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At Nous, we believe in the sustaining power of great organisational leadership. Over the past two years, we have launched the Nous Leadership Way (NLW), a leadership model and development program that articulates the core principles of effective leadership at Nous. Developing NLW has prompted Managing Principal and CEO Tim Orton to think more broadly about the challenges of great leadership, the attributes of great leaders, and how we think about these at Nous.
At its core, leadership is about enabling others. Whether it is a Prime Minister announcing a policy platform as a roadmap for governing, a company CEO launching a strategy for the rollout of a new product line, or an Army General defining the Commander’s intent in military operations, effective leadership involves aligning independent – often disparate – individuals and teams around common goals. Leaders have limited time, so they must create the conditions for others to succeed.
Providing the room for people to act autonomously, while also giving sufficient clarity of direction so that they do not feel lost, isn’t easy. The micro manager errs in providing too little autonomy; the absentee manager in providing too much. Getting the balance right is a key challenge that all leaders face.
Agency is one of thirteen tenets of the Nous Leadership Way (NLW), our organisation’s leadership model and philosophy. Our leaders embody this tenet when they enable the people they lead to have clear expectations, feel accountable for their actions, grow professionally and deliver great work.
Agency enables individuals and organisations alike
Over my career, I have found that agency has remarkable benefits, both for individuals and collectives.
When individuals are given agency, they tend to take ownership and produce higher quality work than if they were more tightly controlled. Over time, this tends to lead to greater employee engagement, more rapid professional growth, and higher quality work. This is the virtuous cycle of agency. It gives people both the freedom to act as they see fit and the responsibilities that this entails.
At Nous, this is reflected in our commitment to an ethos of self-management. Outside of projects, where a clear hierarchy for decisions and responsibility is important to deliver good outcomes for clients, our consultants do not have managers or direct reports that allocate them work. The devolution of responsibility through self-management empowers our staff to use their time effectively and efficiently.
Agency also enables organisational growth without a commensurate increase in bureaucracy and complexity, both of which tend to stifle innovation and creativity. In a famous slide pack that describes Netflix’s company culture, CEO Reed Hastings describes how his company avoids the chaos that can come with scale by investing in people rather than rules. The Netflix model is to “increase employee freedom as we grow, rather than to limit it, to continue to attract and nourish innovative people, so we have a better chance of sustained success.” In other words, for Netflix, agency is paramount.
At Nous, I have found that, by prioritising agency, we are able to sustain a fluid organisational form as we grow. This limits the need for costly and stifling management structures while facilitating the cross-organisational collaboration that enables us to deliver better outcomes for our clients. The big challenges facing our clients, after all, seldom conform to the discrete business offers of consulting firms.
Agency is a tightrope walk
While agency is a potent force, it is difficult to get right. Helping a recent graduate to succeed in unfamiliar professional settings is very different from supporting a new employee with decades of sector experience. Agency thus requires leaders to understand the confidence and capability level of their colleagues, knowing what will stretch and challenge them without overwhelming them. It requires sophistication, nuance, and an attentiveness to context.
Agency is also a balancing act at the collective level. As an organisation grows, new ways of working are inevitably required to facilitate cooperation at scale, manage risks and avoid organisational chaos. One can avoid bureaucracy up to a point, but the limits of human cognition require processes and mechanisms to manage complexity and prevent organisations from becoming schemozzles.
Leaders need to actively create and sustain agency
Leaders can enable agency among the people they lead by being attentive to several factors:
- Agency begins with clear and shared expectations about where the team or organisation is headed. A clear vision sets the foundation for success. Expectations should be ambitious but realistic.
- Expectations must be coupled with a clear view of how the team or organisation will get there. This requires balancing autonomy against clarity. Too much autonomy with too little clarity creates scope for disappointment, while too much clarity and too little autonomy is stifling. The right combination enables teams and organisations to work out how they will get to where they want to be.
- Finally, agency requires a clear view about what will make it possible to achieve expectations. This requires leaders to be attentive to the confidence (belief), capability (skills) and capacity (time) of the people they lead to ensure that expectations are reasonable. Again, these elements need to be aligned. If capability exceeds confidence, a leader will need to help manage an abundance of caution in their teams. If confidence exceeds capability, leaders may need to manage an excessive risk appetite. And if the capacity of an individual or team is not aligned with their confidence and capability, expectations will need to be adjusted accordingly.
Where leaders combine each of these elements in the right quantity, they can promote a sense of agency in the people they lead and realise the individual and collective rewards that agency makes possible.
Get in touch to discuss how you can better create and sustain agency within your organisational context.
Connect with Tim Orton on LinkedIn.
This is the sixth article in Tim Orton's 'Exploring Great Leadership' series. It was originally posted on LinkedIn on 3 July 2025.
Read the other pieces in the series:
