There’s no secret recipe to impressing your boss — or is there?
In late June, four senior McKinsey & Co partners sat down with Business Insider to discuss what it takes to reach the uppermost ranks of the consulting firm.
Three of them had recently been promoted from partner to senior partner, and the fourth had been made a distinguished partner, a new senior leadership role at McKinsey that recognizes deep, specialized expertise.
They now sit among the firm’s most senior and best-paid leaders, a group that numbers more than 2,500 globally. Between them, they work across life sciences, corporate finance, financial services, and artificial intelligence.
When asked what they wished their junior colleagues would stop doing, the group hesitated — then launched into an animated exchange about the pitfalls and missteps they see in the workplace.
In late June, Business Insider’s Polly Thompson sat down with four newly promoted McKinsey senior partners. Their conversation covered topics from careers and promotions to AI and the future of consulting.
Follow Polly Thompson’s reporting here for more of her coverage.
More from the interview:
Stop creating AI slop
Three of the partners’ first responses was: Stop producing slop.
The AI slop issue is not unique to junior colleagues — many people use the technology poorly, said Alex Deverson, a London-based senior partner who works on life sciences. The result is a “lot of AI slop” — content that looks good on the surface, but doesn’t hold up to scrutiny.
Anna Mattsson, a corporate finance specialist based in Switzerland, said that in her practice, some associates are not using AI at all.
“I sometimes feel, ‘Am I the one having to remind them to actually do it?'” she told Business Insider.
That’s happening less frequently, Mattsson added, but she saw a clear difference between consultants who used AI to get a head start and those who don’t use it.
McKinsey
The variation in how people use AI is “crazy,” said Holger Hürtgen, a Germany-based distinguished partner at QuantumBlack, McKinsey’s AI arm. He said some junior colleagues “surprise him really positively” and teach him things about AI, whereas others’ AI use “feels like it’s coming from two years ago.”
It happens at both ends of the spectrum — junior and senior, Hürtgen said. “It reads nicely, but it’s really stupid,” he said of some AI-generated work.
Scrutinizing AI-generated work requires more critical thinking than most people give it credit for, Devereson added, and younger, less experienced colleagues have less instinct for what’s right and wrong.
McKinsey has aggressively incorporated AI into its workflows, first through a generative AI platform called Lilli, and increasingly through AI agents. The technology is becoming part of the “lifeblood” of how McKinsey works, Kate Smaje, McKinsey’s Global Leader for technology and AI, told Business Insider in June.
Get out there and socialize
Hürtgen, who has worked at McKinsey for 20 years, said the social life at the firm has become quieter since his early days. Given the choice between joining a team dinner and getting to sleep earlier or exercising, he said some younger colleagues chose the latter.
“I think this firm is very much about micro communities, getting to know new people. And you get to know people during social events,” he said.
That does not mean junior consultants need to party hard — though Hürtgen joked that he has partied more than many young people appear to today — but that they should at least have a nice dinner, he said.
“Enjoy the journey, not just the objective,” he added.
Mattsson, the Switzerland-based senior partner, also said junior consultants should spend more time building relationships with their teams.
“Some of my best friends are the clients and the associates I worked with back in the day,” she said.
Avoid this ‘recipe for unhappiness’
Many young consultants join McKinsey hoping to climb the ranks to partner. Devereson cautioned against going in with an overly strategic outlook.
“I would encourage people to not think like that,” Devereson said. Attempting to chart a path to partner is a “recipe for unhappiness,” he said.
Devereson, who is based in London, said he was “never particularly strategic,” focusing instead on what he was doing in the moment while remaining open to opportunities. He advised associates to follow what they enjoy, pointing to Mattsson as an example of that approach working.
Mattsson joined McKinsey six years ago after a career spent mostly at Deloitte and had hoped to be promoted last year. When that didn’t happen, she was “majorly disappointed.”
She then decided to focus specifically on what she enjoyed at work rather than trying to do everything, and approached this year’s promotion round without any expectations.
The now-senior partner said that coming from outside, she hadn’t quite understood the system at McKinsey: “It’s a very different firm here than many other places.”
Find a way to make the lifestyle work
Stop ruling yourself out of opportunities because you fear your career is incompatible with the lifestyle you want.
That’s the advice Maria Albonico, a London-based senior partner focused on financial services, said she’d give to junior consultants.
She said she has seen younger colleagues leave or decide an opportunity is not for them because they imagine it won’t work with having a family.
“I was surprised over and over by how much the circumstances adapt. If a place really wants you, if you are really a right fit for a place, the place will adapt to you,” said Albonico.
McKinsey
Devereson said junior consultants can also speak up when the demands of the job become unworkable. “If you don’t like the circumstances, change the circumstances,” he said.
He recalled reviewing one project’s workload, staffing, and meeting schedule and realizing the plan was structurally impossible. At first, he tried to compensate by working longer hours. Eventually, he told the partner, “I think the physics are off. I don’t think this works.”
Personal circumstances could also make an assignment impractical, he said. In his case, that means not serving clients in the Bay Area from London while caring for a three-month-old.
“People just believe that the hand they’re dealt is the hand they have to live with,” Devereson said. “Whereas, actually, we can do a lot to help each other if we know that we need help.”
