Agentic Leadership is about leading with AI, and leading along AI. “With AI” means having AI amplify your leadership practices by providing details and insights that you might not see yourself. “Along AI” means the use of AI will influence the psychodynamics in your organisation, causing often irrational thoughts and anxiety among the employees. So, Agentic Leadership is not about replacing good and well-known leadership practices with something new. Agentic Leadership is about amplifying leadership through AI. It is also about navigating complexity at high pace while providing opportunities and psychological safety for those employees that are affected by the use of AI. Popular speaking: How do you lead when your team is a mix of humans and AI agents?

Most AI transformations are focusing on the business advantages and the technical aspects of the introduction of AI. Only a few are concerned about leadership and the cultural implications of AI, and even fewer are doing something concrete about these aspects. History has shown that doing transformations – like Agile or digital transformation – without properly addressing leadership and culture will cause disastrous results, or no results at all. Culture still eats strategy for breakfast, and it most likely will do that until the end of time.

Leadership is about getting people to do things that they would not have done otherwise. Leadership is about setting direction and guard rails so employees understand what they are supposed to do and why they are doing it. Leadership is about providing an environment where employees can succeed and grow, have autonomy and room for manoeuvre, as well as having a sustainable work–life balance. Leadership is also about having an orientation towards achieving goals, giving inspiration and being guardians for teamwork.

Leaders must understand the complexity of organisational dynamics, and leaders must be able to navigate amid uncertainty and hyper competition. Leaders must know that it is the whole person that comes to work every day and that people’s lives over time include joy, excitement, sorrow, anxiety, losses and fear. Leaders must understand that each person is unique and that their needs vary over time, and leaders must understand that each person is doing what makes sense for them and acts according to personal intent.

Leaders must act accordingly to those understandings!

If you think leadership was difficult in the past, guess what – it has become even more difficult with the introduction of AI. Practicing Agentic Leadership is a way to support you under these circumstances..

Have you ever been surprised by how employees have reacted to a certain event in your company? It could be an announcement about changing the structure of the organisation, a change of strategy or simply introducing a new operating model. You surely have. The question is: why did employees act in an unforeseen way? Well, this is due to psychodynamics playing in.

Your organisation – whether it is a team, a department or something larger – can be seen as a system that takes input from the surrounding world, crunches this and delivers output back to the surrounding world. This is done through what we could call the main assignment. We often think of this as linear work: we go straight forward by following standard operating procedures with predictable output. We are in control by use of plans and task breakdowns, where the employees are doing what is expected of them. Humans acting like semi-automated robots – or AI agents, if you will.

Although we often make plans that build on such assumptions, it usually does not play out like that. Here is why: there are deeper layers in an organisation than just getting jobs done. We can call them psychodynamics, which is about the employees’ often having irrational thoughts about the job they do and what else is going on in the company. The psychodynamics influence the main assignment and vice versa. Psychodynamics are caused by we as humans all having our own individual understanding of what is going on. Truth is plural in human interactions, and we are all acting due to our personal intentions. We all have fantasies about the motives of our opponents, and we are afraid of looking incompetent or stupid. At the same time, we are also hardwired to unconsciously act on feelings of threat or reward. All of this leads to irrational behaviour.

Introducing AI will amplify the psychodynamics that are at play in your company because people are concerned about what this will mean for them. How will it influence what they do? Can they manage the change? Will they lose their job? Will they be able to have time for their families now they need to grow new competences? Will they be able to pay their mortgage?

As an Agentic Leader, you must be a catalyst for change, and part of this is to provide the best possible environment for your employees. They and you will most likely fail with some of the change initiatives along the way, and while failing due to lack of engagement should not be accepted, failing will be inevitable. It is about providing enough safety so the employees do not fear failing so much that they are not taking initiative. In many organisations, the penalty for failing is harder than the penalty for sitting on your hands. Is that what you want? Guess not. Your employees should not fail due to doing stupid things, but you could consider making it part of your culture that if you do not occasionally fail, you are not trying hard enough.

