Leaders Are Losing Their Sense of Agency — Here's How to Reclaim It
· Nia
Leaders Are Losing Their Sense of Agency — Here's How to Reclaim It
Something uncomfortable is happening in boardrooms and Zoom calls across the world. Leaders — the people we expect to be decisive, bold, and in control — are quietly withdrawing. Not quitting. Not burning out in the dramatic, headline-grabbing way. They're just... pulling back. Doing less. Caring less. And that should worry all of us.
Merete Wedell-Wedellsborg recently wrote about this phenomenon in Harvard Business Review, and it struck a nerve. The thesis is simple but devastating: leaders feel their agency eroding, and instead of fighting back, they're starting to disengage.
The Agency Crisis Is Real
Let's be honest about why this is happening. The last few years have thrown more chaos at organizational leaders than most MBA programs could ever prepare them for. A global pandemic. The AI revolution. Remote work wars. Economic whiplash. Geopolitical instability. And now, in 2026, the expectation that every leader should somehow be an AI strategist, a mental health advocate, a DEI champion, and a financial wizard — all at once.
It's not that leaders aren't capable. It's that the scope of what "leadership" means has expanded so fast that many feel like they're playing a game where the rules change every quarter.
Here's the part that doesn't get talked about enough: when you feel like your decisions don't matter — when the market, the algorithm, the board, or the macroeconomic environment will override whatever you choose — why would you keep choosing boldly?
That's the agency trap. And it's a mindset problem as much as a structural one.
Why Withdrawal Feels Rational (But Isn't)
When agency erodes, withdrawal feels like self-preservation. You stop volunteering for high-stakes projects. You default to "safe" decisions. You let the committee decide. You optimize for not-failing instead of winning.
And here's the insidious part: nobody notices immediately. Unlike a dramatic resignation or a public meltdown, withdrawal is silent. It looks like steady, competent management. But underneath, the leader has checked out. The boldness is gone. The vision is on autopilot.
I've seen this pattern in founders too. Especially those who raised capital during the boom years and now find themselves managing a company that doesn't feel like theirs anymore. The investors want one thing. The market wants another. The AI hype cycle demands a third. And the founder? They're just trying to survive the next board meeting.
AI Is Accelerating the Problem
Here's a take you won't hear in most leadership seminars: AI is making the agency crisis worse, not better.
Harvard Business Review also published research showing that AI doesn't reduce work — it intensifies it. The promise was that AI would handle the grunt work so leaders could focus on strategy and vision. The reality? AI creates more options, more data, more possibilities to evaluate, more decisions to make. It's like giving someone a firehose when they asked for a glass of water.
When every email can be auto-drafted, every report can be auto-generated, and every strategy can be "optimized" by a model, what's left for the human leader? Paradoxically, more work, not less. Because now you have to evaluate, edit, approve, and take responsibility for outputs you didn't create.
The leaders who are thriving in 2026 aren't the ones who adopted the most AI tools. They're the ones who maintained clarity about what decisions are theirs to make — and refused to outsource their judgment to a dashboard.
Reclaiming Agency: A Practical Framework
I don't believe in vague advice like "just be more intentional." Here's what actually works, based on patterns I've observed in leaders who've navigated this crisis:
1. Shrink Your Decision Surface
You don't need to have an opinion on everything. The leaders with the strongest sense of agency in 2026 are ruthless about defining their "decision domain" — the 3-5 areas where their judgment matters most — and delegating or ignoring everything else.
Jeff Bezos used to talk about "one-way door" vs "two-way door" decisions. The principle still applies: spend your agency on the irreversible stuff. Let everything else flow.
2. Build a "No" Practice
Agency is exercised through refusal as much as action. Every time you say yes to something you don't believe in — a meeting, a strategy pivot, a hire — you erode your own sense of control. Start tracking your yes-to-no ratio for a week. If it's heavily skewed toward yes, you're probably operating on autopilot.
3. Create Before You Consume
The fastest way to feel agency in the morning is to create something before you open your inbox. Write a memo. Sketch a strategy. Record a voice note about what you actually think (not what the data says you should think). This sounds simple, but it rewires your relationship with your day. You go from reactive to generative.
4. Have a Conviction List
Write down 5 things you believe to be true about your business, your market, or your team. Not things the data supports — things you believe based on your experience and intuition. Review them monthly. Act on them. This is the antidote to the "analysis paralysis" that AI-era leadership breeds.
5. Talk to Other Leaders — Honestly
The agency crisis thrives in isolation. When you think you're the only one feeling overwhelmed, withdrawal seems like a personal failure. When you discover that 70% of your peer group feels the same way, it becomes a shared challenge you can address together.
Peer networks like YPO, EO, or even informal founder groups aren't just networking — they're reality checks. Use them.
The Bigger Picture
Here's what I really think: the agency crisis is a feature, not a bug, of the transition we're living through. We're moving from an era where leadership meant having answers to an era where leadership means navigating ambiguity. That's genuinely harder. It requires different muscles.
But withdrawing isn't the answer. The organizations that will win the next decade are the ones whose leaders stayed in the arena — messy, uncertain, and imperfect as it is.
Your agency isn't something the world takes from you. It's something you stop exercising. And the moment you recognize that, you can start taking it back.
One decision at a time.