The Leadership Paradox

Teams are complex with individual personalities, capabilities and dynamics. How to create a team culture that unlocks high performance, the “empowered edge”, is one of the greatest challenges for leaders, particularly as organisations scale and face increasing change and competition. Inspired by the themes explored by an incredible line up of speakers and experts at the final event of Wavelength Connect 2025 in September, we’re turning our attention to the challenge of empowerment and autonomy. Speaker Rob Burnet, Founder of Shujaaz Inc, put it beautifully when sharing his ‘a-ha moment’ when speaking to a roadside bar and restaurant owner employing young women in Kenya. He was working on a research project exploring how they could improve the outcomes for young women by increasing use of contraception: “you give them agency – that’s how you change behaviour”.

Now picture this: two teams; the first is brimming with talent. They have the skills, the budget and the potential, but they struggle to get traction, waiting for permission, final sign-off, agreement on next steps from their leader. The second team moves fast, driven by sheer enthusiasm, but they often burn effort and resources moving in the wrong direction.

Both scenarios share the same leadership failure. The classic leader’s mistake is equating control with competence.

In dynamic, high-stakes or creatively demanding environments, this impulse crushes the two things modern teams need most: agency and urgency.

Agency is permission to act, make appropriate decisions and take ownership. It fuels autonomy, pride and ultimately self-direction. Urgency is the fierce, mission-aligned momentum to execute now. It is focused intent, not manufactured stress or panic. And its outcome often results in strategic advantage.

True high performance leadership engineers the ecosystem where agency is the fuel and urgency is the speed. It’s about ensuring every team member is empowered to act, not to wait. Waiting creates competitive lag.

Challenging the Theory: When Real World Stakes Intervene

Traditional leadership theory relies on clean, linear models of delegation and hierarchy. These models fail the moment the environment becomes complex or requires split-second judgment. In the real world, the leader must step back from teaching what to do and instead focus on teaching how to think and how to act under pressure.

Leadership Lesson 1: Delegating Authority, Not Just Tasks

Few environments demand instant decision-making authority like military aviation. Mandy Hickson, shared her experience as the first woman to pilot the Tornado GR4 jet on the frontline, providing a chillingly clear lesson: split second decision-making is the difference between mission success and catastrophe. It was only thanks to having clear agency that she was empowered, making a decision, flying a combat mission at 500 knots, that probably saved not only her but also her colleagues. This lesson proves extreme accountability demands extreme agency.

Leaders in these high-stakes roles must provide rigorous training and clear frameworks or boundaries, and then trust their team completely to make the decision when the moment demands urgency. The decision-making muscle must be built and delegated long before the pressure hits. If a leader only delegates the task, but not the authority to execute it fully, they have created a bottleneck, not a high-performance team. Trust must be built before the crisis.

The Purpose-Driven Engine: Sustained Urgency Through Mission

While the military demonstrates urgency in ‘split-seconds’, business leadership often requires holding that momentum for years. How do you generate and keep urgency without relying on perpetual panic and creating extreme stress?

Leadership Lesson 2: Inspiring Ownership Through a Moral North Star 

We also heard from Mike Barry, the architect of Marks & Spencer’s revolutionary Plan A. He shared with us how this complex, decade-long, multi-billion-pound initiative required shifting the entire supply chain and culture of a legacy retailer toward sustainability. You cannot micromanage a change of that scale.

Mike Barry’s genius was connecting every action; from changing packaging materials to optimising logistics, to a powerful, moral purpose bigger than the quarterly profit margin. He taught teams that their work wasn’t just a cost centre or a compliance burden; it was essential to the planet and the brand’s enduring reputation and future.

This massive purpose acts as a moral North Star. It provides high-level agency, allowing thousands of people across the organisation to make complex, locally correct decisions with deep conviction and sustained urgency. When the why is clear and powerful, teams engaged effectively and aligned, the how is managed autonomously.

The Culture of Trust: Unlocking Pride and Talent

Agency is not just an operational tool; it is a catalyst for individual talent and pride. To truly unlock high-performance talent, leaders must address the emotional component of permission.

Leadership Lesson 3: Engineering Psychological Safety as a Catalyst for Agency 

Rob Burnet, CEO of Shujaaz Inc and a creative talent nurturer, focuses on the deep link between trust and creative output. His philosophy centres on the idea that agency is the direct pathway to personal pride, motivation and discipline and unlocking latent talent.

The moment a team member knows they are trusted to bring their best, most original solution to a challenge, they move past compliance and into pure, professional pride. Their work becomes an expression of their competence, not just a contractual obligation.

For leaders, a practical takeaway from Rob’s story is to truly listen out for the authentic voice that connects us and underpins our truth and then allowing that to flourish, removing barriers along the way. This psychological safety provides the ultimate foundation for people to exercise agency and bring their best, most autonomous thinking to the table.

A Blueprint for Empowerment: Engineering the Agency/Urgency Ecosystem

The lessons from the pilot, the purpose-driven executive, the creative nurturer and storyteller converge into a model for The Generative Leader: one who designs the system for empowerment. The Wavelength Model for building Agency and Urgency requires three key inputs:

1. Clear Guardrails (The “What”): Define the mission’s non-negotiables, the core values, and the ultimate destination. This is the purpose (Mike Barry) and the training (Mandy Hickson). Key Rule: Define the boundaries, not the path.
2. Radical Trust (The “Permission”): Explicitly grant the authority to act (Agency). Empower the team to make decisions up to a certain budget threshold, or decisions that impact a specific functional area immediately, without requiring escalation. Ask: “If this person is accountable for the outcome, why shouldn’t they have the agency to determine the action?”
3. Rapid Feedback Loops (The “Learning”): Leaders must ensure team members quickly see the impact of their decisions, positive or negative. This instant feedback reinforces learning and validates the use of their delegated authority, fuelling the next cycle of aligned urgency (Rob Burnet).

The Result: A Virtuous Cycle

The combination of these elements creates an unstoppable feedback loop:

• Agency leads to pride and personal investment.
• Investment leads to self-motivated urgency.
• Urgency leads to decisive action aligned with purpose.
• Decisive action delivers results, reinforcing agency.

Becoming the Generative Leader

The most powerful advantage a business can build is not speed alone, but speed delivered through conviction.

The shift required for the modern leader is profound: stop trying to be the answer provider, the plate spinner (at its worst), and start trying to build the architecture. Your role is not to control the outcomes, but to engineer the ecosystem—defined by clear purpose, radical trust, and safe boundaries—where agency and urgency thrive naturally in every single team member. Lead from the front by trusting your people to make the decisions that matter.