2-way apprenticeships can help employees connect on difficult topics and learn new skills, BCG exec says

Alicia Pittman.

Alicia Pittman, the global people-team chair at BCG, has been at the consulting firm for nearly 20 years. It’s a testament, she said, to the company’s culture.

“It’s a place built to make talent do things that they didn’t even know they could do,” Pittman said. “I’m included in that. I love the learning that comes with it.”

Pittman said one aspect of leadership development she’s focused on is ethical practices. “We teach and train our people to understand how small choices that don’t seem like major ethical choices matter,” she said. “The responsibility is to show up with high ethics in everything that you do and think about the bigger picture of how you do things.”

She said the firm had implemented programming through partnerships to help the company’s leaders navigate the need to drive innovation ethically: “It’s a place that we continue to invest because it’s quite important for us.”

The following is edited for length and clarity.

Where is BCG on the adoption curve of artificial intelligence, and what do you want to see in 2025?

I am excited about how BCG is driving change and grabbing the reins on generative AI. Gen AI is important to our clients, industry, and people.

We have a suite of tools, some of which we developed internally and some that are available off the shelf, that we’ve made available to all of our staff. Nearly everyone is a user to some degree.

What we’re focused on now is moving from casual use to what we refer to as habitual use. It’s habitual use that gets the value so that you can change how work gets done, based on the frequency, sophistication, and depth to which they use the tools.

We have a lot of enablement resources for our people, both as individuals and as teams, to make sure that we’re moving up that habitual usage curve as quickly as we can. A firm like BCG is under pressure to stay on top of things because its clients look to us.

So how do you strike that balance and not go so fast that you risk leaving some of your people behind? We have an enablement network of more than a thousand people who are there to help both individuals and teams adopt gen AI. It’s in all of our core curriculums.

Just this fall, we held AI days across every one of our offices at BCG with hands-on training. So we have people who are naturally there and ready for it, but we’re also investing heavily to bring people up the curve.

You’ve mentioned in Workforce Innovation-board roundtables that apprenticeship is now a two-way street. What advice would you give leaders looking to deploy apprenticeships differently?

At BCG, we’re fortunate to have a pretty flat structure so that you always have a good proximity between your senior leaders and all your staff. There are two ways we focus on helping to support this idea of two-way mentorship.

One is we just talk about topics. I recently wrote a piece about a mental-health town hall we held. It was quite moving. We had BCG employees who were generous and vulnerable in talking to thousands of people on a virtual town-hall panel about their struggles with things like addiction, grief, and depression, both before their time at BCG and during their time at BCG, and how they work through it.

It’s about having those difficult conversations, getting the points out there, and starting to have shared language or shared opportunities to talk about these topics.

The AI days that I mentioned already are another way we do this. A lot of it is about getting cross-cohort connections on technology and other topics, creating forums so that people can talk about it.

The other is ensuring continual, structured feedback. Our staff provides 360-degree feedback all the time. It’s an important part of what we do, and we’re piloting doing it even more frequently. For example, we’re giving people 360 feedback on how to be an inclusive leader. So it’s both the formal mechanisms and also just creating the formats and discussions.

So much of culture and moving culture forward is really about having the language so we can share and talk about things. Creating those forums helps. It’s an invitation to engage in productive ways.

What innovations are happening around DEI, especially as the topic has become more politicized?

DEI is built into our business model. We need great talent. We grow way faster than our talent pools, so just to get people in at quality, we need to be able to reach a lot of people; we need them to thrive.

Our business requires innovation, which requires diverse thought and experience. So, for us, it’s quite core. One of my areas of focus is on inclusion and inclusive leadership. In some ways, it’s the simplest thing to focus on. We all know that when people feel comfortable being themselves at work, you get the best out of them. They’re most motivated, ready to take risks, ready to collaborate, and all of those things.

In North America, where we have the best statistics, 75% of our workforce is part of one or more of our DEI groups. Whatever intersectionality people have, whatever group they belong to, it’s about how you make everybody able to show up at their best. That’s really where our focus is.