The team looks great on paper.

Experienced. Capable. People who know the industry, know the clients, know how an agency runs under pressure. You have invested in them. You have promoted from within, backed the ones with potential, built a team that should by any reasonable measure be running alongside you.

But they are not running alongside you. They are waiting for you to tell them where to go.

The ideas do not come. The commercial thinking does not surface. The ownership that should exist at that level the proactive spotting of opportunities, the decisions made without being prompted is largely absent. And you find yourself driving everything, wondering why a senior team that looks so strong on paper requires so much energy to move.

Before you look at the team, look at the conditions you have built around them.

What do you actually mean by initiative?

This is the first question worth sitting with honestly.

When MDs tell me their senior team lacks initiative, I ask them to be specific. What are you not seeing? What does initiative actually look like at that level, in your agency, in the role each person holds?

The answers are usually clear. They want people to come to them with ideas before being asked. To think commercially, not just deliver what is in the brief. To spot a client problem before it becomes a crisis. To own their area without needing to be prompted at every stage.

Those are reasonable expectations of a senior team. The question is whether the conditions exist for those behaviours to develop or whether something in how the agency operates is quietly working against them.

What happens when your team does bring ideas?

Think back to the last time a senior person came to you with something new. A different approach to a client relationship. An idea for a service the agency could offer. A concern about how a project was being run.

What happened next?

Was there genuine space for that conversation where thinking out loud was safe, where a half-formed idea could be explored without immediate judgment, where getting it wrong in front of peers was part of how good thinking develops? Or did it land in a week where you were too deep in the operational detail to really engage with it? Did it get a fair hearing, or did it move too quickly to why it would not work?

Most MDs, when they are honest about this, recognise the gap. Not through any bad intention. But because the operational urgent has a habit of filling every available hour, and the strategic conversations the ones that build a culture where initiative is expected and rewarded never quite find the space they need.

Initiative does not appear in a vacuum. It grows in specific conditions. Where people feel genuinely heard. Where their thinking is taken seriously. Where the psychological safety exists to bring something that might not land, without it counting against them. When those conditions are not present, capable experienced people go quiet. Not because they have nothing to contribute. Because they have learned that contribution does not go anywhere.

Why engagement is your responsibility, not theirs

Gallup's research on this is unambiguous. Seventy percent of the variance in team engagement is determined by one factor alone, the manager. Not salary, not tenure, not the market conditions the agency is operating in. The manager. Which means the initiative gap your senior team has is not really theirs to fix. It belongs to the conditions being created around them. You can read the full research here.

Gallup describes engagement through a hierarchy of needs not unlike Maslow's. At the base: do people know what is expected of them? Do they have what they need to do their work well? Only when those foundations are solid can anything above them develop. The sense of contribution, the belonging, the growth, the initiative that shows up as the behaviour you are looking for. All of it builds from the bottom up.

"When the MD is below the line — reactive, in the detail, pulled into the operational urgent the base of that hierarchy quietly erodes. Expectations become implicit rather than explicit. Direction shifts with the week. People learn to wait for clarity rather than create it."

The senior team is not disengaged by choice. They are disengaged by design without anyone intending it, and without anyone naming it until the frustration becomes difficult to ignore.

What actually motivates your senior people?

Here is what the research consistently shows, and what I see confirmed inside agencies. People are not primarily motivated by pay. They are motivated by purpose. By a genuine reason to be there. By feeling that what they do matters and that someone is curious enough to find out what drives them as individuals.

When did you last sit with each of your senior people not to review performance, not to talk through a project but to get genuinely curious about what gives them energy? What they are not getting enough of. What they would do more of if the space existed. What a good year looks like to them, not to you.

"The answer to the initiative question is almost always in that conversation. Not in a new process or a team away day. In the specific, unhurried conversation that treats them as individuals rather than as a function."

Most MDs have not had that conversation recently. Not because they do not care but because the week never made space for it.

Where to start

The shift does not require a culture overhaul or a new engagement programme. It starts with two things.

First, create the conditions for initiative to exist. That means psychological safety — genuine space where ideas can be brought without judgment, where senior people can think out loud in front of each other without it being used against them. That is a leadership behaviour, modelled from the top, not a team activity.

Second, get curious before you get frustrated. Before you conclude that someone lacks commercial thinking or ownership, find out what is actually driving them. What they care about. What they are worried about. What they have been sitting on because the space to say it has not been there.

Your senior team are present. The question is whether they are engaged. And that, the research will tell you and experience confirms, is your role not theirs.

I have made a short video on what above the line leadership looks like in practice including how to create the conditions for a senior team that leads rather than waits. Watch it at leadershipline.co.uk/atl_video

Suzy Malhotra is a leadership adviser to MDs and founders of creative, events, experiential and exhibition agencies. She ran an agency inside this industry for nearly thirty years. The Leadership Line — leadershipline.co.uk