Agency at Work
Hey!
Welcome back to another week of musings.
This is my "birthday week," if that's a thing. Regardless, I hope you had a good weekend and managed to rest.
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Things I discovered in the past week
- I love travel and food shows (I also miss Anthony Bourdain)! But I came across this show from Huckberry called Dirt, which has been pretty good. I watched 2 of the latest episodes.
- I've been trying Claude.ai recently and enjoy complementing some of my side projects with it.
This past week, I had a conversation with a peer. We discussed how past managers enabled their teams to achieve more, seek out more projects, and, in general, achieve higher output.
While listening to this feedback, I asked them why they felt they couldn't do something similar. This question switched the conversation to a bit of self-reflection, and we discussed the topic of agency.
agency: the capacity, condition, or state of acting or of exerting power **
High Agency at Work is frequently discussed on social media and in the overall research at work. Generally, having high agency at work means moving forward whenever you want, finding creative ways to execute, or influencing others to help you.
During our conversation, it became apparent that they didn't feel they had high agency or were in a position to make decisions on behalf of other teams or their manager.
The past managers we talked about shared this trait of high agency and took it upon themselves to pursue these goals, having a high degree of ownership. While it's good to have managers like that, if you want to own your career beyond your current job/role, then I think you need a higher degree of agency because no one else will care more about your career.
And it doesn't have to go toward climbing the ladder. It's also valid to want to exercise your agency for better work-life balance or the support of others.
At the end of our conversation, we set up a recurring time to talk about this agency. I'll also help them pursue a project they've been wanting to push forward for a while but felt unsupported to do so. So, I'll try to provide the coverage required for them to pursue it and set them up for success.
Your turn!
Have you ever wondered if you're a high or low-agency person at work? Do you generally take ownership and have a bias for action, or do you wait for managers to help plan the goals? Let me know by replying to this email!
Happy coding!
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