Most people spend a huge portion of their lives at work. So why do so many of us dread it?

In this episode, JR speaks with Debbie Lovich, Senior Partner Emerita at Boston Consulting Group and author of Make Work Work, about why employee engagement has remained stubbornly low for decades despite billions spent on leadership training, culture initiatives, and workplace transformation programs.

Debbie argues that making work better doesn’t require another grand strategy or organizational overhaul. Instead, it comes down to a handful of daily leadership behaviors that create more human, enjoyable, and productive workplaces.

Their conversation covers:

• Why most leadership training fails to change behavior
• The connection between employee joy, performance, and retention
• The five daily practices that help leaders create better workplaces
• Why employee experience should be treated like customer experience
• How co-creation can replace traditional change management
• The role of middle managers in shaping workplace culture
• What leaders get wrong about AI and the future of work
• How anyone—not just senior executives—can improve the culture around them

If you’re a leader, manager, or employee who wants work to be more meaningful, productive, and enjoyable, this conversation offers practical ideas you can put into action immediately.

Subscribe to Career Sessions on YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts for weekly episodes like this.

Check out the full series of “Career Sessions, Career Lessons” podcasts here or visit pathwise.io/podcast/. A full written transcript of this episode is also available at https://pathwise.io/podcasts/debbie-lovich/

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Listen to the podcast here

Why Work Feels Broken (And How to Fix It), With Debbie Lovich

The Stagnation Of Global Workforce Engagement

If we’re honest with ourselves, a lot of us would say that the answer to that question is no. Workforce engagement with a proxy for satisfaction has hovered around 30% in the United States for many years. It’s even lower in other parts of the developed world. If you think about it. It’s a huge failure that we can’t do better than that. What’s fascinating is that we’ve never had more books or frameworks or leadership training and even shows like this one about how to make work better. Hundreds of millions of people just go through the motions every day at work and that’s terrible.

My guest, my friend in HBS classmate Debbie Lovich has spent over three decades working inside some of the world’s biggest organizations. She has been at Boston Consulting Group, advising leaders who genuinely want to create workplaces that are better but they haven’t figured out how to translate that intention into everyday behavior in a way that truly makes a difference.

The problem isn’t that these leaders aren’t trying or that they don’t care. It’s that they’re focused on the wrong things. The way they’re going about it is making things even worse. In her new book, Make Work Work, Debbie introduces five daily practices that when done consistently can transform how people experience work.

It isn’t about launching a big transformation or rolling out yet another HR program. It’s about what leaders can do every single day. In this episode, we’re going to talk about why work feels so broken to so many people, what it takes to create joy at work and how any leader or honestly, any of us can take part in changing our workplaces for the better. I’m J.R. Lowry. This is Career Sessions.

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Debbie, welcome back to the show. This is your second time with me. You must be especially brave.

Maybe especially lucky.

We will leave that up to the interpretation of our audience. Let’s get going. You have a new book out. You spent 30 plus years working at the Boston Consulting Group and advising organizations. What finally pushed you to write a book now?

Defining The Concept Of Radical Employee Centricity

If I look at the ark of my career, I spent the first part thinking that smart people did strategy and operations and the softies did people stuff. Halfway through my career, I realized that, “If I look at all the projects I did for clients and the work I did for clients. They definitely had a great impact, but they didn’t have as much impact as I aspired for them to have.” I started to look at what got in the way. What got in the way? People, leadership, culture, ways of working and behavior.

I started to say, “I have to address this stuff.” I went into work on the people’s stuff. My first client was BCG, and I found out that changing behavior is anything but soft. It is hard, especially senior leader behavior. When you have dozens, hundreds, thousands of leaders, to get them all work differently and to drive value creation. That was the coolest thing I could be doing. That’s what I’ve been doing for the past decade and a half.

In the last decade, I started focusing on what I call radical employee centricity. Which is if you treat your employees as important as you treat your customers and shareholders, there’s tremendous value on lock for the company. It’s not just you employees nice because it’s the right thing to do. Employees who enjoy their work can create so much value. I discovered this thing. I’ve written about it. Now, I want to get those two ideas, the leadership piece and the employee value. They sort of skate together because what is the easiest way to unlock employee value, to make work enjoyable, or the title, my book to make work work?

