For roughly a hundred years, employees had a deal with work. You showed up, you sat in a specific spot for eight to ten hours a day, you did what the person above you said, and in exchange, you received a paycheck. But over the past several years, that deal did not just crack, it shattered. Between the explosion of AI, the return-to-office debate, and the rise of a generation of talent that refuses to be treated like a line item on a spreadsheet, leaders are being forced to answer a new question: How do we get our culture back?
According to BCG Managing Director and Senior Partner Debbie Lovich, that is entirely the wrong question.
In this episode of The mbaMission Podcast, mbaMission Founder Jeremy Shinewald and Executive Director Jessica Shklar sit down with Debbie Lovich, who has been with BCG for 32 years, to discuss lessons from her new book, Make Work Work: The 5 Daily Practices of the Employee-Centric Leader. She argues that rather than trying to get back to anything, companies should be reinventing work from scratch, starting with how they treat their people.
Here are some of the most important takeaways from the conversation.
Table of Contents
- Employee-Centric Means Employees Are as Important as Customers and Shareholders
- Practice 1: Celebrate People – Specifically and Often
- Practice 2: Go See and Help – Assist, Not Judge
- Practice 3: Be Interested in the Person
- Practice 4: Co-Create Everything – and Share the Credit
- Practice 5: Do First
- Why Being Employee-Centric Matters More in the Age of AI
- About the Book
Employee-Centric Means Employees Are as Important as Customers and Shareholders
Debbie defines the term “employee-centric” as treating your employees as if they are just as important as your customers and shareholders. She walks through the history of how business thinking evolved: in the late ’80s, all the focus was on creating value for shareholders and scale economies. But then the tech industry arrived without assets and proved that delighting customers could create market value. Now, Debbie claims, the next wave should be companies treating their employees the way tech firms taught companies to treat their customers.
Practice 1: Celebrate People – Specifically and Often
The first daily practice she recommends is celebrating people, not by offering generic praise—“Great job, team!”—but with specific, timely recognition. If you think something positive about someone, do not keep it to yourself. Tell them. Text or call them to let them know.
Debbie notes that behavioral science says that people need at least three positives for every negative to feel engaged. She also distinguishes between public praise, which might be “rocket fuel” for most people but is typically uncomfortable for introverts, and private recognition. The key is knowing your people and matching the delivery form to the individual.
Practice 2: Go See and Help – Assist, Not Judge
Debbie explains that this second practice, “go see and help,” is related to the old concept of “management by walking around,” but with a critical difference: It is not about merely observing employees but about being present with the intent to help.
She shares the example of a pharmaceutical client that was a large sales organization with persistently open territories because of turnover. Rather than sending out more communications about staffing, each quarter, the company’s executives would take a week and go into the field to sell alongside their reps. The message it sent was that leadership was willing to do the work, too, and it changed the firm’s culture in ways no memo ever could.
Practice 3: Be Interested in the Person
The third practice Debbie touts is being curious about your employees—ask people about themselves, their backgrounds, what they do on weekends. She relays a story about a junior team member who turned out to be a former professional football player in Canada. When that previously unknown fact surfaced, it helped the whole team understand his collaborative instincts and drive in a new way.
This practice also connects to mission clarity. She recalls the famous story about JFK and the NASA janitor. When the president was touring the facility, he stopped and asked a janitor what he did at NASA. The janitor replied, “I’m helping put a man on the moon.” The idea is that every person in an organization connects to the mission in their own way. Part of good leadership is being curious enough to find those connections.
Practice 4: Co-Create Everything – and Share the Credit
The fourth practice is co-creation. Any initiative or change that will affect a team should have input from the team members. But beyond process, co-creation is about credit. Debbie is direct in advising leaders to take pride, not credit.
She shares a story about a global rollout of a new selling model called “mirroring.” It was a success everywhere except Japan, where sales were not improving. When Debbie’s colleagues investigated why, they found that Japanese sales reps were systematically undoing the new process every week in their alignment meetings. They were not bought in. Debbie asserts that these employees were right to push back, in a way. The relationship-first approach might have mattered more in that particular market, but because leadership had not involved the sales reps in designing the solution, the reps had no ownership of it, which led them to reject it quietly, consistently, and effectively.
Co-creation involves making sure that the people who will live with the results of a decision are in the room when that decision is made. And it means sharing the limelight when the results come in.
Practice 5: Do First
The fifth and final practice Debbie recommends is to not ask anyone on your team to do something that you have not first done yourself. She offers the example of a CEO who, shortly after taking the job, told all his new employees that they had to return to the office four days a week. Meanwhile, he was himself in a different state and working from home full-time.
The principle is straightforward. Leaders who ask their teams to adopt new technology, new schedule, or new way of working need to be the first to do so. This is not to make the leader look good, but because the only way to truly understand any shortcomings of a proposed change is by encountering them firsthand.
Why Being Employee-Centric Matters More in the Age of AI
A particularly striking finding that Debbie shares comes from research she conducted with Professor Stephan Meier at Columbia Business School and colleagues at MIT Sloan. They discovered that companies that scored high on employee-centricity were seven times more likely to be AI advanced. Why? Because employees who feel respected, informed, and involved are far more willing to embrace change.
When companies ask employees to adopt new technology, the natural human response is most often resistance, fear, and suspicion. Employees worry that their jobs might be in jeopardy, that their workload could increase, or that leadership will be inspired to cut resources. Employee-centric companies have already built the trust and the communication patterns that make adoption possible.
About the Book
Make Work Work: The 5 Daily Practices of the Employee-Centric Leader by Deborah Lovich is available for preorder now from Penguin Random House. Debbie is retiring from BCG at the end of 2026 after 32 years at the firm, and this book represents a lifetime of accumulated insight into what makes organizations and the people in them thrive.
Preorder here.
Listen to the full episode for the complete conversation, including more in-depth explanations of the five practices, a debate about whether the approach works in high-pressure environments, and Debbie’s reflections on what she hopes the book will accomplish.
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