Innovating Leadership:
Co-Creating Our Future

Resources:

Our host, Maureen Metcalf, posts a newsletter every week on LinkedIn. You can subscribe here.

Maureen’s latest book is Innovative Leadership & Followership in the Age of AI. You’ll find details about it at https://bit.ly/LeaderInAI, or check out the Kindle version at https://amzn.to/44buVz8. The audiobook version is now available at  https://amzn.to/4dTCleZ.

Her other 10 books are available on Amazon here.

Books we’re reading for fun or personal development right now include:

• Take Back Your Power: 10 New Rules for Women at Work by Ancestry CEO Deb Liu, on how to overcome the obstacles women still face in the workplace – especially in tech. It’s in hardback at https://amzn.to/47OUO9E, and audio at https://amzn.to/3Y6EmOQ.
• Covert Cows and Chick-fil-A by Steve Robinson; it’s available in hardback at https://amzn.to/460LnmQ, on Kindle at https://amzn.to/3RVXhZs, and as an audiobook at https://amzn.to/3xPjBgn.
• The War of Art by Steven Pressfield. Paperback = https://amzn.to/3VEl7cU, Kindle = https://amzn.to/45JGm1L, and audiobook = https://amzn.to/3RPhC2y
• Everyday Ubuntu: Living Better Together, the African Way by Mungi Ngomane. Hardback (https://amzn.to/48Doh6j) and audiobook (https://amzn.to/48YCRF4)

NOTE: As an Amazon partner, we may make a small commission from books you buy through these links.

Other episodes you’ll enjoy:

Guest(s):

Guest(s) Bio:

Alicia Pittman is the Global People Chair at Boston Consulting Group and is integral to the firm’s Consumer, Operations, and Organization practices. Alicia is responsible for BCG’s efforts to attract, retain, and develop exceptional talent, ensuring BCG delivers leading-edge capabilities and diversity of perspectives to clients. She also serves on the firm’s Executive and Operating Committees. Previously, Alicia was the North America Consulting People Team chair leading Women@BCG for North America. Over the last five years, she played a vital role shaping BCG’s people strategy through COVID and developing new programs like Teaming@BCG and Pathways@BCG. Alicia’s passion for BCG’s value of “grow by growing others” guides her approach to mentoring BCG’ers the world over.

Transcript
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Maureen: [00:00:00] This is Innovating Leadership: Co-Creating Our Future. I’m your host, Maureen Metcalf, founder and CEO of the Innovative Leadership Institute, where we help leaders be future ready. Helping us in this mission today is Alicia Pittman, global people chair of Boston Consulting Group. She’ll be sharing her insights on the most pressing challenges and opportunities facing business leaders today.

Alicia, we’re really glad you’re here with us.

Alicia: thank you, Maureen. It’s really a pleasure to be here and I’m looking forward to our conversation.

Maureen: In your role as global people chair, how are you seeing young workers reshaping the workplace and what opportunities do they present for companies in terms of culture and innovation?

Alicia: Well, this is one of the great honors and one of the great fun of being people chair for Boston Consulting Group is we have So much young talent and new talent coming in every year that would really allows us to stay on the cutting edge and also really keeps us on our toes [00:01:00] to make sure that we’re staying on the cutting edge in terms of the value proposition for our talent, both existing and new people to come in.

And Young people and young talent are shaping. Corporate America, globally, the corporate world, and many institutions in, in a number of ways. Two of them that I think are most exciting to me, even if they’re not easy, is one, um, remote work, um, and hybrid work, and really learning new ways to collaborate that are, um, using technology that are taking advantage of flexibility where we have it.

And are, you know, pushing our boundaries in terms of what what we can get done where and when. And that’s not always easy. It’s not easy, especially in multi generational workforces to kind of mold to those new ways of working. It creates challenge in a number of ways. And there’s it. Things that are really hard about hybrid work, like do we get enough apprenticeship?

Do we get enough, you know, really in person learning happening? But there’s also things that are really wonderful about it in terms of enabling [00:02:00] flexibility, enabling people to live closer to family, enabling young parents to be able to manage their works and their life in a more blended way that that I love.

So that’s one of the things that is, you know, sometimes a little terrifying and actually quite exciting all at the same time. Another one, um, certainly is the use of, um, of generative AI and technology in general. But let me talk about Gen AI, uh, specifically. So, you know, um, BCG has been all in on generative AI because for us, it’s really, it’s kind of a triple word score.

It, like, influences how our clients work, um, and what we need to support them on. It also shapes our industry, and there’s offensive and defensive moves on that. But it’s also a really exciting part of our core, People value proposition in terms of how we train people, how, what skills we give them, uh, how we equip them to do their jobs better and how we allow them to be on, on the cutting edge.

And that’s a place where we have a lot of reverse mentorship going on. I mean, as an example, [00:03:00] we have, um, about 1100 black belts across BCG. Who are people that are fairly new to BCG in many dimensions, but they are, you know, at the forefront at the vanguard of learning how to use Gen AI, not just in general, but how to specifically change BCG workflows and methodologies and stuff using Gen AI.

