Power vs Agency in Leadership

The most interesting leadership paradox is this:

You can have enormous power in an organisation and still feel like you have very little agency.

Titles expand, authority grows, but the ability to decide how things are done narrows. Investors enter the room, markets impose expectations, teams grow large enough that culture becomes harder to steer.

Suddenly the person with the most power in the organisation may feel like the one with the least freedom.

Conversely, early-stage founders often have tremendous agency.

They can move quickly, make decisions without bureaucracy, experiment with ideas freely, but they lack power in the broader market.

Power enables you to influence outcomes. Agency is how you wield that power.

You can have one without the other and transitioning from one to the other is what we call the messy middle.

Power determines what you can influence. Agency determines who you become while influencing it.

Cutting Through The Messy Middle

Without power, leaders struggle to execute.

Without agency, they struggle to lead authentically.

Understanding how to hold both, is what makes a leader effective in their role.

Power allows a leader to shape their environment. It determines the scale of impact they can have, the resources they control, the direction they can set, the systems they can influence. Agency, however, determines how that power governs judgment, priorities, the willingness to make difficult decisions when circumstances become uncomfortable.

Without power, leaders struggle to execute, their vision remains theoretical.

They see the problems clearly but lack the leverage to change them.

Without agency, leaders may control large systems yet still operate reactively.

They defer difficult conversations, avoid decisions that might create friction, or allow external pressures to dictate the direction of the organisation.

Over time, teams recognise this instinctively: A leader with authority, but little clarity.

The leaders who cut through the messy middle are the ones who understand that power expands the scale of their decisions, but agency determines the integrity of those decisions.

They use power to create environments where good decisions can be executed.

And they use agency to ensure those decisions remain aligned with the long-term health of the organisation.

In practice, this often means making choices that are not immediately comfortable:

• Challenging culture before it calcifies.

• Resisting short-term incentives that erode long-term value.

• And setting boundaries that protect both the company and the people within it.

This does not make you the most charismatic or the most visible leader, but it makes you the most trusted one. Teams can recognise the difference between leaders who simply hold power and those who exercise agency with intention.

And trust, more than authority, is what allows leadership to scale.

A Note on Women in Leadership

For women in leadership, this dynamic often carries an additional layer of complexity.

Many women enter leadership spaces that were historically designed by and for men.

Over the past few decades, women have slowly gained access to positions of power within these structures. But power does not always translate into agency.

Some women find themselves holding senior titles while still operating within unspoken expectations about how they should behave, speak, or lead:

• The pressure to maintain soft authority.

• To remain agreeable.

• To avoid appearing “too straightforward.”

  
  

The consequences of this extend beyond the individual and into organisational culture.

When women leaders feel unable to exercise full agency, this message travels downward.

Younger women observe what is acceptable, and adjust to the limits being modelled.

And so, the cycle continues.

The opposite is also true, but when women leaders exercise both power and agency with clarity, making decisions confidently, setting boundaries, shaping strategy, the ripple effect is equally powerful. It expands what leadership can look like.

The Leadership Question

So the question remains:

As leaders, are you wielding your power well?

Power changes the structure around us, agency determines how responsibly we operate within it. The most respected leaders are the ones who exercise their agency most intentionally.