revive) a monthly check-in cadence where leaders report against their goals to each other — not just to you. Peer visibility creates peer accountability, and peer accountability is stronger than top-down accountability.

This quarter, identify one person on your team who has demonstrated ownership and initiative beyond their role, and publicly recognize them for it. Name the behavior. Explain why it matters. Let the organization see what you reward.

You won't build a high-agency culture in a quarter. But you can start sending the right signals this week. The rest is compound interest.