And they are, in many cases, training their partners and training their office leaders and training their seniors. In and how to do that themselves. , not only is it really impactful for BCG, but it’s actually quite a lot of fun for, for everybody. And so I think those are a couple amongst many of the places that I really see this, um, very energizing and highly impactful, uh, way that, you know, this generation coming into the workforce is, is really helping reshape things.

Maureen: I was listening to an NPR story recently and coming out of consulting as one of those young people a long time ago. Um, and knowing how much we depended on the. [00:04:00] Online knowledge exchange and realizing that our young folks, fewer years enrolled, how much more productive they are leveraging the best in class research, the best deliverables and how I will bump the productivity.

Even significantly more, and I think the stat was like, 60 percent more productive for young folks and for more senior people, the productivity bump is smaller because we’re leveraging our own knowledge. So, so. AI knowledge isn’t as important. And so if we think about the one, the work our young people get to do, but also how that will eventually ripple through, we’ll invest in building the AI models, which will offset the cost savings in some ways, but the others.[00:05:00]

Presumably at some point we’re delivering more for the same or a lower rate.

Alicia: it’s interesting. I hadn’t heard that stat before. It resonates, although I probably come at it a little differently, but, um, it, it really resonates quite a bit. I think. You know, first of all, when we look at Gen AI specifically, we really look at kind of three different metrics, um, or groups of metrics.

We’re BCG, so we look at hundreds of metrics, but the three big buckets of them are, we do look at productivity, of course. We look a lot at, um, quality. So like better insights, faster insights, you know, getting to better answers, not just, um, doing it less expensively. And then we also look at, um, employee joy, satisfaction.

You know, we really are finding that Gen AI helps people, you know, do more of what they love. We call it sometimes less toil, more triumph, uh, but really like spending more time on the things that gives them energy on teaming and those sort of things and taking some of the, you know, more, more drudgery of that’s true in any job kind [00:06:00] of out of the equation.

But one of the things we see is that, um, if you look at the things that Gen AI does, Can really help deliver in terms of content creation, content review, um, qualitative, uh, synthesis and research, quantitative research, of course. If you look at the activity set of more junior staff versus more senior staff, there’s more time in the day that the junior staff is doing things where Gen AI is applicable versus the more senior staff, uh, who’s spending more time in meetings and influence and things like that, that use all of those things that, um, the junior staff are creating.

But if you just look at, like, the percentage of time Of tasks that, you know, more junior people can use on Gen AI, it is, it is, uh, it’s greater. So we do see that, that difference in impact. The other thing, though, that I think is really exciting in terms of one of the ways we see Gen AI, you know, changing the workforce, we call it an exoskeleton, and we did some, some research on [00:07:00] this, which basically shows that, you know, because Gen AI can equip you, you know, can equip people who aren’t coders to do things that are reasonably sophisticated coding and, and things of that nature, It really can equip our people to do things that they couldn’t, you know, didn’t think they could do that.

They didn’t think they had the skill set to have. Now, it doesn’t make them experts in all of those domains. We still need the experts, those senior people to your point, to actually do the quality checking and do some of the coaching and things like that along the way. But that power to unlock, and I really like that exoskeleton.

It reminds me of like Iron Man or something. I mean, it feels like it really is a superpower. Um, That, um, we really are equipping people at BCG at our heart has always been about development and about equipping people to do things that they didn’t think they could do. And that’s certainly something that’s been true for me and in my career and one of the reasons I’ve stayed at BCG as long as I have, but we have like a whole new set of gears now to deliver that to people with this exoskeleton concept.

And I think it’s. Yes,

Maureen: I love the [00:08:00] exoskeleton concept. Can you give an example that you’re aware of or that you’ve been involved with specifically about how that’s worked and impacted either a client team your client or your client?

Alicia: When we think about the, um, the examples and, and a lot of the research we’ve done has been on things like coding and advanced analysis and things like that, that are quite easy to measure and, you know, even, you know, measure versus a control set and, and things like that.

But other examples where I see it happening, and actually it was quite interesting. We, I got the opportunity. This week to be at the open AI headquarters. And we were doing a sharing session because of our partnership with them around how we’re using, uh, gen AI. And we had, we had a, this great, we called it the AI Olympics and we had 1100 people across BCG submit ideas of how they were using or thought they might be able to use gen AI in [00:09:00] their work.

We chose four finalists and we took them to the open AI headquarters and kind of shark tank style, they, they gave all of their ideas, which was It was, I mean, amazing, uh, but it was well worth my, my 16 hour trip from Washington, D. C. to the West Coast to, to do this. And um, and you saw all sorts of different, uh, interesting examples of this, this exoskeleton concept.

I think one of them that I thought was, was most interesting is we had a team that, um, really decided to rethink how workshops get done, right? And, and in some ways that seems very boring, but we all know that actually. In most big organizations, there’s a lot of workshops and a lot of working sessions, and some of them are a lot of fun, and some of them are kind of snooze fests, right?

