Gordon MacKay MBA, BSc(Hons), BA(Hons) FAPM 

Sellafield Project Management Capability Lead, and APM Author ‘Evolving Project Leadership from command and control to engage and empower. 

Committed to promoting wide acknowledgement and adoption of leadership quality in fostering the realisation and release of both individual and team potential reflecting neuroscience and psychology exposing detrimental and counter-productive impacts of traditional heroic stereotypes.  

Session | Navigating the tensions of uncertainty through autonomy and agency 

There is a tension between the project leader protecting their own autonomy, while increasingly driven by delivery in complex, if not almost chaotic delivery environments, to actively foster and empower both delegated team, and individual, engagement and ownership.  

Feeding into the above tension is the fact that securing engagement necessitates what, for some is a clear and present threat to their leadership autonomy: bestowing ‘agency’ on the team (elements of ‘holocracy’).  

At the same time there is a powerful need to recognise that neuroscience research evidence workplace mental health increasingly eroded where ‘agency’ removed by traditional ‘command and control’ stereotypes imposing unquestioning compliance, and obedience.  

The above fosters recognition per Eric Berne’s ‘Transactional Analysis’, of the need to move from ‘Parent-Child’, to ‘Adult-Adult’ relations, across the integrated project team to foster synergy and collective collaboration.