How Leaders Can Build a High-Agency Culture.

The article focuses on how leaders can build a high-agency culture by deliberately shaping organizational beliefs to make effort feel worthwhile, action possible, and progress visible. Using General Electric’s turnaround under CEO Larry Culp as a case study, it highlights that agency is a learnable capability supported by three mechanisms: attention, anticipation, and agency itself. The article outlines four leadership practices to foster high agency, including designing mastery experiences, auditing and replacing limiting beliefs, rewriting explanatory stories about setbacks, and building systems that embed agency as a structural default. This approach aims to upgrade an organization’s “invisible operating system” of shared beliefs to sustain engagement and effective problem-solving amid challenges. [Extracted from the article]