And more importantly, back to the quality point we were making before, you know, the quality of outcomes. Of those workshops can really be quite different depending on is there a group thing, people kind of bored. Do you settle into like, um, you know, [00:10:00] one easy answer or do you have real debate? Are you able to bring new ideas to the table?

And so one of the things that this team did, which I thought was was super interesting, um, was they created Gen AI as an exoskeleton to this whole workshop. So that as they were having debates about this happened to be about what are new growth vectors for this client they were supporting, they were able to bring in real time new research on as things got prioritized, they could send the group out and say, Okay, we’re gonna do real time research to bring in new ideas to push this further much faster.

So that’s something that might have been, you know, something that you took Three weeks to like, okay, we’re going to go back. We’re going to do some research. We’re going to bring it back in a meeting when we can organize it. Three weeks later, they actually did this real time during the meeting and it totally changed the outcome.

And I mean, to give you an idea over the course of, you know, several months, they were able to identify with this team, what the new growth vector was. Um, launch it launch it so much that it was actually getting press attention. Um, and so there were like [00:11:00] newspaper quotes about what, you know, this new growth vector was going to be.

And this was actually in a regulated industry, so not, not one that is known for speed. Right. So I thought that was a super interesting example, not just on an individual level of this exoskeleton, but actually as a group level on this exoskeleton that, that really kind of. Is, is game changing and, and we’re just scratching the surface on those sort of things.

And there’s lots of other examples of the exoskeleton, particularly on creative concepts. For individuals, like, you know, being able to create video when you didn’t think you could, you know, when you didn’t have that tool set being able to create graphics. I’ve used that actually quite a bit myself. I am not an artist, but I know the power of words.

And so often I will go into chat GPT as an example. And, you know, just where I have an idea for something I want to communicate. I, um, you know, use, uh, you know, have chat GPT create a visual for me. And that’s the whole slide. That’s the whole communication to do my talking point. I, I certainly couldn’t have drawn that up, right?

So there’s a lot of [00:12:00] ways, um, particularly bringing together the qualitative and quantitative that I think are quite, Powerful.

Maureen: I love the workshop piece because we work with clients similarly at a different scale. But similarly, either the planning workshops or even just leadership development. And I do remember being in a group where they were dealing with a specific case of a challenge. And we had just launched a We’re just talking about it and they immediately got on and started looking for best solutions describing this very meticulous example.

And so they were learning prompting, but they were also. Seeing how they could in real time deal differently with a complex situation.

Alicia: Maureen,

curious from your perspective, you know, you spend so much time thinking about leadership and leaders specifically. Do you see ways [00:13:00] that, that Gen AI is really impacting how people need to lead or, you know, the specific task of, of leadership in different ways?

Maureen: We wrote a book on leadership and followership in the age of AI. And I wrote this, or we wrote this. Specifically, because I wanted to answer for myself and for my clients, with all of the things that we’re automating, where can we leverage humans, my, my unique talents, your unique talents, so that we stay relevant and so our organizations can go forward effectively.

So I came up with a top 10 and I’ll go through them really quickly. Bye. But first of all, we need to communicate with each other. And so as only humans can do, I may write an email with chat, GPT or co pilot or whatever, but I still need, it still needs to sound like me. And certainly [00:14:00] conversations I, I need to interact with my team.

More, I’ll say face to face, it may be on zoom or whatever, not in person necessarily because the world, the work we’re doing is more complex. So the communication is more important. Um, growth mindset, adaptiveness, emotional intelligence. This next one is I am hesitant of the wording, but abundance mindset that staying out of fear, uh, Recognizing that we can think our way through the challenges we have as long as we’re collaborating well and doing the human things we need to do, then we can create solutions where they didn’t exist domain expertise.

I need to know my work. I need to understand how to use the tools. Analytics, decision making and systems thinking. I have to be guiding the [00:15:00] AI tools I’m using to be comprehensive in the solutions. So, as you talked about running the workshop, you may be using AI for components, but that then feeds into.

The work that’s happening in the room of strategic planning and looking at trends to redesign your business models. So it’s an enabler that we have to do well, but I, as the leader need to understand the system and the context in which I’m operating creativity and then risk awareness.

Alicia: Yeah. Those are,

Maureen: are our, and in each bucket,

Alicia: I know you said you were careful about the wording, but I loved that concept of an abundance mindset because. Um, you know, we all live in the real world. That world is resource constrained and all of those sort of things, but, um, resources are actually while the resources might be fixed, our ability to leverage those resources for higher impact changes all of the time with technology.

And [00:16:00] so I mean, there’s a tremendous amount of optimism in what you said about an abundance mindset. And I, I love that because I think that’s part of why. Gen AI is so exciting is because it really is like unlocking a new gear, um, in terms of what we can get, um, out of our work processes, out of talent, um, out of human collaboration.

And I think I’m going to use that. If that’s okay, I’m going to steal that one.

