Locus of Control: Are You Making Things Happen?
I was opening a leadership session with a group of law enforcement supervisors — experienced professionals who deal with high-stakes decisions every single day. I asked them the question I open almost every session with:
"Do you make things happen? Or do things happen to you?"
The room got uncomfortable fast. Because the honest answer — for every one of them, including me — is that it depends on the day, the situation, and the circumstance.
That's the real conversation about Locus of Control. And it's one that most leadership development programs treat too simplistically.
The Science Behind the Concept
Locus of Control is a concept rooted in decades of psychological research. At its core, it describes the degree to which a person believes they have agency over the outcomes in their life.
Internal Locus of Control: I make things happen.
Leaders and individuals operating from an internal locus believe their actions, decisions, and mindset directly influence outcomes. They take ownership. They adapt. They ask "what can I do differently?" when something goes wrong rather than searching for external causes.
External Locus of Control: Things happen to me.
Those operating from an external locus feel that their outcomes are primarily determined by forces outside themselves — their organization, their manager, their history, the market, systemic barriers. These forces are often real. But the belief that they are the primary driver of outcomes removes agency from the equation.
The Organizational Dimension Nobody Talks About
Here is where the leadership conversation gets uncomfortable — and important.
External locus of control is not simply a personal mindset failure. In many cases, it is a reasonable response to the actual conditions a person has experienced.
When an employee has raised ideas that were dismissed. When a leader from a marginalized background has watched less-qualified colleagues advance faster. When an organization's stated values and its lived culture are two different things — and everyone knows it.
In those environments, an external locus of control is not irrational. It is a logical adaptation to a system that has provided real evidence that effort and outcomes are not reliably connected.
This is the equity dimension of locus of control that most leadership conversations skip. And it matters enormously — because you cannot build a high-performance, genuinely inclusive culture while ignoring the experiences that have taught some of your people that their agency has limits.
What Leaders Can Do
Creating conditions that cultivate internal locus of control across your team requires more than inspiration. It requires structural change. Here's what that looks like in practice:
Give people real ownership over meaningful work — not just tasks, but outcomes they can genuinely influence and be recognized for.
Build a culture where honest mistakes are learning opportunities, not performance file entries. When the cost of trying is too high, people stop trying.
Close the gap between your stated culture and your lived culture. People experience the culture through their direct supervisor. If the organization says "everyone's voice matters" but certain voices are consistently talked over in meetings, the message received is clear.
Actively sponsor and advance people whose path has historically been less supported. Representation at the table is not just a diversity goal — it is evidence, visible to everyone, that agency and effort produce results.
Leadership begins with modeling. The manager who sighs and says "nothing ever changes around here" is broadcasting an external locus to their entire team. The leader who says "let's identify what we CAN control and move on that" is modeling something entirely different.
A Question Worth Sitting With
At the end of that session with the law enforcement supervisors, one of the participants said something that has stayed with me:
"I realized I've been blaming the system for things I actually have the power to change. And I've been blaming my team for things the system has actually taken away from them."
That's the locus of control conversation that builds leaders. Not just the one about personal accountability — but the one that holds both truths at once: that individuals have more power than they often claim, AND that systems shape what agency looks like for different people.
Both are true. Great leaders hold both.
WANT TO GO DEEPER?
Locus of Control is a foundational module in the Potential Unleashed LeadUp Workshop and is woven throughout IDEAL: From Overcoming to Becoming. Visit potential-unleashed.com to learn how we bring this work to organizations or to book Jahmad for your next keynote or leadership summit.
Check out Jahmad talking about Locus of Control in this video below.