What’s the easiest way to do that? It’s leaders and what leaders do every day. That’s what the book is for. It’s to get this message out there. Every leader has in him or herself, the ability to make work enjoyable for his or her people and her team or her organization. In doing that, they could unlock so much value for their organizations besides just making the people’s lives better every day.

What’s interesting about this, all these business books have been read. We’re doing training for leaders and employees. Yet, as you point out in the book, work still sucks for a lot of people. What are we getting wrong?

Why Traditional Corporate Training Often Fails

First of all, training doesn’t work. I tell people, and you will appreciate this. You don’t get in shape by watching an exercise video from the couch. Nor do you get in shape by going to a spa for a week because you’ll go back to sitting at your desk all day or your sedentary life. You also won’t get in shape by saying, “I’m going to go to Pilates every morning at 5:00 AM,” because you’re going to hit snooze and you’re not going to go. The way you get in shape is by walking to work, doing walking meetings, building fitness that’s doable into your natural rhythms and routines.

What organizations spend billions on is the spa, the watching an exercise video from the couch or Pilates classes that nobody goes to. It doesn’t take and so the secret to building muscle, to building leadership case stability is not doing off-site, training and webinars. The secret is to make small changes in your day-to-day work that build habits and build muscle. People could understand that work could be better. They understand that leaders could be better, but the answer they’re putting against it, the solution just doesn’t take.

There’s certainly a heavy emphasis on behavioral science that underpins your five practices. The idea that you’ve got to make it simple, habitual, and do it consistently or you’re not going to continue to do it over time. That’s where a lot of these things fall down. A lot of leadership books are at 50,000 feet. They’ll talk about these big thematic things. They don’t bring it down enough to what you can do. A lot of other books do a decent job of that. Your book certainly is very focused on saying, “These are five practices. They seem simple. They’re not as simple as they seem if you want to put them into practice and you’ve got to make them into habits.”

It’s also interesting because there are a lot of books out there that give you a checklist and do these things. One of the things about the five behaviors in the book, the five practices that help them take is that they’re rewarding to do. They’re multiplicative in their impact. This is like doing something that just gives energy and in return, gives you back energy. Hopefully, people get addicted to doing these things because they’re so rewarding to do. You see the multiplicative impact right away.

Let’s get into them. I’ll rattle them off and then I’ll let you explain each of them in turn, celebrate someone, go see and help, be interested, co-create, and do it first. Let’s go through them.

Celebrating People And Embracing Servant Leadership

Let’s start with celebrate someone. I start that chapter with the story about this very senior leader I worked with whose team was not productive, bad morale, and bad culture. I interviewed all of his senior directors one-on-one and they were like, “He hates us. We’re never good enough for him.” This was in a pharmaceutical company, a biotech company. They’re all clinical geniuses. I go back and I tell him, “Your team thinks you hate them.” He’s like, “What? I have the best team on the planet.” I’m just, “When have you told them that?” He goes, “They don’t need to hear it. They know it.” I’m like, “No. They need to hear it.”

This is to celebrate people, every time you have a positive thought about someone, tell the person. Be like,” J.R, you are so awesome because I don’t know how you created this show in your spare time while you work full time. You are this runner, hiker and walker. Where do you find the time for it? It’s amazing.” That’s a specific compliment. I happen to believe that, and it’s true. It’s genuine. Don’t make stuff up or say, “You’re great.” The move. If you think anything positive at any time about anyone you work with, let them know.

By the way, it doesn’t have to just be your team underneath you. It could be your peers. It could be your boss. Bosses are lonely, but you got to get the balance. We know from behavioral science that people need to hear something like five positive things to every negative thing to feel good about themselves. Yet, we’re not saying the positive things. Go see and help is built on servant leadership. If you remember that from agile methodologies.