Ingredients in providing a safe environment for your employees are, first of all, your ability to be a role model. Next, it is your emotional intelligence. If you state that failing is an opportunity to learn but you react strongly to failing with hard consequences for those that failed, then it does not work. You must practise what you preach to provide positive psychodynamics in a safe environment.

Self-awareness is the ability to identify and understand your own emotions and how they are affecting the way you perform and act. It is important not to ignore your emotions but face them no matter how uncomfortable it feels. The author of this text has, for example, the awareness that when being tired, he has a tendency to feel sad or have anxiety without necessarily being able to name the current source for it. This is most likely caused by a burnout with stress back in 2003, which will be in his backpack for the rest of his time. He seeks to prevent these uninvited feelings by, in general, having eight hours of sleep every night, and when they come, he can name them and by that reduce the impact of them.

This leads to the next domain: self-management, which is about being in control of your feelings, preventing them from doing harm to you and others. It is okay to show your feelings, but as a leader it is important to express your feelings in appropriate doses. Almost nothing is worse than having a manager that is out of control and bursts out with capital-letter vocabulary when something has gone wrong. So self-management is about being in emotional self-control – not neglecting your feelings but using them appropriately to achieve the outcomes you desire. A major part of this is your ability to adapt to what is currently going on and having a positive outlook for how you may influence the situation for the better. Positively reframing negative emotions and thoughts, without being naive, is a key component of emotional self-management.

So far we have addressed Emotional Intelligence on the personal level, and when it comes to leadership, your ability to be the master in your own house is essential for your ability to influence others. But there is more to it, so let us look into the social aspects of Emotional Intelligence.

Social awareness is your ability to read the organisation. To what degree you are aware of what is going on around you. This is about how well you sense the organisational climate: how the employees react to some recent events. What has the introduction of AI caused in the company? Are people concerned about job security? Are people stressed out by the accelerated pace of how things are happening? Do people make sense out of the latest change of strategy? Leaders with high emotional intelligence meet people with empathy. Not in the sense that resistance to change is always appropriate and anything goes, but merely in the way that you ask yourself: "If it makes sense for them to act in this way, and if they do this with the best intentions, what are they then trying to tell me?" Having a curious and appreciative approach to what is going on is usually productive, even when employees seem to act in a counterproductive way.

Social awareness is also about mapping the informal networks in the workplace as well as employees' perception of the power structures of the organisation. Who is influencing whom, and how are decisions being made? It is important to know.

Finally there is social management. This is about how you are able to influence others. Your success in this domain builds on how you master the three other domains as well as how you are able to provide inspirational leadership for the employees. Being visionary, role-modelling and helping people make sense of the mission are things you need to focus on. A leader with good social and relation management skills is a guardian for teamwork as well as confident and competent in managing conflicts. You do not necessarily need to know all the details of what your employees are doing, but your ability to coach and mentor them will be a catalyst for success.

As said, the introduction of AI will highly influence the psychodynamics in your organisation, and as an Agentic Leader your Emotional Intelligence is a great help for you and others to cope with the complexity and anxiety AI will cause. The good news is that Emotional Intelligence can be learned by addressing the aspects shared in this article.

Have you ever experienced a situation where somebody is taking the lead and forming the generally accepted opinion about something, while the rest are simply complying with that, no matter that they initially disagreed? I guess you have, as this is happening all the time. It happens in families, in groups of friends, in companies and in political parties. Somebody is grasping the power, and anyone else is letting them.

How can that be?

Well, let's explore power as this is part of forming the psychodynamics in your company.

Power is often seen as something you have because of your position. This is to some degree right. However, power is not something absolute, it is rather a ratio or a balance that can be influenced by various factors. Norbert Elias, a German sociologist, was the man behind this thought. Back in 1969 he stated: "The master has power over the slave, but the slave also has power over the master, due to the services provided and the master's dependency on those." It basically means that you do not have more power than people are allowing you to have.

