Announcing our upcoming book!
We are excited!! Our forthcoming book will be entitled:
The Power of Agency
Cultivating autonomy, authority, and leadership in every role
The journey of change and higher performance is about the need to enable and support greater agency for individuals and teams. Agency ensures that people of all backgrounds, identities, tenure, and roles have the power and voice to make decisions and choices related to their jobs and the success of the organization. When people can exercise their agency, they feel greater ownership, not only for their area of responsibility but for the larger enterprise. They become the COO of their own jobs. Leaders' and managers’ roles shift to removing barriers and setting parameters to enable greater autonomy, trust, and collaboration.
A central premise of the book is that agency exists in all people. Agency cannot be bestowed or given; it needs to be unleashed. In this book, we discuss why agency is critical to creating a higher performance workplace that retains and leverages talent. It provides practical tools for leaders, teams, managers or supervisors, and individual contributors to unleash agency in their day-to-day interactions and roles. The book explores some of the common barriers and practices that block people's ability to exercise their agency. This book provides the next step in the evolution of inclusion in the workplace and what is needed to unleash the talent, skills, and contributions that all people possess in order to create higher organizational performance.
The following is how we see agency as the next step in the inclusion journey:
There is a common saying used to distinguish diversity from inclusion and how life needs to be different in the organization: diversity means being invited to the party, whereas inclusion is that you are invited to dance (Cho, 2016).
We believe inclusion and diversity are necessary for creating higher performing workplaces people want to join and contribute their talents. Agency is the next step in this journey. Agency is co-creating the party itself, feeling the freedom to contribute your wisdom, and having the authority to act: decide on the venue, who is invited, the music to play, etc. With agency comes ownership. You no longer feel like a guest at the party or in the organization. At work, this means you can make the decisions and take the actions needed to do your job and you feel empowered to act in ways that uphold the organization’s values and further its mission, vision, and strategies.
We are still in the process of writing the book and would appreciate hearing any thoughts you have about agency in organizations.
Advance sales of the book will start early next year. We hope you and others will find it helpful as we, collectively, evolve organizations so that people can bring all their skills and know-how to their work.
We are pleased to continue our thought leadership related to human differences in organizations, leading to higher individual, pair, team, and organization performance and the ability of each person to do their best work. We want to thank all of you who have contributed to our thinking and work throughout our 51 years, especially our clients, we always learn from you.
Other books that highlight our thought leadership include:
The Promise of Diversity (1994), one of the first books written about diversity in organizations.
The Inclusion Breakthrough (2002), the first book written about inclusion in organizations.
Safe Enough to Soar (2018), one of the first books written about interaction safety in organizations.
And we cannot wait to have one of the first books written about agency in organizations coming in 2024!