It’s the notion of going to where the work is and helping people out. What I tell executives is, “You’re meeting at these gleaming corporate headquarters or fancy hotels and you get together all day for your executive meetings. You’ve gotten so disconnected from what’s happening at the rock face of the work. Instead, why don’t you do your meeting in a manufacturing plant or in a retail store or in a distribution center? Before the meeting, go out on the floor and talk to people. Ask them, “How can I make your job easier? What can I take off your plate? What gives you straps?”

When you get to your executive meeting, talk about it at the meeting. I talk about Hubert Joly, who I’m so privileged to have worked with. Hubert was the CEO who turned around Best Buy when Amazon got into consumer electronics and they started going online. If you remember, there was Circuit City, RadioShack, and Best Buy. Circuit City and Radio Shack were out of business. Hubert took this very employee-centric mindset.

Before he took the CEO position, he worked in the stores. He just spent time with the front line and learned what we can do as an organization to help them be more effective in their jobs. He’s written in his wonderful book, The Heart of Business. Everything I needed to know about turning around Best Buy was coming from the front lines. That’s the go see and help. Get on the floor and help folks.

As I was reading that piece, I was thinking back to when I was at Fidelity. This goes back many years. We would do meetings. I can’t remember how frequently we would have them. Maybe every 6 or 8 weeks or maybe every quarter. We would go to a different site to do the meeting, to your point. Most of our organization were call center reps. Thousands of people answering, in that instance, calls from people who are participating in a benefit plan that Fidelity administered like a 401(k) plan or a pension. Every time we met, we would have our meeting but then we’d spend time with the management team there.

We do events with the employee population. They loved the fact that all of us came to them. Even if we didn’t spend a ton of time with them, we were certainly being visible to them. I made a huge difference in those circumstances and it certainly reinforced for me the value of getting out there and being visible to your employees. Make sure that you’re breaking through the layers of management chains and hearing about what their experience is like.

That’s exactly right. You’ve got it. I worked with a client years ago who was big pharmaceutical company. Pharmaceutical companies have huge sales forces. They always have an open territory. The executives would go out for a week a quarter and go sell. That was magical because they were helping out the district manager who was short-staffed. They also were in tune with what it was like at the rock face of the customer interaction. The reaction you get, like what you said, when you were out in the call centers, people loved it. That’s the energy. Remember I said, these are positive things. It makes you want to do it again because people are so happy to see you. It makes them feel like rockstar. It is reinforcing energy.

For sure. Let’s go to the third one, be interested.

Developing Genuine Interest In Employees As Individuals

This is just asking people about themselves. Being interested in the people on your team as a human. Not as a worker. What do you do outside of work? How do you end up here? Where’s your family from? What do you do for fun? What do you want to do long term? What are your career goals? People want bosses and leaders who care about them. You then remember the details. In my contact information for people, in the notes section, I write down the details. The next time I talk to them, I could be like, “How’s your son’s college applications going?” They’re like, “Debbie, remember that?”

It’s being interested in their lives. I get a little bit of push back when I talk about this. Some people are not comfortable talking about themselves. They may be very introverted. That’s fine. Make it safe. Talk about yourself first and don’t go deep to say, “Here’s what I’m doing on the weekend. What are you doing?” If you offer about yourself, that’s also generous. It makes it psychologically safe for them to offer about themselves. It shows your interest in people. It helps people feel valued, not just as someone who does great work but as a whole person, part of your team.

For a lot of leaders, it’s uncomfortable. You get some who are great at walking the floor. They remember people’s names. They remember the details. They can make it seamless. They light everybody up and bring energy. Others are so awkward about it. That it just feels like a horror show for all parties involved. Having a repertoire of questions that you can go to or having a method of engaging people in a way that doesn’t feel awkward for them or awkward for you and your style. It takes time to develop. A lot of leaders are interested in their people and their certainly time constraints.

