Agency Isn't Born. It's Earned in the Rooms We Create.

If you could give your children one quality, which would you choose? The Economist's Bartleby column poses that question in The quality you should most wish for your children, and its answer, drawn from economist Deborah Cobb-Clark of the University of Sydney, is a strong one: an internal locus of control. People with an internal locus believe their actions shape their outcomes. People with an external locus believe luck, fate or other people decide for them.

The research the column gathers is persuasive. People with a greater sense of agency search harder for work after losing a job, save more and are likelier to turn plans into action. Expectant mothers with an internal locus invest more effort in parenting. And people routinely underestimate how often others will say yes when they ask for help.

For managers, the column suggests testing for agency in hiring, linking rewards clearly to achievement and setting norms that prompt people to act, with guardrails.

I agree that agency may be the most valuable quality a person can have. But I would change one assumption underneath the argument.

Agency Is Earned, Not Just Inherited

The column treats agency largely as a trait: something to wish for, screen for and reward. Traits matter. But in my experience, agency is built far more than it is born.

I define conviction as the earned capacity to act on what you believe before the outcome is certain. That is very close to what psychologists call an internal locus of control. The operative word is earned. People develop agency through repetitions: they act, they see that their action mattered, and they gain the confidence to act again. Take away those repetitions and even naturally driven people start to believe their efforts make little difference.

The column's own evidence points this way. It describes a study of manufacturing firms in Shenzhen adopting AI. Workers who saw AI as a skill to master shared what they learned. Workers who saw it as a threat to their jobs hid information. That second group is not simply made of different people. It is made of people who read their environment and concluded that sharing would not help them.

Agency is shaped in the rooms we create.

Rooms That Build Agency and Rooms That Drain It

Many workers today feel stuck. In a March 2026 MyPerfectResume survey of 1,000 U.S. workers, 45% said they want to leave their employer but feel unable to act because of concerns about stability, the job market or their own fears. That is what an external locus of control looks like in a career: wanting change but not believing you can make it happen.

In my work, I call one cause of this the edit: the parts of themselves people learn to leave out to fit the room. When people are repeatedly told to follow the process, wait for approval and avoid mistakes, they learn that their judgment does not count. Over time, they stop using it.

In my work on Leadership in the Age of Personalization, one of the five shifts moves organizations from results to methods. The question beneath it is: How do you let them do it? Rooms that leave space for people to choose their methods, take smart risks and learn from the outcome build agency. Rooms that dictate every step drain it.

Standards still matter. The column rightly warns that a culture of acting first without guardrails can go badly. Clear boundaries are an asset. The goal is to set them wide enough that people can practice judgment inside them.

Parents and Leaders Have the Same Job

The column begins with children for good reason. Young people learn very early whether their choices matter. Every time a parent solves a problem a teenager could have solved, or a school rewards compliance over curiosity, a small lesson about agency is taught.

Leaders do the same thing at work. As I explored in Blaming the System Is a Confession, waiting for circumstances to change is often a sign that we have handed our agency away. And as I wrote in Raise the Individual, Not the Resume, the most valuable preparation we can give young people is self-awareness and the confidence to adapt.

Three Questions for Leaders and Parents

Where do the people I lead get real repetitions of choice? Agency grows through decisions people make themselves, not decisions made for them.

What happens when someone acts and gets it wrong? If the answer is punishment, you are teaching an external locus of control.

Do people see the link between their actions and the results? Make that connection visible, in feedback, in recognition and in the stories you tell.

The column is right that agency is the quality worth wishing for. But wishing is not enough. Agency is not handed down. It is earned, one decision at a time, in the rooms that let people make them.

Want to explore these ideas further? Learn more about my work on leadership, identity and conviction at www.theglennllopis.com.