What influences this power ratio?

Your formal position is part of that equation, of course, but it does not mean as much as you think. Information is an ingredient in power. If you know and your opponent doesn't, that gives you an advantage in the power game. Loyalty is another ingredient. The relationship you have with others, and their loyalty towards you, beats any position your opponent may have. Personal confidence also plays in. Research has shown that people who feel confident are often seen as more knowledgeable, skilled, charismatic and convincing than those who have less confidence. This is particularly true for males. For confident females it might backfire as they can be seen as being too much ahead of themselves.

Another driving force for power, and maybe the strongest one, is people's imaginations about what the opponents' use of power will cause. We see this again and again in international politics as well as organisations: patriarchal leaders getting away with bad or even unethical behaviour, because nobody is calling them out on it. People remain silent and do not act because they are afraid of the consequences of speaking up. Often their imaginations are way beyond what actually could happen if they spoke up. Power can be utilised in counterproductive ways simply because it is being allowed.

The introduction of AI will amplify all that has been shared in this article so far.

So, as an Agentic Leader you need to have the awareness of what imaginations others might have about your utilisation of power. You simply cannot control what they think, and no matter how hard you try to keep the power distance low, they might unconsciously still see it as being huge and present. As discussed in a previous article, your emotional intelligence is your primary tool for preventing people's imaginations of you taking your usage of power too far. Your awareness and personal reflections about how the employees might interpret your sayings and actions, can help address matters and act in a way that will not increase the perception of the power distance.

There is no silver bullet to prevent the unfortunate impact of power dynamics in your interaction with employees. What works is investing in the relationships, being present and interested in them as human beings. Over time their imaginations of your power and your utilisation of it will begin to converge with how it really is.

Take the perspective of the natural phenomenon of murmurations, where a flock of starlings forms various patterns in the sky. When they do this, it is due to the presence of a predator and their desire for survival. When starlings are flocking, there is not a Chief Executive Bird orchestrating the event. No, each individual bird is deciding on its own how to fly. Most likely, three simple rules are at play: 1) Fly at a constant distance from the surrounding birds. 2) Fly at a constant pace relative to the surrounding birds. 3) Fly towards the centre of the flock, as this must be the safest place.

In the theory Complex Responsive Processes, murmurations are used as a metaphor for the social dynamics in an organisation. It tells us that we may have strategies and plans, but what is really going on in the company happens because the employees are doing what makes sense to them. They are acting according to their own individual intentions, so the social dynamics are the result of the interplay of intentions among the employees. That means you, as the leader, cannot control what is going on. Control is an illusion, and the sooner you accept this, the sooner you can start learning how to navigate the complexity of the dynamics in your company.

Leadership is about getting people to do what they would not have done on their own. But how can you lead if they are always acting according to their own intentions, doing what makes sense to them? Your best bet is to work actively with sensemaking.

Sensemaking is, in many ways, how our brain tries to connect the dots. When unexpected things happen, we try to make them fit into how we generally see the world. We look for patterns in our attempt to make things fall into their right place – even when things are not really fitting. As a leader, you are most likely using various models like DISC, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, or the Tuckman model. These models are not 100% correct; they are simplifications of something more complex. Models are like maps: they do not have the same level of detail as the landscape itself; sometimes they are even wrong, but they help you navigate to your desired destination.

When leading through sensemaking, there are a number of aspects you need to address. Most importantly: direction, guard rails, and environment.

Direction – It is impossible to find your way if you do not know where you are going. All too often, employees have vague understandings of the purpose and goals of what they are doing. This makes them confused, sceptical, and hinders them from taking responsibility for achieving results. They might just blindly follow orders; they will constantly come back to you to verify their actions. If something goes wrong, they will use their energy to find excuses for why it went wrong rather than finding ways to make things go right. As their leader, you must clearly communicate the purpose and goals, and you must do it again and again so they can make sense of what they are doing.