They can’t engage is deeply in every conversation that they would probably ideally like to be able to. It making the most of those little moments, whether it’s passing somebody in the hallway or bumping into them, going in or out of the bathroom even or in the cafeteria or in the elevator. There’s lots of opportunities for those 30 second conversations that will bring a little bit of extra lift to somebody’s day if you take advantage of them. There’s also the people who just don’t. You stand in the elevator next to CEO and they don’t say a word to you. That’s the thing you’re going to remember. That they didn’t say a word to you. They didn’t even say hi.

The elevator is so funny. The BCG office in Boston, we have floors eight to the top. There are people who get out before but as soon as we hit eight, I’m like, “This is the BCG express. I’m Debbie. Who are you guys?” People appreciate it. It warms it up. These are colleagues, but you’re right, it is awkward. By the way, it’s awkward for the CEO, too. Maybe they don’t know how to do it but they know everyone knows that. You almost have to.

 You almost have to. At the same time, I see a lot of senior leaders who are like, “Pretend there’s nobody in here with me so I can be alone with my thoughts for just a second.” The phone has become the ultimate cure for social awkwardness and unfortunately, it’s making it worse.

Again, as soon as you do all these practices, the positive instant feedback you get just gets you hooked on it. I like talking to random people in the elevator who are all colleagues of mine. I know we have something in common. I like that. I like getting to know people, which is great. The problem starts when people are like, “Debbie, you introduced yourself to me yesterday or last week.” I’m like, “I’m sorry, my brain. Please remind me of your name again.” You got to be okay with that.

You do. I’m terrible at remembering names and I work at it and work at it. Age is not helping that. I will just say to people like, “I’m terrible at remembering names. You may have to tell me your name again, but I will remember you.” It helps take some of the pressure up. It’s admitting a little bit of weakness and vulnerability in a way that people can relate to and it in my case, it’s not just made up.

Prioritizing Co-Creation To Boost Adoption And Engagement

That’s right. It makes you so human as a leader. Even saying, we’re interested. That’s the third. The fourth is co-create. Co-creation is a little harder. Co-creation is more anything that you were working on as a leader that’s going to impact some group of employees, have someone at least someone at best a couple of those employees on the team with you working on it. What happens is as we make these top-down changes, these off to the side projects, these Gen AI use cases. We’re like, “Let’s roll them out.”

They never get adopted the way they should be because they don’t work as well as they should be because you haven’t gotten adequate input from the people who are getting it. The world gets this with consumer products. There’s so much customer level, interaction, piloting, alpha beta, gamma, feedback loops co-creation with customers. It’s so ironic when it comes to work. We don’t do that. Every change we do at work, re-org, new technology deployment, new workstream, and new approach impacts people.

We got to do the same customer stuff with our employees and that could take lots of different forms. It could take a couple and put them on the team. Create an employee advisory panel and have the team off to the side that’s doing this read out to them every week like they’re the client or do a focus group with them. I’m working with a client. We’re doing a huge transformation program and we literally communicated to the entire organization we want your ideas. There’s a website they can go to put their ideas in.

Every idea is categorized and routed to the right leader. The person gets a response like, “Here’s what we’re doing with it and why. Can we talk more? Here’s why it doesn’t work, but thank you. Keep them coming.” Is it energizing? There’s a whole goal of these behaviors. By the way, it’s to unlock employees, and joy which unlocks value creation for the company. This stuff makes it feel like we’re all in this together.

This co-creation is a little harder to do because you’ve got to pull the people on your team or you have to create the advisory panels or you have to create the infrastructure to make people feel a part of everything you’re doing, then it’s not top down. When you do this, remember Jim Whitehurst, from our section? He wrote a book called The Open Organization after he went from Delta Airlines to Red Hat. He saw Red Hat. That company was all co-creation. He’s like, “What is my job as CEO if everyone’s self-motivated and doing their own work?”

What he realized, and he wrote in his book is something like change management is for when you’ve done a bad job at the work. If you do the work in the wrong way and you need to convince people it’s in their best interest to adopt it. That’s changed management. If you do real co-creation, like, “Change what? This is just how we do things.” That’s the fourth.

In the scheme of things, frankly, that one is more than a little bit harder. It’s a lot harder for most people. First of all, leaders feel like they have to have all the answers and they don’t necessarily want to feel like they have to go out, solicit and put on them. They want to move quickly. They think engaging employees in the process slows them down.

