Why agency is evaporating in university teams – and what to do about it

The quiet loss of agency in Higher Education

There’s a common frustration that we hear from many leaders in HE: why won’t colleagues step up? Why does every decision get pushed upwards? Why do team members wait to be told what to do?

None of this is unusual. In fact, it’s a rational response to the environment people find themselves in.

Repeated restructures, frequent leadership turnover, top-down decision making, cycles of cost-cutting, power structures, and ongoing uncertainty about the future all play a part.

Over time, taking the initiative becomes risky, while waiting for permission becomes the safer option.

When agency is missing, it isn’t because people lack ability. It’s because the system has shaped behaviour to suppress it. And if that’s the case, then trying to unlock agency by simply encouraging people to take it tends not to have much impact.

You need to change the conditions in which people are working.

What agency actually looks like in teams

When we talk about agency – the ability to make decisions and act independently – we don’t mean in an abstract way. It appears in practical ways when people feel able and allowed to improve things.

You can spot it when:

• people suggest ideas rather than waiting for instructions
• problems get fixed locally rather than endlessly escalated
• teams experiment, learn and iterate
• individuals feel ownership of their work

Small signals, big impact

Agency isn’t dramatic. Often it looks quite ordinary in small improvements and small decisions. But taken together, it changes the feel of a team.

Importantly, agency doesn’t appear because someone has been told to take ownership. In fact, that instruction can sometimes have the opposite effect, particularly in systems where people have learned that acting without permission carries risk: “You want me to take ownership? You want me to stick my neck out? You want me to take the fall when it goes wrong?”

Instead, agency seems to emerge spontaneously when the conditions are right.
It has to be safe enough.
It has to feel equitable.
And it has to be within the person or team’s sphere of influence.

These conditions can be hard to create in HE right now, when job security feels low, when reorganisations leave many over-burdened and the challenges being faced seem to be structural and monumental in scale.

Three practical ways to unlock agency

Here are three ways to try creating those conditions for people to take up their agency:

i. Invite people into the problem

In our work we often come across teams that have never been asked to think strategically about the challenges.

I had a conversation with a client recently who had been asked to review the efficiency of their workflows, to help them do more with less. They enlisted the help of their team: “If we were asked to redesign our processes, what options might exist?” they asked.

Instead of going straight to the answer, the team explored a spectrum:

• Do nothing
• Tweak processes
• Partial redesign
• Full rebuild.

The team’s feedback from this exercise was marked: no one had ever asked them to think like this before, and they really engaged with the task. They felt ownership of their recommendations and were motivated to make some changes, including initiating conversations with other teams to set up some trial ways of working.

Once people begin exploring a problem, they inhabit it. Research consistently shows that involving employees in problem-solving increases engagement and performance because people are far more committed to solutions they help shape.

That shift is subtle: it’s not about dictating solutions, but about creating space for them to think and act.

ii. Make it safe to share imperfect work

A common barrier to agency is when people hesitate to share work until it’s finished and perfect. Previous experiences may have taught them that sharing something incomplete can lead to criticism, confusion, or extra work.

Leaders, on the other hand, can find themselves frustrated that they’re only seeing things at a late stage, when changes are harder to make and their feedback might feel like too much too late.

What it does

One small intervention we’ve seen in use is the ‘scrappy first draft’: explicitly labeling early drafts as rough and intended to surface ambiguity, invite early feedback and remove the fear of criticism. They are straw models for breaking down and rebuilding.

Why it works

The ‘scrappy first draft’ works when everyone understands it’s part of a process, where leaders clarify what they want, peers chip in ideas and everyone knows the initial feedback is formative.

No one minds when this version gets a radical overhaul – that’s what it is for.

But everyone needs to be explicit that this version is the Scrappy First Draft. Without that context, early drafts can backfire – people expecting something more formed might panic, take on the work themselves or lash out. Others may feel criticised, frustrated, or unsure of expectations.

Research from Google’s Project Aristotle highlights that psychological safety is the number one factor in high-performing teams—people need to feel safe to take risks, including sharing incomplete ideas.

It’s worth overexplaining to colleagues: signal clearly what you want, and what the draft is for.

iii. Start with small improvements

A third way to cultivate agency is to give people small manageable problems to fix or improve, and give them the freedom to solve that problem as they see fit.

The work doesn’t need to be monumental – the goal is to enable people to experiment and discover what they can achieve. In so doing, they’ll release their own agency.