Maureen: Well, and so as we’re talking about this, there’s some research that comes out of Harvard on, um, harmonic vibrancy and specifically the idea that We can look at, we’ve got a set of resources and we do what we do. But then talking about looking at the work, like you’re looking at it, we are continually developing resources and developing our people to meet a vision of a very different future.

So we’re looking at what’s possible. We’re developing resources and we’re [00:17:00] leveraging what we have responsibly. And, and the research would say that view that you take of what’s possible What’s possible, how do I develop it and how do I work responsibly really is the optimal produces the optimal results with humans and machines

Alicia: Really interesting.

Maureen: and having any of those pieces missing because there were folks who are incredibly optimistic, but can’t connect the optimism to delivery. And there were other folks who sit in the bucket of, I have this. Amount of resources. So I’m going to deliver that amount, but they’re not connecting the vision.

Again, the development of people and, and technology concurrently. I think that’s where the magic. And I think that’s where, and you and I used the term when we were, um, having our pre chat about the magic of all of this, it is bringing together talented humans, partnerships. [00:18:00] Investments all of your people across the world and having the capacity to to enable them in complex times where they’re dealing with all of the things humans are dealing with and presumably you expect more of your people than.

Probably an average company.

Alicia: Yes. Yes. We expect a lot of our people. And our people come to BCG because they expect us to really, you know, unlock their potential. That is our purpose and, and that is our promise to them as well. I think this concept is, is so interesting. I mean, one of the things that we, Obviously, you would expect spend a lot of time, um, on is, is teaming, right?

So we have all function called teaming at BCG. And, um, that’s really about how do we get the most out of teams. Um, and, you know, one, because that is where the magic happens and how all of these things come together. It’s also because that’s what gives people [00:19:00] delight and joy and a sense of community and, and all of those things.

And I think we’re really, you know, entering a time now. In we can call it leadership. We could call it, you know, workforce. We could call it a lot of different things. But I think we’re entering a time period now where technology is becoming a core component of that of that team, you know, and we see that conceptually and how we can each get more out of ourselves and things like that.

Um, so we can each contribute more of the team, but I think we’re also, I mean, seeing that even as a, um, you know, technology actually playing a role. I mean, one of the things that we’ve done a ton of at BCG in terms of using Gen AI is we’ve created a lot of custom GPTs, which are, you know, essentially agents to do specific things.

And one of the things that our case teams have done quite a lot of is, um, they, uh, have created these, these case team agents, what we call them, which basically are. Memories of, you know, key documents [00:20:00] for that, that are relevant for that case. It’s a way to, you know, bring together all of the different work.

That’s, you know, maybe happening across 5 people, maybe happening across 70 people in some cases and more. Depending and 1 of the things I loved is 1 of my teams. Named that agent. Um, after the founder of the company that we were serving, right? So he gave him a human name and it’s incredible what that unlocks and it unlocks, you know, both frankly, it’s a lot of time and speed because you can real time and intuitively query what all of your colleagues are doing to kind of bring that in and learn it quickly.

Versus, you know, who do I talk to? And then can I set up a call with them in two hours? And, you know, all of the time you lose in that sort of thing, you can actually get to a real time and, and you don’t really have to know who to ask or what to ask, you can explore, which is, is super cool. I’ve also found it, and this is one of the things that like is really important to me is it’s an incredible confidence builder, especially for, [00:21:00] um, our newest people, whether they’re new to BCG or whether they’re new to a topic or new to a client, you know, I hear again and again.

Wow, I went into that meeting and I really was not normally not nearly as worried as I might have been about what I didn’t know, because I had the opportunity to explore it and actually come in quite more prepared and that’s showing up sometimes. And, you know, like being able to connect dots in ways that that they wouldn’t have like real time during the meeting, but also sometimes just like in walking in, you know, like standing a little taller shoulders a little more square and just saying, like, I know this, right?

I really and so. We talk about, um, AI sometimes as, you know, your, your ally, your, your partner, partner in crime, so to speak, in, um, really equipping you to do what you came to do. And I think that’s a super cool part. So I really am interested in, um, how we increasingly see technology as part of the team, not just something the team leverages.

Sort of outside.

Maureen: I love the case agent idea because as a new [00:22:00] consultant, a long time ago at Accenture, we would go through project files to see how other people did deliverables. But as a new person, I didn’t know which ones were the best ones and which ones were the worst ones. So that confidence bit, it took a long time.

I eventually figured out which, Managers or engagement people were better than others in my view, but, but the amount of the learning curve was much steeper and I didn’t always walk in with confidence. I walked in with a stack of stuff that I reviewed and we’d put together books of deliverables and it, it was just time consuming, arduous, And better than not having them absolutely better than not having them, but what’s available now, as you’re describing, it is exponentially better for the consultants and the clients [00:23:00] Speed, speed and confidence.

Alicia: Yeah. Yeah. There’s a lot of knowledge transfer, but I mean, just to make it really real, because I’ve, I certainly had the same experience in my, um, you know, first days and months and years at BCG is sometimes you only have enough time to read the things to know enough that there’s a lot out there that you don’t know yet, actually, to be able to speed up going through all of those things and being able to do it real time.

