ALM Intelligence has named Boston Consulting Group (BCG) a top leader among the world’s premier consulting firms for its depth of ability to get results and overall client impact. The ALM Vanguard: Talent & Leadership Consulting, an annual report that assesses the capabilities of the world’s major consultancies, ranks consultants on a relative basis according to their ability to create impact for their clients. BCG was ranked the highest among both strategy and HR consultancies.
Top-ranked consultancies not only generate the greatest impact for their clients but also stand out for their capacity to carry out arrays of projects across the full range of client contexts. “The recognition we’ve received in this important industry assessment is very gratifying,” says Allison Bailey, a BCG senior partner and global leader of the firm’s People & Organisation practice. “We are proud of our team’s work and of the level of bottom-line impact and value it consistently helps unlock for clients. The team’s focus on people strategy as a differentiator is driving tangible results from the C-suite to the frontlines—and everywhere in between.”
BCG earned the highest possible marks for its approach to developing what ALM calls internal client insight and client capability development. Internal client insight encompasses a consulting firm’s approach and tools—its assessments, data analyses, interviews, and workshops—and how effectively its findings are incorporated into the client’s business case and roadmap design. Client capability development refers to a firm’s strength in helping clients fortify skills and adapt mindsets and behaviours. This strength enables clients to execute their strategies and sustain fundamentally new ways of working.
Innovative Approaches Emphasise Client Collaboration
Liz DeVito, the report’s author and associate director of management consulting research at ALM Intelligence, recognised BCG for its view that talent management is “a value-creating organisational capability driven by a culture of leadership.” BCG’s multidisciplinary approach, she noted, blends competencies in management consulting with industry expertise, learning and development, data science, and solutions design.
BCG’s innovative methods afford clients seamless access to the firm’s ecosystem of companies and leading-edge solutions, creating for clients what BCG calls a sustained people advantage. Among these is its “design for adoption” methodology, which earned BCG ALM’s recognition as best in class in project management. According to BCG, design for adoption, which helps clients devise solutions that accelerate leadership development on the frontlines, is developed jointly by BCG and the client, building leadership muscle on a daily basis while remaining focused on outcomes.
ALM’s report also highlights BCG’s Leadership & Talent Enablement Centers (LTECs), which “harness the full value of the firm’s internal and external ecosystems,” including consultants, coaches, instructional designers, data scientists, and data and digital assets. The consultants bring expertise in organisation design, behaviour and culture, change management, HR operations, and agile ways of working—as well as in leadership and talent. Together with BCG’s digital businesses—Gamma, Platinion, and Digital Ventures—these assets provide clients with what ALM calls “a wholly curated solution focused on activating talent strategies.”
BCG Excels at Overcoming Digital Era Challenges
The rapid changes brought about by digital as well as emerging technologies, such as robotics, AI, and machine learning, present new challenges to companies’ leadership and talent efforts and, thus, figured in this year’s assessment. BCG, a market leader in this space, is staying ahead of these client challenges with new strategies, approaches, tools, and support systems.
“At BCG, we’re grounded in future-state strategy and people requirements,” says Debbie Lovich, a BCG senior partner and coleader of the firm’s Leadership and Talent Enablement Center and overall people strategy topic. “Creating a talent advantage requires a focus on four crucial questions relative to a company’s digital strategy: Does it have the talent it needs to enable it to succeed? Does it have the leadership and culture it needs to deliver? What is fuelling and failing it in the operating model? Does the company have an HR organisation that can fulfill people, talent, leadership, and culture requirements? We take a systematic approach to defining what ‘good’ looks like in terms of talent, leadership, and culture in order to fundamentally and sustainably change the way work gets done.”
The top-ranked consultants in the study view learning as a foundational capability in the digital era. They invest substantially in proprietary tools that help clients personalise learning paths for employees. They also help clients assess employees’ learning aptitude to help design custom content and training.
BCG received kudos for its rigorous approaches to unlocking leader capabilities at all levels, from the C-suite to the frontlines. The firm applies principles of behavioural economics and the latest in adult learning science to build leadership programs that have bottom-line impact.
Lovich adds, “Our success—not just in talent and leadership consulting—but also in our people strategy practice as a whole, boils down to two truths: we work with clients, not on them. The point is to equip and enable our clients with the ability and power to sustain their leadership and talent success. We believe in practising what we preach. BCG consistently ranks high among the best places to work. Our success is based in our own people and talent practices that enable us to bring BCG’s global best to every engagement.”
Sourced from Boston Consulting Group