For this month's column, I've decided to discuss how to maintain agency in a corporate environment. "Agency" is the capacity to act intentionally, make meaningful choices, and influence outcomes. Personal agency has been under assault for over a century as independent, small farm and business people have transitioned to working for "the man" - where they are told what to do, how to do it, punished for not doing it as prescribed, and subjected to systemic removal of human effort through automation and AI - that could even leave you in the cold. People continue to make that transition for the benefit of steady paychecks, benefits, and possibly a career growth path. All predictable and safe. Until it's not.
The corporate world rewards compliance and predictability. K-12 schooling trained society's participants to be that way. Those educational institutions really don't educate - they create factory workers. For example, economics is the most overlooked and untaught subject - what is it that you are earning with your time? It's hours of your life, a truly limited supply, when others can conjure money out of thin air. You certainly can't teach that or the game is up!
Hierarchies, bureaucratic processes, risk-aversion, and gatekeeping can quietly erode and individual's sense of ownership, turning capable professionals into executors of someone else's strategy under their terms. Maintaining agency in these structured environments is not only possible but profoundly valuable, both for personal fulfillment and long-term effectiveness.
Employees have to navigate layers of approval, standardized metrics and dashboards, and shifting priorities set from above. Even high performers can experience "learned helplessness," where initiative feels futile. Decisions are centralized, credit is diffused, and failures carry disproportionate personal risks. I'm not implicating all corporations and firms in doing this, but there certainly are degrees. In my humble opinion, the healthiest corporate cultures accommodate both a structured path for those who thrive in them and a high-autonomy tracks, that thrive on intrapreneurship, with a flatter organization in specific operating units. High agency drivers tend to gap at the edges of an organization - sales and R&D. Non-linear thinking, along with personal initiative tend to reward those in this kind of role.
The way to best maximize agency inside an organization is to clearly understand your 'internal locus of control'. This means to focus on what you can influence - like networking relationships, skill mastery, and proactive problem identification. High-agency individuals reframe constraints as parameters for creativity, finding pockets of autonomy in how they execute tasks or serve clients. With a strong track record of rare expertise, strong internal and external networks, and a track record of results makes one difficult to sideline. The more out-of-the-box thinking, the more you stand out.
Speaking as a literal 'agent' working in a sales agency, there is a lot of differences I can spell out versus a direct seller for an OEM. First, agents (acting as manufacturer's reps) can typically offer a broader solution portfolio. Agents in our industry tend to stack multiple principles offering a wide range of solutions. Having a "flatter" organization - decisions come faster, as does customization (e.g. deviating from standard/default products), and responsiveness. Trust develops over long periods of time since an agent will stay in such a gig longer than those climbing a ladder and turning over every couple years. Focus is certainly customer centric. Think of all the agents you encounter in your daily life and you can see how the focus is on you and your needs. Real estate agents. Insurance agents. Travel agents. Freight agents. Literary agents. Talent agents. Corporate talent agents (headhunters.) People in these agent roles only benefit when the client gets what they want or need. That incentive alignment is where the magic happens. Then there's the dreaded IRS agent and many other federal agents - no incentive alignment there. That's pure coercion and gives the word "agent" a bad name.
I certainly get why corporations exist and why people prefer working in that environment. I did it for 30 years. Resource availability and sharing is the big one. The first thing I noticed as an independent agent was the lack of IT, HR, Finance, Contracts, and logistics support. None of that comes into play when recognizing and solving customer issues, so that's what I like to do. I like being the match-maker when everyone wins.
Now the word "agent" is getting a big boost in the world of AI. Traditional AI responds to prompts. The next level is when AI agents are goal driven and can handle longer workflows, recover from errors, remember context, and orchestrate actions across systems. There is literally no limit to how many AI agents will be working in the background in the future. There are plenty of examples of autonomous systems that can perceive environments, reason, plan, use tools (like software and databases), make decisions, and execute multi-step tasks to achieve goals with minimal human intervention.
AI garnering most of the conversation around agency is going to only grow. Single individuals will be able to expand their own value by activating AI agents in a coordinated way. A solopreneur can tap AI agents to do all the work you used to have to hire someone. And they will not be getting crap either - most AI agents are trained off data from the world's brightest minds.
I think I say this nearly every time I complete a new column...the world is amazing and the future is exciting. I'm so glad I am in the generation that gets to witness this accelerated technological wave. There's no telling how far it will go. How many agents will you personally have in 10 years? Will they be human?
Steve Sena (stevesena@me.com) is a Cincinnati native. He obtained degrees in Paper Science & Engineering from Miami University in Oxford, OH and an MBA concentrating in Economics from Xavier University. He's worked for a broad array of leading producers, suppliers, and converters of pulp and paper grades.