You know, I’m sure you have this experience. As I had, which is like, you start something, you read a thousand things, you don’t really know which ones are relevant, and then you hope a week later that you remember, like, okay, which, which document was that in or whatever, and, you know, you know, you and I probably started our careers when it wasn’t even that easy to query inside documents and pull them up.

But, um, it’s, it’s just, it’s such a game changer. It’s, it’s really quite exciting. And it goes back to this idea of abundance. You know, there’s an abundance of information out there. There’s an abundance of resources for us to draw on. And when technology enables [00:24:00] us to more quickly, efficiently, Productively draw on all of those resources.

You know, it really changes the game in terms of, you know, what each of us and what us, what we can collectively as teams accomplish. That’s

Maureen: Well, and back to the idea that then our, our teams are much happier that those days of reading 1000 pages. I got a lot smarter, but I don’t think I loved those days. So let’s jump slightly different direction. C suite transformation is becoming increasingly challenging. What advice would you give to leaders who are grappling with the fast pace of, as we’ve talked about AI adoption, managing multiple generations in a workforce, what has to change about cultures to accommodate just that along with all of the other people and business [00:25:00] challenges, this is just an, a job that’s becoming more.

challenging by the day and I’m not sure humans are wired to deal with all of it.

Alicia: I think that’s right. So I spend a lot of my time. You know, I wear two hats at BCG. I am our people chair, but I also, um, I’m a client service officer primarily in transformation. And that’s what I love. And it’s what gives me a lot of energy. But. Man, is it hard? And it’s gotten hard in, in, um, some exponential and measurable ways.

I think one of the reasons that it is harder, it is objectively faster pace, right? I mean, you can see the half life of market leadership, um, is just much, much, uh, shorter, right? Than, than it used to be. And that’s, um, I think quite Yeah. Quite staggering for for leaders to keep up with. And, um, you know, for reasons good and bad, you know, the demands of talent have become much, much higher.

And I think most of those things are good. I mean, I think when talent [00:26:00] demands more, we also get more out of talent. So I tend to be class half full on that topic. But the importance of not https: otter. ai

Want to start moving faster than they had to, um, really is a pretty high bar for, for leaders as well. And, and that’s in part because I think of what, um, the, uh, in part, I think that is because of what talent demands, you know, it’s, it’s a little less hierarchical, it’s a little more, you know, self motivation driven and things like that.

Um, but I think it’s also because the challenges of today’s business more and more require. Real agility in working cross functionally and using technology, um, and the days when, you know, anybody could really just kind of stay in their lane and actually expect to get to the outcomes they want. I think those are long behind us.

And so there’s a real practical reason that you need to bring people along emotionally as well. [00:27:00] So, you know, I could go on for hours about what I think is important in transformation. And we have. 700 page playbooks on it as well, but I would really focus on two things. Um, I would really focus on one, this people component, make the emotional case for change.

Bring people along, not just because you need to, but because you’ll be glad that you did, because you will get more creativity, you will get faster results, and you will get a set of inputs that leadership alone could have never come up with. So really making that emotional case for change, bringing the organization along is super critical.

And by the way, more fun, right? I mean, it just is. It’s work, but it’s more fun. And then the other thing that I think is so important for C suite leadership, driving through transformation. Is to be more and more externally focused and that means not just bringing in, you know, expertise that they might need.

That’s always been important. And that continues to be important when you’re driving change. But it also means, like, really [00:28:00] being attuned to. What is changing in the business environment around you? I find that on average, most leadership teams are, you know, to a varying degree, but, but often at least three months, if not more often, six to nine months slow in actually realizing the changes that are going in their market around them, um, even when they can see it in the data and things like that.

Um, really when they drive it into their actions is is usually like lagging by by a few quarters. And some of that is wise because you want to watch for a little bit and, you know, make sure you really know the direction of travel before you start reacting. You don’t want to zigzag left and right all the time.

But sometimes it’s just because the faint signals remain faint until they’re inescapable. And I actually think that if leaders can be more attuned to how things are changing, get more ahead of What pain signals am I seeing and how am I starting [00:29:00] to move to be able to react to those sooner? Um, they’ll be able to compete with and be up to the challenge of the faster and faster cycles of market leadership and innovation.

So those would be the 2 big ones I’d focus on.

Maureen: So I’m curious about the trends, mainly because I am a bit maniacal about following them, and I’m sure I’m not doing enough. But there’s a mindset and a choice of action. So the mindset that I care about them, but then the choice of action, and we’re all looking at a long to do list. And at what point do I say I’m going to read an article or jump into a podcast or, uh, I don’t know.

Uh, conversation about a trend versus doing a deliverable, and I’m guessing all of our senior executives are making those trade offs all day long. Every day. What would you advise? Either C suites or even mid level managers at this point also seem [00:30:00] to need to know what’s coming so that they’re prepared.

