Scaling Autonomy: Helping Leaders and Teams Climb the Agency Pyramid
✓ High agency is a primary way for every professional to innovate in the modern workforce.
✓ The Agency Pyramid provides a clear roadmap to help individuals and teams have a greater impact.
✓ We help leaders support their colleagues and help individuals move up the ladder from reporting problems to executing solutions.
✓ Tools like Gemini and ChatGPT, if used properly, can provide the support necessary for professionals to move toward Level 5 with precision.
Visionary leadership requires building professional agency within every member of an organization. I recently encountered a framework that perfectly illustrates this path through five levels of professional performance. This Agency Pyramid transforms how we view problem-solving and individual growth.
From @businessbarista on X https://x.com/businessbarista/status/1978988763620741503?s=20
At the lowest level, an individual simply identifies a problem and walks away. As professionals climb the pyramid, they find causes and suggest possible solutions. A significant milestone for any high-impact professional happens at Level 4. At this stage, you identify the issue, analyze the root cause, and recommend a specific path forward. The peak of the pyramid is Level 5, where the problem is resolved independently and reported back to the team retroactively.
While reaching the summit is an extraordinary achievement, my work focuses on encouraging the climb for everyone in the organization. Whether you are a leader guiding others or an individual looking to increase your own reach, we can make good use of Large Language Models (LLMs) to bridge the gap. For those new to the term, LLMs are the underlying technology behind popular tools like Gemini, Claude, and ChatGPT. These are specialized reasoning agents that provide the analytical support necessary for professionals to innovate.
When you face a roadblock, an LLM acts as a strategic thought partner. Instead of waiting for a manager to provide direction, a professional can use the agent to research complex causes and simulate potential outcomes. For example, you might ask a reasoning agent to analyze a project delay and suggest three mitigation strategies based on current data. This process allows them to have a greater impact by arriving at solutions faster.
This shift creates a high-performance transformation. By helping individuals move toward Level 4 and Level 5, we build a culture of deep accountability. Leaders move from being a bottleneck for minor decisions to leading a streamlined engine of execution. Empowering everyone to use AI as a reasoning tool allows them to climb the pyramid more effectively. This ensures that the entire team stays focused on the visionary work that defines a grounded agentic frontier.
If you are a leader ready to help your team climb the Agency Pyramid, or an individual professional ready to have a greater impact, I can help you use LLMs such as Gemini to implement these specialized reasoning strategies. Let's work together to empower your growth and close the gap between identifying hurdles and clearing them.
