Agency and communion: The big two

I talk a lot about the need for employee agency in culture definition - that ability to shape one’s own conditions, make one’s own calls, find one’s own place in the room. It’s crucially important. It contributes to our sense of purpose and helps us to bring our whole selves to work. 

Employees in cultures without agency stop offering opinions (or are afraid to do so), stop taking risks, and stop caring whether the team or project succeeds because it was never really theirs to shape.

But agency on its own is a lonely (somewhat selfish) business and without communion, collaboration, innovation and ultimately success are almost impossible.

Psychologists have had a name for this pairing since the 1960s: the 'Big Two' - agency and communion. Agency is about mastery, separation, getting ahead. Communion is about connection, cooperation, getting on. 

A culture built entirely on the first, without the second, doesn't produce confident individuals. It produces what researchers call ‘unmitigated agency’. That is, drive with no counterweight, and it produces exactly what you'd expect: transactional relationships, personal gain over collective welfare, selfish decision-making and cultures that good people leave because of the actions of a few.

We saw this play out at scale in recently published research. A study of over 200,000 earnings calls from 3,567 CEOs found that agency alone - ambition, assertiveness, competitiveness - had no measurable link to company performance. None.

What did predict outperformance was communion: language demonstrating relationship-building, collaboration, concern for the people around them. 

CEOs who combined high agency with high communion beat everyone else. Those with high agency and low communion came last.

Communion isn't the ‘soft’ add-on to a hard-driving culture. It's the thing that stops agency curdling into something stagnant or combative.

None of this makes agency the problem. A workplace where nobody has a say, no autonomy, no room to grow is its own kind of miserable. Indeed the first quarter of my culture workshops is spent purely on agency.

But a workplace where everyone has plenty of say and no shared purpose is just a room full of people optimising for themselves. Communion is what turns ‘my place’ into ‘our place’. It's where individual growth gets pointed at something bigger than the individual. This is why three quarters of my culture workshops are dedicated to communion.

Agency gets people to the table. Communion is what they build once they're sitting there.