For example, we recently supported a cross-faculty coalition to improve a single administrative process: one form with a fair amount of manual handling used across multiple faculties and hundreds of modules. A small project to fix, but lots of stakeholders with differing needs, policy implications and student wellbeing at the heart of it. Instead of waiting for a major system overhaul, they got the right people in the room, made use of existing tools, built a simple prototype, tested it quickly, learned and iterated.

The results were tangible: time saved, relationships strengthened, and individuals discovering previously unrecognised skills. The prototype itself was good enough and safe enough to have an impact until something more formal could be built.

More importantly, the mindset shift was profound, the coalition team started to believe “We can fix things around here.”

The real benefit wasn’t the process improvement – it was the emergent sense of agency, the confidence to experiment, and the collective momentum that followed. It demonstrated, in a very practical way, that change was possible.

In fact, the team were eager to tackle the next problem.

So give teams:

• A contained problem
• Autonomy to solve it
• Permission to experiment

Why this matters now in universities

All of this sits within a wider context. Universities are dealing with financial pressure, changing expectations from students, and rapid shifts in technology. It’s understandable then that the focus often turns to cost reduction, structural change, and tighter control.

But these responses carry an unintended consequence: they reduce the very capability institutions need most – the ability of teams to adapt, improve, and solve problems locally. It’s less safe, there’s less capacity and time, and less freedom to operate.

The hidden cost of control

When decision-making becomes more concentrated, and uncertainty remains high, the system inadvertently teaches people to wait, to defer, to hold back.

And that rapidly reduces the organisation’s ability to respond well.

Here’s a related example.

A client in a senior role shared their PDR with me. The role carried a lot of responsibility across a very broad range of activities. Reading the PDR made me feel a bit twitchy. One KPI in particular really made me nervous: “Zero reports of health and safety breaches. No remedial actions required.” On the surface, that reads as success.

When teams are smaller, pressure higher, the desire for control in the face of ambiguity so much stronger, this sounds like exactly the thing we want – no safety breaches, no additional work needed to put things right.

But what kind of behaviour might this encourage? If zero reports are what’s wanted, that’s most likely what you’ll get. No near misses, no lessons learned, no incremental improvements. No conversations, no shared responsibility, no expectation of fixing it. No agency taken.

In practice, framing an outcome of ‘no mistakes’ often discourage reporting, hides learning opportunities, and reinforces risk-avoidance. When people fear consequences, problems go underground instead of being addressed early.

A more enabling measure would be regular reporting of near misses and rapid remediation – creating a culture that would make learning safer, more visible, and iterative. Airing problems together motivates people to fix them. And in this case, would ensure that major problems were solved more quickly.

The systemic nature of the problem

There are plenty more ways we gently drain our collective agency. Siloed, hierarchical structures, committee-based decision making, and the primacy of academic over professional services can all contribute.

Creating protected spaces for agency

So what can you do?

In practice in our work with clients, we strive to create a protective ‘bubble’ around a project: a space safe enough for experimentation, shielded from misinterpretation or hierarchical encroaching. It’s easy for us, as external consultants, to carry some of the risk – we are visible reminders of the senior sponsorship of the project.

Even then, those spaces are fragile. A junior colleague might try to build a network and be met with suspicion, simply for reaching out. Or constructive suggestions in a project may be misread by a senior observer, threatening the momentum. Culture has a way of self-correcting – often in ways that inhibit initiative rather than reward it. When the choice is experienced as between control and risk, it’s understandable why many of us default to the former.

These dynamics are systemic, not about blame. The solution is careful, sustained cultivation: creating small, safe spaces for agency, monitoring the system for points of friction, and being ready to respond and ‘reinflate’ bubbles when the system pushes back in an effort to maintain the status quo.

The three tools to unlock agency described above can help with that.

A better question for leaders

With all this in mind, here’s an alternative to the leadership frustration I mentioned at the start. Instead of asking: “Why won’t my team take more initiative?”, a better question might be: “What conditions would make initiative feel safe and worthwhile?”

Agency isn’t something that can be required. It tends to emerge – gradually – when the conditions support it.

And when it does, the effect can be cumulative. Small shifts in behaviour, building over time, leading to something more adaptive, and more capable, than any single intervention driven by a Leader could produce.

👉 If this resonates – and you’re navigating change, culture shifts, or leadership questions in your institution – we’d be glad to talk about how to support your teams to work together better. Send us a message or book a call here.