How can I help my team regain a sense of agency?

Whilst at the gym today, I listened to an HBR IdeaCast conversation with Martin Seligman, whose work on learned optimism and resilience I have used in leadership programmes for years. He was discussing how people make progress when so much of what happens around them feels beyond their control.

One thing I found particularly interesting was his take on agency, or the belief that we can influence what happens next. It got me thinking about why some teams seem to lose the willingness to act. People stop offering suggestions, wait for decisions to be made elsewhere or simply get on with what they have been told to do. Sometimes we call this disengagement or resistance to change, but I wonder how often it is because experience has taught people that there is little point in trying.

Seligman breaks agency into three elements: efficacy, optimism and imagination. I hadn’t thought about imagination this way before, and I think the distinction offers useful ways for leaders to approach teams that have become stuck.

The distinction matters because people may have confidence in their abilities but little faith in the organisation, or remain hopeful about the future while feeling unable to influence anything today. Before trying to motivate people, it helps to understand what is constraining their agency.

How can I give people more room to act?

A sense of efficacy develops partly through experience. When people see a connection between their choices, their actions and what happens afterwards, they have more reason to believe their efforts matter. When their decisions are repeatedly overturned or their suggestions ignored, that belief can weaken. Start by identifying where people have genuine discretion. What can they decide without approval? What problems can they address? Where do they have the freedom to experiment? Then examine whether the boundaries are clear and whether managers consistently respect them.

Try an influence audit: Ask your team to identify one frustrating issue and sort their possible responses into three categories:

Agree at least one action from the first column, one conversation from the second and, where necessary, one explicit request from the third. The point is to identify where progress is possible without pretending that every constraint can be overcome through individual effort. This builds on Covey’s idea of the circle of control and influence, but adds an important organisational consideration: leaders can sometimes expand people’s actual room to act by removing unnecessary controls or negotiating better agreements with others.

How can I help people challenge beliefs that limit their actions?

Seligman recommends realistic disputation, a technique from his work on learned optimism. Rather than trying to replace negative thoughts with positive ones, we examine whether our interpretations are supported by the evidence. He describes waking during the night, at the age of 84, worrying that he was no longer capable of giving a good HBR interview. Instead of reassuring himself that everything would be fine, he challenged the assumption by recalling two recent interviews that had gone well.

People can make similar assumptions at work. A rejected proposal becomes “Nobody listens to us.” A difficult stakeholder becomes “They will never support anything we do.” One unsuccessful attempt becomes evidence that further effort is pointless.

Try a five-question belief check:

1. What exactly are we telling ourselves about this situation?
2. What evidence supports that belief?
3. What evidence challenges it?
4. What other explanations might be possible?
5. What could we try if another explanation were true?

For example, if a team believes another department always blocks its proposals, examine the actual decisions and reasons given. Is the problem unwillingness to cooperate, competing priorities, insufficient information or something else? Sometimes the original belief will prove accurate. That is useful information too. Realistic disputation is about reaching a better understanding of the situation, not manufacturing optimism.

What can I do when my team expects the worst?

Seligman also describes put it in perspective, a technique intended to reduce catastrophising. This occurs when people interpret an uncertain event as the beginning of a much larger disaster. Imagine hearing that your organisation is planning another restructuring. Within minutes, people may be predicting job losses, the disappearance of their team or the failure of an important project, even though few details have been confirmed. The technique uses four questions:

The final question is particularly useful because it shifts the conversation from speculation towards preparation. The outcome may still be uncertain, but people can identify information they need, relationships they should strengthen or contingencies they can develop.

Why not try this out with your team? Take one uncertainty that is creating anxiety and work through the four questions together. Capture what is known, what is assumed and what people can do next. Avoid making promises about outcomes that nobody can guarantee.

It is equally important to recognise people’s emotional responses. Anxiety and frustration can be understandable reactions to uncertainty. Helping people regulate emotions and develop everyday resilience can support better judgement without dismissing legitimate concerns.

How can I help people imagine different possibilities?

Imagination is perhaps the most interesting of Seligman’s three components of agency. We often encourage people to become more confident or persistent, but spend less time helping them challenge what they believe is possible. Seligman discusses abductive reasoning: developing plausible explanations for observations when the available evidence is incomplete. It is particularly relevant when a team has become attached to one explanation for a problem and can no longer see alternatives.