They don’t think employees will have a valuable perspective. All those reasons that people put in their heads about why they can’t, shouldn’t or don’t want to do this stuff. It’s a lot harder and it’s countercultural in a lot of organizations. I talk about Red Hat build on a usage of an open source platform Linux, in their case. That’s how that whole company was built and grown.

It’s in their ethos. We’ve seen more of that open source mentality in the era of the internet. This crowdsourcing and all of the things out there from Wikipedia that are about people working together to make something better than it could ever be with people working individually on their own. It’s still grudgingly finding its way into most of corporate America. That is about a leader’s egos and their processes and their willingness to make time for this early rather than doing, and fear. That’s why this one is the hardest of the five.

I agree. Here’s how I’ve been working around it. It doesn’t have to be all the way to a Red Hat total crowdsource company. Literally, an email box where people can send ideas and you staff someone to respond to them. That’s super easy to do. As a leader to any team, you just need to start saying, “Make sure you have the employees impacted. Have a voice on that team. Here are a couple ways you could do it.” Making Red Hat is definitely very hard, but there are baby steps that get you a lot of the way there, but you’re right in what you said. It’s a mindset thing.

What’s helped me on the mindset thing, is the customer discovery wave. You do this with your customers. Why not do it with your employees? By the way, our customers choose every day how much energy to bring to work. Can you turn your customer stuff, which you already have, on your employees? We got customer journeys, design thinking, segmentation, personalization, AB testing, crowdsourcing and customer feedback. You can’t buy a product without customer feedback. How many times do we ask employees for feedback? Once a year or twice a year. Long surveys that nothing happens as a result. I just need to pull them over to say, employees are customers, too. Your spot on that mindset is the issue.

Let’s go the last one.

The Power Of Leading By Example (Do First)

Do first. I start this chapter with the story of this new Starbucks CEO who takes the job at Starbucks, but says, “I’m going to still live in Southern California and private jet up to Seattle whenever I need to be there. By the way, I need everyone to be back in the office.” Disconnect. This is not the only reason Starbucks is totally failing, but it can’t help.

On top of that, “Here’s my ginormous pay package,” while the average person is Starbuck’s is barely earning a living wage.

That’s it. You can’t ask anybody to do anything that you don’t do first. You want everyone to adopt Gen AI and rethink how they spend their day and their work streams. You better do it first and talk about it. Talk about how hard it is, how rewarding it is and how scary it is. Once you start doing it and you see how people react, it will become addictive.

This one is ultimately about role modeling. Role modeling or showing people is a lot more powerful than just telling them to do something because you’re showing them that you’re willing to do it, too.

By the way, if you can’t do it, you’ll think twice before asking everyone else to do it.

For a leader who’s reading and saying, “This sounds great. Where do I start?” Where should they start?

You just start by starting. I literally would start with the celebrate them. That’s the easiest one. You have a positive thought about anyone. Say it. Coach the leader of the big transportation company. People even use abusive words about him. I had him start doing that, celebrate them and people were literally sending me notes like, “Whatever you did to Sam,” and it was nothing. The cultural ripples, the performance and the energy. That was amazing.

It’s about feedback, positive or negative. You said the ratio was 5 to 1. I’ve heard some people say it needs to be up closer to 10 to 1. The point is, you need to be delivering those specific bits of positive reinforcement all the time. Don’t leave a meeting. Don’t be in an enemy meeting without mentioning things. Don’t be in a one-on-one without mentioning these things. Don’t be in the elevator without mentioning these things.

Have the ability where you’re constantly giving some little piece of specific positive reinforcement. In the scheme of things, I won’t say it’s always easy but it’s the one that gives you back to the point you talked about earlier, that dopamine hit for yourself. I gave a person positive feedback. That felt good to them and it feels good to me. It makes you want to keep doing more of it. If you can get that cycle going, then it becomes easier to do some of the other things like being interested in working way up to probably the hardest one, which I still think is co-create.

