Building Muscle for Agency

Observations from Managing Partner Jen Prosek in the Leading in Volatile Times Newsletter.

A few weeks ago, The Economist published a story with an irresistible headline: “The quality you should most wish for your children.”

Naturally, I jumped right in.

The answer wasn’t intelligence, resilience, curiosity or even kindness. It was something psychologists call an internal locus of control: the belief that your actions can shape what happens to you.

People with a strong internal locus of control tend to put in more effort, exercise greater self-control, save more and perform better educationally. They believe that what they do matters.

As an entrepreneur, this idea immediately resonated with me. Entrepreneurship can be almost an extreme exercise in having an internal locus of control. Every day, you wake up believing you can make something happen that otherwise wouldn’t. You create something out of nothing. You convince someone to become a client, launch a new product, hire someone extraordinary, enter a new market, fix something that’s broken. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t. But fundamentally you believe that your actions can change the outcome.

I’ve always known that I have an unusually high dose of this quality, although I’ve been a little afraid to say it out loud. After all, in its most extreme version, it can start sounding like overconfidence or even narcissism. There are plenty of things in life we cannot control.

But the article made me think about a different question:

Is agency something you’re born with, or can you learn it?

I’ve spent much of my career watching what I think is a fascinating experiment around that question.

The most important aspect of Prosek’s culture has always been entrepreneurship. We’re fast-moving. We encourage experimentation. And we give people a sense of ownership. We want our employees to have ideas, try them, occasionally fail and try again.

At first, I thought we were simply attracting entrepreneurial people.

After watching people develop over many years, I know we also are manufacturing them.

I’ve seen employees arrive at Prosek who weren’t particularly entrepreneurial at all. They were smart and hardworking, but they waited for instructions. Five years later, some of those same people were creating new products, developing businesses, solving problems nobody had asked them to solve and spotting opportunities I hadn’t seen myself.

Their entrepreneurial IQ had changed. In 2011 I wrote a book entitled “Army of Entrepreneurs” to capture our formula.

Creating and refining that formula has been one of the greatest sources of psychic income I’ve gotten from building the firm. There is something incredibly satisfying about watching someone discover that they can make things happen.

It also suggests something important: agency may be a muscle.

Put people in an environment where they’re repeatedly expected to make decisions, solve problems and recover from mistakes, and they accumulate evidence about themselves:

I had an idea. I acted on it. Something happened. I adjusted. The outcome changed.

Do that enough times and your view of yourself begins to expand.

You stop thinking, “Someone should do something about that.”

You start thinking, “I can do something about that.”

Years ago, watching this happen inside our company made me wonder about raising children with these qualities. If a workplace culture could seemingly increase agency in adults, could a family culture do the same thing for kids?

I became sufficiently obsessed with the question that I eventually co-wrote a book with a PhD in child psychology called “Raising Can-Do Kids.” The premise was provocative: Could we “manufacture” more entrepreneurial children? Not necessarily children who would someday start companies, but children who believed they could figure things out, solve problems and affect the world around them.

I’ve been obsessed with the subject ever since.

And I think there’s an uncomfortable paradox for those of us who are parents.

We desperately want to raise capable, confident children. But in our desire to help them succeed, we can inadvertently remove the very experiences that teach them they are capable.

We solve the problem. We make the call. We remind them of the deadline. We intervene when something goes wrong. We smooth the disappointment. We use our own agency on their behalf.  We do it out of love.  We do it to save them pain.  I admit I have done it many times.

Perhaps that’s the real challenge in developing agency in our employees and in our children. You can’t simply tell someone to believe they can shape their own life.

You have to give them enough opportunities to discover that they can.

That tricky balance is where the magic lies.

Follow Jen’s Leading in Volatile Times Newsletter on LinkedIn.