How do I, how do we help make those decisions? Because even if I want to, how am I balancing? All the other stuff.

Alicia: Maureen, the challenges that you made, they’re real, right? And they’re, they’re the real day to day things that, that each of us kind of grapples with. So when I think for, for myself about what I try to balance and I don’t always get it perfectly, but also what advice I give my teams and my clients and things like that, I would say three things.

One is. You know, really thinking about how much time you’re spending listening versus talking. Are you taking in those signals? Are you taking in that information? And I don’t mean just how much you’re spending your time, but like, how much are you absorbing what you hear versus thinking about how you’re gonna respond?

Right? Because that really is. So much of it’s missed, not because you didn’t actually have access to the information, but just because you weren’t in a headspace to absorb it. So I think that’s one piece. Another piece is this can be a little controversial at times, but [00:31:00] people are constantly talking about how do I shorten my priority list?

How do I streamline my priority list to get through it? And that’s, of course, important, but I also sometimes like to think, look, the fastest way to shorten your priority list. Is actually to move through your priorities, change the rate at which you’re moving through things. And so, you know, I, I often, you know, suggest and try to do myself that we asked the question of, like, how often is what I’m doing as a leader, as a manager, speeding up outcomes versus slowing people down.

And sometimes you ask questions that. Deliberately slow people down, but sometimes you have to look for those opportunities, which is can I just move this forward two weeks? Can I, you know, cut out a bunch of work? Because I know what it’s going to say. So I think that’s another thing that helps you get through that priority list, um, faster.

And then the other thing, which is, you know, very tactical, but it’s something I remind myself of quite a bit is each of us as as leaders and as managers, You know, has a set of things that we’re really good at and probably better than our teams are, because [00:32:00] we’ve been doing it for longer, but those are not the things that we can uniquely do.

Right. And so how do I spend my time on the things that I can uniquely do? And I’m uniquely responsible for as the leader of our team versus how much of my time am I spending on things that, you know, I’m good at and I can be helpful, but actually my team can do 90 percent as well. And, you know, this is maybe the, the old example of just, um, comparative advantage and, you know, Abraham Lincoln typing faster than his assistant.

Right. So, I mean, I’m not sure that’s exactly the right analogy, but, this point about making sure that you’re as a leader doing things that you can uniquely do, even if. You kind of get some joy sometimes out of doing stuff that’s from your old job that your team can also do is, I think, a way to rebalance some of that.

Maureen: Yeah, I think I would trade off the joy I get in doing a task by for just not having to do the task in some cases because there’s no shortage of stuff to do. So let’s go back to transformation. You talked about [00:33:00] the people side. We’ve talked about. Um, Jen AI taking over some tasks and yet, and, and some of the things I read about at some point, we won’t be working these long hours that has not yet happened in my world.

Um, how do we help leaders think about the, you’ve talked about signals and being more future focused. If I’m a listener and I’m thinking, okay, I’ve got a. Update my sales force. I’ve got to do something with my E. R. P. I’ve got a I and I’m not sure where it’s going to help me or how it’s going to help me.

I’m doing stuff, but I’m not sure if it’s the right stuff and things are happening in my industry and I’m not sure I’m keeping up. Or staying ahead of my competitors. I’ve still got D and I, I’ve still got sustainability. A bunch of people died in Asheville this week. How, [00:34:00] how do we help leaders think about just the crushing stuff and it all has to get done. So especially with your expertise in transformation, is there some kind of general guidance that you would give most clients?

Alicia: , there’s a whole spectrum of things around, you know, how to take that large and you articulated very well. There’s a large set of pressures. They seem never ending. Many of them are new. Um, you know, I would add to that, you know, how do you think about social media in the workplace? How do you, I mean, there’s just.

So many, um, big things out there, mental health, um, crisis, and how does that manifest in the workplace and all those sort of things. So that’s unending. So the first thing I would say is one, people should give themselves some grace. I mean, it is, uh, an overwhelming load and, and some people are, you know, paralyzed by it, [00:35:00] or some people spend time beating themselves up because they can’t possibly do it all.

And, and there’s a little bit of that, but I think giving yourself grace. To not have to solve every problem all at once is, is important. But the second thing also is like there are empirical, there’s empirical proof that there are things that can enable organizations to manage more things at once. One of those things is that you need to be long term focused and, and future focused, as you said, which, which we talked about a couple minutes ago.

But you can see empirically in the data that Um, organizations which are more future focused in their, um, transformations are more successful. They hit their growth outcomes more often. They hit their cost outcomes. They’re less likely to go over budget on doing it and all of those sorts of things and making sure that you’re doing the things that are important, not just now, but also for the future, like really helps.

The other thing is. You know, whereas, you know, we [00:36:00] have amazing sets of collaboration across most organizations, there is also a lot of time and rework. And this goes back to something that you said before, which I loved about this idea of abundance and actually having an abundance mindset. I mean, there is just no doubt that in the crush of people trying to coordinate and, you know, who needs to be in what meeting and all of this sort of things, there’s a lot of time.