Remember, the meta goal here is to have an organization where everyone is excited to be there every day. Which doesn’t mean every minute of work is joyful. It’s not, but on average. When people say, “Do you enjoy your work?” Your answer is yes. Did you enjoy your work this week? Your answer is yes. Did you enjoy work? Mostly yes. Sometimes we could have bad days. My research shows when employees enjoy their work, they are half as likely to quit.

They are anywhere from 2 to 4 times as motivated to bring their best to work every day. In a recent piece I put out an BHR, they sell 25% more per hour than people who don’t enjoy work. There is value on the table just like the customer revolution decades ago. I believe we’re on the precipice of the employee Revolution. The value on the tables there. The unlock can be tiny little things that become multiplicative. Start by starting.

We need something, because employee engagement haven’t moved in the last generation 25-30 years. Everything we’ve been trying is not working. It goes back to what you said earlier in the conversation that all these big programs, the training, the books, and the retreats, none of that’s working in the way that we want it to. We’ve got to try something else. The idea of small practices matters. Let’s we talked a little bit earlier about leaders, but for a mid-level manager or mid-level person, what can they do to help bring this into the culture of their organization?

Mid-level managers are so important in my mind because they are the providers of this emotional context in which their teams live. They’re the coaches to the frontline manager to help them drive it. A mid-level manager has to role model this. They need to coat their frontline leaders in doing this. They also have to give feedback up high. If a mid-level manager is doing this, in one part of organization and they start seeing performance, this beautiful work that works, performance morale or performance motivation, virtuous circle going. Their group will perform better than others.

That will send the message up high. This is applicable to a front-line supervisor, a mid-level manager, and executive. Ironically, it’s also applicable to individual contributors and employees. You could give a compliment that’s genuine. You could ask the peer how they spend their weekend. You could say, “I heard something’s going on incorporate. Let’s find a way if we can get our voice heard.” You could change the dynamic. I’ve had junior people on my teams change the dynamic all the time. You’re not a victim.

If you’re going to work every day and you’re not happy. You’re quite quitting, your job hugging or whatever you’re doing. You have enough of a relationship with work. It may be tactically necessary because you need a paycheck. At the same time, you don’t want to live in that situation. Work or careers are too long to have anthe us the mentality and constantly be looking over your shoulder and worrying about it. Everybody needs to change that dynamic. We’ve made work so utterly unenjoyable for so many people that it’s like a hollow form of capitalism in a way.

Imagine this. You’re one of these employees who are working for the paycheck. The place is terrible. You feel like, “I can’t do anything about it,” and then imagine something small good happens. There are new snacks in the cafeteria. If you take a minute to write a note to whatever leaders in charge of that and you say, “Thank you. That made a huge difference. If you’re open to other ideas, I got plenty.” You can do something. By the way, that’s not a complaining way to do it. You have to find a little thing to say thank you about and say, “If you want more, we could give you more.”

I know you do a lot of writing and thinking about the future of work more broadly. Apart from applying practices like the ones you described in your book. What else do you want to see in the workplace in the future?

Applying Human-Centric Practices To Future Technology Deployment

I’m still pushing for more enjoyable work. It is critical when it comes to Gen AI, agentic AI and this whole technology explosion. In my heart of hearts, most organizations are going about this wrong. They’re pushing technology for productivity. Productivity alone as opposed to saying, “Here’s your work. Here’s what this technology can do. How could it make your work more enjoyable? How can it take away the stuff that sucks your soul?”

By the way, customers and employees are all different. One person’s joy is another person’s toil. I worry where we’re going with technology. This whole thing about making work work, if we approach AI in the same way, co-create with employees, focus on helping them in their work, celebrating people who find ways to do it. The productivity will solve for itself.

We’re at this crossroads of how you decide to deploy it. Everything in the book and everything that I’m trying to push around moving from transaction track to work that works gets magnified with this. It could go much worse or much better with AI. That would be my last message. This is not separate from your technology agenda. It has to be the core of your technology agenda.

