After 35 years, Lovich urges five daily habits over costly HR programs

By Olivia Hart

Deborah Lovich has spent 35 years working with Fortune 500 companies, and she says most companies seek better performance but pursue it the wrong way. Her prescription is five daily practices for executives and line managers that need no more budget or time and, she says, have an outsized impact on employee joy and value creation.

Lovich, a senior partner and managing director at Boston Consulting Group, places responsibility for that impact with executives and line managers. “HR simply cannot impact employees’ day-to-day work, which is where joy is created,” she says. In Lovich's account, employee motivation cannot be outsourced to a specialist function while leaders manage the daily work.

What is the performance problem?

Marcel Schwantes, identified as an Inc. contributing editor, executive coach, speaker and author, says the largest improvements in employee motivation often come from small leadership behaviors rather than expensive HR programs. He frames the issue as a gap between executive language and operating priorities.

Executives often call people their greatest asset or say culture eats strategy for breakfast, Schwantes writes. Yet their actions, he argues, show that quarterly targets matter more.

Schwantes also asks what an organization would gain if its least motivated employees became 10 percent more motivated, then 20 percent more motivated. The account provides no workforce size, productivity baseline or worked example. A percentage alone cannot become revenue, margin or company value without those inputs.

Lovich's thesis rests on a direct value chain: employees who enjoy their work generate more value for customers and the organization. She says leaders then relegate employee experience to HR, leaving a performance problem to a function that cannot reach the day-to-day work.

Lovich's 35-year record with Fortune 500 companies gives the argument practitioner weight. Her experience establishes credibility, but the account does not show how she derived the diagnosis or who created the 10 percent and 20 percent thought experiments.

What replaces an expensive program?

In her new book, Make Work Work, Lovich presents five daily practices for executives and line managers. Schwantes says leaders can implement them without more budget or time, and that each has an outsized effect on employee joy and value creation. The simplicity is the promise, not a measured saving.

“You don’t need an expensive culture campaign, a complete HR transformation, or a company-wide restructuring to get this right,” Lovich says. “What you do need is a personal commitment from every leader, and a real willingness to do a few things slightly differently each day.” Those conditions shift the burden to daily behavior, but the account leaves success undefined.

The claim that the practices need no more time deserves the same scrutiny. The account provides no time assumptions, staffing model or examples from Lovich's 35 years of work. It also does not say whether a leader's own attention counts as implementation time. No incremental cash cost is not the same as no implementation effort.

What would prove the five habits work better?

The account does not list the five practices, describe their mechanics or provide company results. It also leaves the comparative claim untested:

• No customer, productivity, retention or profit metrics
• No names of participating companies
• No sample size, survey or operating data
• No definition of “joy” or “value creation”
• No cost, duration or failure rate for the programs Lovich says leaders can avoid

The strongest support for Lovich's position is therefore professional judgment rather than evidence presented in the account. Her 35-year record with Fortune 500 companies gives the argument practitioner weight, while the direct quotes make her diagnosis clear. Experience alone does not establish that the five practices outperform the programs they replace.

The comparative claim remains unresolved. It establishes three concrete anchors: Lovich's 35-year background, a five-practice framework and a demand that every leader change daily behavior.

It does not establish the size of the business gain. The practical message is to put leaders back into the work; the financial case still needs numbers.