Lost in translation. There’s a lot of time spent either not on the right things or a couple teams going in different directions and then having to come back and put their put their notes together and then actually reset some assumptions and and move forward again. And there are ways that you can use.

Um, you know, some really tried and true methodologies of, you know, deciding what decisions need to be made, what assumptions need to be put in and that sort of thing, which, which actually, like, drastically takes down some of that rework and does it. And then the other thing, which again is pretty practical, but I think [00:37:00] quite revolutionary for a lot of organizations is a lot of organizations.

Go about prioritizing these things by putting a set of resources against them and then seeing what those resources can go do. And actually, we find that again, you can sort of see this in the data that when teams actually put a value case in front before they resource. You get a lot more outcomes out of those teams, and it means two things.

I mean, one, it means like, let’s make sure this is big enough to go after. It also means one. It also means how do we make sure that, um, the aspiration, if we’re going to resource this, that the aspiration is big enough to justify those resources. And often, frankly, it allows. Organizations to put more resource towards the things that really matter to to accelerate them most.

In some ways it feels very intuitive to say, Hey, I should know what I’m going after before I decide how to resource it. But it’s not in [00:38:00] practice how most organizations work and setting up, as example, transformation offices that help create that discipline can can really change the game in creating a multiplier effect on how much resource you actually need.

And so that’s kind of way tactical versus the, um, you know, the, the crushing, uh, intellectual challenge of how do I take on all of these things. But, but I think the good news in all of that is like, there are tried and true management practices that actually enable you to work through it. They’re not the ones that are intuitive to many organizations, but they are very.

Um, coachable and repeatable. Once you get them, right?

Maureen: You know, as you say that I’m thinking of basic project scoping and we tell our clients to do this and yet we don’t always do it. And when we do it, it absolutely makes sense. This is the outcome. These are the amount of hours and time. And dollar resources we need for this implementation, and the, [00:39:00] the reduced stress of everyone agreeing on the timeline, along with all the other things we’re trying to do has been massively helpful and. Yet for us, it’s not that we don’t have the capacity to do it. We just don’t always have the will. And then when I layer in clients who may even have transformation offices where we’re managing 12 initiatives, and how are we looking at. The, the stakeholders, how many initiatives back to what you talked about earlier, how, what can humans absorb and, and how do we layer them?

And I don’t know many people who are doing that. Well,

I assume that that’s something BCG does routinely to help clients with large transformations that you’re managing multiple transformations with, and in some [00:40:00] cases, probably for your clients, because. Often our clients are experts in their thing and we’re experts in doing the transformation

Alicia: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And that’s, you know, a pretty big piece of our business and of my personal business is on transformations. And so it really is about exactly what you said, which is creating more capacity to move through all of these things. And so it is about You know, doing the good old fashioned project scoping, um, to, to make sure that, you know, everybody’s really focused on the goal it’s about being really deliberate and how you, how, and when you resource different things.

It’s about, um, having the connectivity between the team so that you reduce some of that rework and everybody can see the bigger picture. But a lot of it is around using tools that actually, you know, enable people to take on more. And so you talk about how much can humans absorb. Well, we do see that like humans can only absorb so much.

But to be honest, when they feel like they’re having impact, when they feel like they’re learning, when they feel like, um, what [00:41:00] they’re doing matters, They can actually absorb more. They take on more work. It’s they’re more motivated and all of those sort of things, right? So there is real value in that. We also and I talked about this a little earlier.

We also look at that emotional case for change, right? How do you actually, you know, get people excited about what they’re doing and also just help connect because. You know, some people will be very taken by the, the data and the financial numbers of what needs to be done. Others will be taken very much by the strategic logic.

Um, but, but others need to feel it. They need to feel it inside of them. Like, why, why is this better for me as a human being? Why is this exciting? And I would say most of us, depending on, you know, how we feel in any given day, need probably some combination of all three of those things. And, and to kind of, you know, Fuel our motivation as well.

And so those are some of the, you know, practices that we help our clients put in place to, to, you know, work through those many, many, um, priorities.

Maureen: helping people navigate [00:42:00] the feelings is the hardest part. It’s a much easier to put together a business case than help a diverse group of people

Alicia: Maureen, I think this is one of the most interesting things because often that’s the piece that gets. Left out. This is actually something I’ve really learned. We have a team within BCG called bright house and bright house really is our purpose driven creative. Piece of BCG that, you know, creates human connected storylines. It helps excavate purpose in organizations and in efforts and they do everything from, you know, really high impact marketing campaigns to, you know, supporting the change management of these sort of transformations. And I’ve been a client of theirs many times in my people role inside of BCG, you know, I, of course, leverage them as well.

And the ability that I’ve seen. Of that team to just communicate things in ways that I could never communicate through a slide or, you know, a set of, you know, an outline set of things that kind of draw people [00:43:00] back to this is the very rigorous logic. I have of why we need to do this and they will make it.

