Founders have agency by default. Everyone else needs it designed.

Agency is not a personality trait. It's a permission structure.

Early in my career I worked in a large, regulated organisation where rules were the point. 550 people, very little room for error. Keeping your head down there wasn't laziness. Often it was the right call. Agency still existed, but it lived in the pockets where a leader made room for it.

Years later I have worked alongside many founders, and I saw what it looks like when leaders drive it.

I've worked with founders who made sure they personally sat in the room whenever policy affecting their industry was being shaped, even when they had people who could have gone for them. I've seen one get in the car and drive to a border crossing to make sure a single new hire got through safely when everything was closing down.

That's agency. Not hustle, not long hours. It's the belief that the situation in front of you can be changed by you, and the habit of acting on that belief before anyone gives permission.

There's a line I like about this: people with a low-agency mindset see life as happening to them, while people with a high-agency mindset believe they are happening to life. [I don't know the original source, so credit it if you can find it, or paraphrase.]

I like it. And I think it's incomplete.

The mindset is often a reaction

Most low-agency behaviour I've seen was learned. Someone took initiative once, it went badly, and nobody backed them. They updated. That isn't a flaw in the person. It's good pattern recognition.

Agency works the same way at any size. A large company can have it, a small one can lose it. What decides it is whether the leadership team drives it too. If leaders talk about ownership and then take decisions back, people believe the second thing.

In a small company, culture is the first minute

When someone takes initiative and it gets messy, what does the leader do in the first minute? Takes over? Sighs? Asks who approved it? Or asks what they learned and what they need?

In a company of 40, that reaction is the culture. Everyone is watching, and they learn faster than any value statement can teach them.

So working in a founder-led small company asks something specific: owning outcomes instead of tasks, being comfortable with ambiguity, saying the uncomfortable thing early, and disagreeing and committing quickly. And it asks leaders to respond to initiative with curiosity before judgment.

What a People person can actually do

I don't think the job is to fix mindsets. It's to change what the environment teaches. A few things I'd start with:

• Ask for the stories.

  Ask people about the last time they took initiative and what happened next. Five of those conversations will tell you more than any survey.

• Run a permission amnesty.

  Have everyone write down what they'd do tomorrow if they didn't need approval. Leadership answers each one within a week: yes, no, or yes with boundaries. The clear "no, and here's why" matters as much as the yes.

• Write down decision rights.

  Who decides what, up to what money and risk? Most "low agency" is really "I don't know if this is mine to decide."

• Kill approvals nobody can justify.

  For every sign-off, ask what would break if you removed it. Include your own People processes. If HR is the bottleneck, it's part of the problem.

• Make failure small and cheap.

  Praise good decisions that turned out badly. People watch that signal harder than any other.

Where I'd push back on myself

Agency without alignment is just fast chaos. Five people each acting boldly in five directions is a collision, not a culture. So every push toward autonomy needs clarity on priorities.

Not everyone should be high-agency about everything either. Some roles need reliability, and some people want a calmer relationship with work. A culture that makes steady, careful people feel like they're failing has missed the point.

And if the leadership team keeps quietly taking decisions back, no employee programme will outrun that. Sometimes the most valuable People conversation is the uncomfortable one with the person at the top.

Why I love this work

Founders who act like this show what's possible. My job is making sure it isn't one person's trait: that a new hire can act like an owner in week three, not year three.

You'll know it's working when people stop asking "can I?" and start saying "I'm going to, tell me if there's a reason not to."