For example, a matrix team might conclude that slow decisions are caused by poor collaboration. That might be true, but other explanations could include unclear decision rights, competing incentives, overloaded stakeholders or different interpretations of priorities.

The three-explanations exercise is good for exploration. Take a problem the team has struggled to resolve and ask people to develop three genuinely different explanations before discussing solutions. For each explanation, ask what evidence supports it, what might challenge it and what action would make sense if it were true. In complex situations, progress sometimes requires a different explanation before it requires a better solution.

How can I create evidence that progress is possible?

Seligman describes agency and progress as mutually reinforcing. Believing we can make progress encourages action, while experiencing progress can strengthen that belief. This suggests that leaders should not wait until everyone feels confident or optimistic before taking action. A meaningful achievement may provide the evidence people need to attempt something more ambitious.

Try a small progress experiment. Agree on one issue the team can influence, one change worth testing and one way of recognising whether it helped. Keep the experiment manageable, but make sure it addresses something that matters to people.

At the review, ask four questions:

1. What did we try?
2. What happened?
3. What did we learn about our ability to influence the situation?
4. What should we continue, change or try next?

An experiment does not need to succeed completely to be valuable. Discovering that an approach does not work, or that a constraint lies elsewhere, can improve the team’s understanding of what is possible. However, avoid turning every minor achievement into a celebration. People are more likely to regain confidence when they can see meaningful changes in their work, not when leaders simply declare that progress has occurred.

Is the organisation undermining people’s sense of agency?

There is an important distinction between psychological agency and the actual ability to influence outcomes. Sometimes people feel powerless because the organisation has repeatedly demonstrated that they have little room to act. A leader who encourages initiative while retaining unnecessary controls, regularly overturning decisions or leaving conflicting priorities unresolved is unlikely to restore agency through optimism exercises.

Try a constraints review. Ask people to complete two statements: “We are expected to take responsibility for…” and “But we cannot influence…” Look for mismatches between expectations and authority, resources, information or access to decision-makers. Then identify what you can change directly, what needs negotiation with others and what must be escalated. In a matrix organisation, this connects closely with creating accountability without authority. This is where leadership responsibility becomes particularly important. Sometimes the most useful intervention is helping people challenge their assumptions. At other times, it is changing the organisational conditions that made those assumptions reasonable in the first place.

A practical 30-minute agency conversation

The following exercise brings the ideas together and gives leaders a structure to explore being in a place of power.

The most important part is what happens afterwards. Make sure agreed actions are supported, organisational barriers are addressed and the team returns to examine what it has learned. Without follow-through, another discussion about empowerment may simply reinforce people’s belief that nothing changes.

Three questions for reflection

1. Where have people in my team stopped trying because they no longer believe their actions make a difference? What experiences have contributed to that belief?
2. Which assumptions about our challenges might be preventing us from seeing alternative possibilities? How could we test those assumptions?
3. What could I change about decisions, responsibilities or organisational constraints to give people more genuine influence over their work?

Regaining agency is not about convincing people that everything will turn out well. It is about helping them understand their circumstances more accurately, recognise what they can influence and discover new possibilities for action. Leaders can support this through better conversations, meaningful experiments and, where necessary, changes to how work is organised.

Further reading: Developing agency in yourself and others

Taking initiative – Explores how leaders recognise opportunities and act without waiting for direction. Particularly relevant when people have become reluctant to make decisions or take responsibility.

Optimism as a leadership trait – Examines optimistic and cautious tendencies, including their strengths and limitations. Useful for understanding how expectations influence persistence without overlooking genuine risks.

Perspective expansion – Looks at how leaders move beyond familiar assumptions and explore different viewpoints. Closely connected to the imagination component of agency.

Emotional self-awareness – Explores how recognising emotional responses can help people make more deliberate choices when uncertainty, anxiety or frustration are influencing their thinking.

How do I lead through ambiguity and uncertainty in a matrix organisation? – Considers how leaders can help people make progress when decisions are interdependent, circumstances remain unclear and formal authority is limited.

Sources

• Seligman, M.E.P. (2026) ‘What it takes to make progress when the future feels out of control’, HBR IdeaCast, September. Listen to the podcast and read the transcript.
• Seligman, M.E.P. (1990) Learned Optimism. New York: Knopf.
• Reivich, K. and Shatté, A. (2002) The Resilience Factor. New York: Broadway Books.