Fun. They’ll make it human. They’ll make it emotional in a way that just unlocks a whole different gear for for what we’re trying to do. And so I really do think that part is so important. And it’s funny because I find that as much as the soft side of change. Is so critical for actual results in business.

Many leaders feel like it’s indulgent, right? They feel like, Oh, I’m cheating a little bit because this is, this is fun or this is soft, or do I really need to do this? And what about getting back to the business case? What about getting back to the numbers? And they feel a guilt about it, but in fact, it is what.

Makes the difference. And, um, and I think that’s, you know, something I always strive to help our clients with

Maureen: So connected to that, you, you talk about D E and I, me. And helping people feel like they’re doing meaningful and impactful [00:44:00] work. Can you say a little bit about what you do because you’re recruiting the top talent in across industries, across age groups, out of universities, or out of industry and. Having the right work environment is crucial to get that talent.

Alicia: so we could do a whole podcast just on inclusion. So I will try to keep it brief. But but this is such an important topic for us. And it’s important for a few reasons. I mean, one is because it’s core to our values and what we believe. To because we know that diversity and inclusion produces better answers.

I mean, B. C. G. S. Clients hire us to answer the hardest questions, right? They’re often there once in a generation type questions, and that requires creativity and perspective and all of this. This that we know only comes when you have diverse teams. And also, um, you know, frankly, there’s some pretty [00:45:00] basic math behind some of this for BCG as well.

I mean, we grow roughly 10 times faster than our core talent pools. And so if we’re not able to get a diverse set of talent into BCG and create an inclusive environment where they can all thrive. Like we just can’t hire at the quality and the rate that we need to. Right. So there’s like very basic, you know, algorithms and math that comes behind that as well.

What we also know, and we’ve done lots and lots of research here. What we also know is that inclusive environment helps. Everybody be their best and, you know, showing up as your authentic self, whether you’re part of a diversity group, whether you are not, um, you know, actually helps everybody. And it really helps employers in terms of retention and development and all of the things that we strive.

So so hard for. So. We, um, really have that at the core of our, our people promise and our people agenda in, in so many ways, and it takes a lot of [00:46:00] forms in terms of education and awareness, which is a constant, um, in terms of structural interventions where we need them in terms of training leaders to be more inclusive, you know, making sure that all of our people practices are inclusive, um, and also in, you know, creating really, you know, Fantastic communities within BCG in our employee resource groups to make sure that we’re, you know, fueling the energy and the connectivity and the learning that happens within those teams.

So this is one of my favorite parts of of my job. I led women at BCG for North America before. I took on a broader people roles, and so it’s something very near and dear to my heart, but it’s also, um, you know, at the heart of our business model as well.

Maureen: I love the structure you put behind it because often people say the words and then there is no corresponding structure. And I assume also performance management that. You’re [00:47:00] expected to do this and we measure how much you do and that impacts your comp.

Alicia: An organization like BCG apprenticeship is a big part of what we expect from all of our leaders. That’s what makes her business model work. It’s, you know, part of our promise of what makes people come to BCG is that apprenticeship they’re going to get.

Yeah. And more and more, it’s important that apprenticeship is not just about, you know, being a good mentor to people who look just like you, but actually you need to be a great mentor and really be able to apprentice for people of a variety of backgrounds, communication styles, skill sets. Um, you know, and that’s true when we look at a classic DEI type lens, but it’s also true.

I mean, BCG has on our team now, climate scientists and data architects and, um, you know, engineers and, and all sorts of, of different career paths. And our leaders need to be able to create teams that are not just other business analysts that look like them, but actually taking in [00:48:00] this wide set of skills.

And so it really does, you know, up the demands. Um, I think in some exciting ways, but it’s no doubt in more demanding ways about our leaders to be really great at creating an inclusive environment in their teams and investing, um, in developing a broader set of people.

Maureen: Alicia, thank you. I wish we could talk for hours more and unfortunately that’s not an option today, but thank you for sharing your really deep insights with our listeners and with me. How would people find out more about what you’re doing? And I assume bcg. com is the Public facing, but how would other leaders learn more about you

Alicia: So first of all, Maureen, this was so much fun for me. Thank you for inviting me to be with you today. I learned quite a bit and I wrote down a few notes for myself that I’m going to do some more research on afterwards. These are passionate [00:49:00] topics that I’m really passionate about. And so I appreciate the opportunity to share.

And I’ve learned a lot from you. Um. You know, there’s lots of ways to find out if people are interested more about BCG. Certainly BCG. com is, um, a great way to do it. But there’s also, you know, between, um, current BCG employees and BCG alums out there, there’s, you know, um, tens of thousands of, of people who can tell you more about BCG, but also, um, you know, we really are out there in the world, um, at our clients.

In big, uh, forums on campuses, and I really, you know, invite any of your listeners, um, to find out more about BCG and, and seek us out where, where we are. We also have, you know, good old fashioned LinkedIn accounts and things like that. So there’s lots of resource there, but I also, you know, BCG is a community at our heart and we’d love to engage.

And so I also, you know, invite people to engage with more BCGers.