Something is disruptive as AI can be disruptive in a good way or disruptive in a bad way. The jury is still out on how we’re going to see this play out. That’s what everybody’s focused on and worried about.

The jury is still out on how we’re going to see this play out, but we all have agency. Especially as leaders to drive how this is going to play out. We can make sure it plays out in a much more human-centric, employee-centric and people-centric manner. I want every leader to be the cause to tip the scales to make a come out the way it should come out.

Agency is an important point. From the leader all the way down to the front line, you have to have agency in your professional life. Otherwise, it will happen to you. Odds are, it will happen to you in ways that you don’t always like. If you want to tilt the odds in your favor, you’ve got to take ownership.

You’ve got it.

The book comes out in November 2026. It’s available for pre-order.

It’s called Make Work Work: The 5 Daily Practices of the Employee-Centric Leader. It’s out at Amazon, Barnes and Noble or wherever you buy your book. Thank you for helping me amplify it, my friend.

You are more than welcome, Deb.

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What should we take away from our discussion with Debbie? First of all, work doesn’t improve through big programs. It improves through small daily behaviors. That’s the premise of her book and the five practices that she covers. The way that you as a leader show up or you as an individual show up, matters more than any strategy, deck or culture initiative. It’s the small behaviors that compound over time or compound across people in a way to become meaningful.

Second, we didn’t talk about this so much but, certainly, a key highlight that Debbie mentioned right at the end. That the idea of an employee is a better goal than employee engagement. We use employee engagements as the measure that’s been out there for 25 or 30 years that Gallop came up with. There’s a big difference between being engaged, which means checked in and truly enjoying your work. When people truly enjoy their work, it drives better performance, better retention and better innovation.

The third is that five practices are simple, but they’re not automatic. Celebrate someone, go see and help, be interested, co-create, and lead by example. The power in doing them consistently even if you don’t always do them perfectly. Pick a place to start. Don’t try and make it like a New Year’s resolution where you throw yourself into something and you stop doing it by the second Friday of January. This has to be something that you work on bit by bit over time.

Fourth, is it culture isn’t just about what leaders say. It’s about what people experience. This is where this idea of employees as customers that Debbie talked about. The transaction trap, the us the mentality, all of that comes into play. You want a workplace for people want to contribute. Who wants to work in a workplace where it feels like us them all the time?

Finally, importantly, is that everybody plays a role and everybody has agency. If you are C-level leader, a middle manager or even an individual contributor, you can bring these practices into action in your team, in your organization and all of that adds up in making your organization a place where people enjoy coming to work. I invite you as always to subscribe to Career Sessions on Apple Podcasts and Spotify or YouTube. If you found this discussion enlightening, sign up for my membership community, which is called PathWise and our newsletter PathWisdom. Thanks.

Important Links

• Debbie Lovich on LinkedIn
• Boston Consulting Group
• Make Work Work: The 5 Daily Practices of the Employee-Centric Leader
• Hubert Joly
• The Heart of Business: Leadership Principles for the Next Era of Capitalism
• The Open Organization: Igniting Passion and Performance
• PathWise on LinkedIn
• PathWise on Facebook
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About Debbie Lovich

Deborah Lovich is a Fellow at BCG Henderson Institute, Boston Consulting Group’s think tank, leading the thinking on the Future of Work, with a focus on “making work work” for all stakeholders by adding radical employee centricity to organizations priorities including reshaping work with GenAI.

Debbie has spent the last half of her 30+ year consulting career working across industries and countries on the human side of transformation. She does the hard work of changing cultures and leader behaviors from the C-suite to the front line to enable sustained value creation. After COVID-19, Debbie led BCG’s thinking on the future of work. As GenAI is reshaping work, organizations and industries, Debbie is showing her clients how being employee-centric will enable them to get the most value from these new technologies. Debbie has also applied her expertise internally at BCG, where she led the development and rollout of the firm’s global predictability, teaming, and open communication (PTO) program, an initiative implemented to improve BCG’s culture and employee work–life balance. She has been a frequent contributor to Forbes, as well as Harvard Business Review, Sloan Management Review and a TED speaker.