Guard rails must also be clearly marked. For you as a leader, communicating the guard rails is usually more difficult than communicating the direction. For the employees, it is also usually more difficult to understand where the lines are. Depending on the psychodynamics in your organisation, they might understand them as tighter or wider than intended. Often, employees understand guard rails as more restrictive than intended. That will limit their room for manoeuvre and reduce their possibility for success. Sometimes, the employees simply make up their own rules that are more limiting than you intended. Truth is plural in human interaction, as we all see things differently and all have our own intentions. With guard rails, you often need to check in with the employees and clarify misunderstandings. In doing so, it is generally better to link this to what we intend to do rather than making a lot of rules about where the lines are. But metaphorically speaking, occasionally the guard rails need to be electric fences rather than lines painted on the lawn.

Environment – There needs to be a suitable context for employees to be motivated and succeed in what they are doing. Inside the guard rails, room for manoeuvre to achieve results and personal growth is a must for employees to feel motivated. Often, employees do not see the full potential of what they can and may do. Here, you help them by being their coach, helping them to see the big picture and unlock their potential to achieve the best possible outcome. The environment is heavily linked to the organisational culture and your ability to act as a role model – a quite difficult task to do.

Going back to the metaphor of murmurations, there is one more important lesson for you.

When watching starlings flocking, you can recognise the various patterns they form, but no matter how long you observe them, you will never be able to predict the next pattern. It is totally random and therefore unpredictable. The same unpredictability exists in your organisation. Running initiatives to shape the dynamics and culture in an organisation, you need to work with sensemaking while adopting an experimental approach. Build this on hypothesis testing and feedback loops. The metaphor tells us that a successful experiment only proves that, in this instance – with these people, in this context, at this particular time – it was like this. Repeating the experiment – even with the same people, in the same context, but at a different time – might yield another result. When you are leading people, do not take things for granted, and do not be unpleasantly surprised when something different from what you expected happens. Leading people is about navigating the complexity of organisational dynamics and human interactions.

If we look at how, for example, software development was done prior to the AI revolution, software architects were defining the structure of systems, senior developers were programming the complicated parts of the software, and junior developers were developing the simpler parts while being mentored by seniors. Through this, junior developers could build up their experience and competences, and through hard work, sweat and maybe even tears, they could reach a senior level over years of practice. With AI taking over what junior developers are doing – and maybe even some of what senior developers do – your company will, over time, lose the opportunity to grow experienced seniors. Experience and competences come through hard work, which includes a long chain of failures and successes. The question is: how do you substitute this in an AI-driven world?

Prior to the AI revolution, software was, to a great extent, developed by using Agile practices like Kanban or Scrum. Some think that with AI, Agile is no longer needed, while others – like the author of this article – think it is even more important than ever before; it is just the practices that must change while the focus on value creation and human interaction remains. Agile operated with cross-functional teams, where the collective competences of the members should cover what was needed to get the job done, end to end. It was recommended that a team consist of some five to nine persons, and there were usually also a variety of seniority levels in the teams. Working towards shared goals gave opportunities for knowledge sharing and growing skillsets.

With AI as part of the equation, teams will most likely consist of a few humans and many AI agents. The humans, acting as initiators, reviewers and integrators of work, while the AI agents are doing the "dirty" work. You can get a lot of work done in such a setup. But is it the right stuff, and is it of the right quality? Only competent and experienced developers can verify this – at least for many years to come. Once it is no longer needed, well, then digital illiteracy will truly take hold.

As an Agentic Leader, you need to think about sustainability, and you need to consider having the right competences in the future. Like saving up for retirement, you need to invest in future competences already today; otherwise, your company will lose its competitive advantage in the future. Consider how you will help your teams organise their work so that mentorship and knowledge sharing will continue, while your company benefits from the great advantages that AI will bring. In Agile, we use the latest responsible moment as a core factor for when to make decisions or act. To secure sufficient future competences, the latest responsible moment for this is most likely now.