BCG
- BCG's Behavioral Science Lab cofounder says success is linked to having a "high-agency mindset."
- Julia Dhar said these workers actively seek to understand expectations and are proactive.
- She said these employees do more than the minimum required.
Type A workers, rise up.
BCG's North America leader of people and organization practice, Julia Dhar, says that success increasingly boils down to what she refers to as "a high-agency mindset."
These are the proactive employees who actively seek to understand what's expected of them. They're also the ones who show up with a positive attitude and a belief that their actions will have an impact.
"They have some optimism about the future, even if they're not assured that everything in the future will be good," said Dhar, who co-founded BCG's Behavioral Science Lab and is a fellow at the BCG Institute.
While self-starters may have always thrived in the workplace, that mindset may be more critical during a time of rapid technological transformation.
BCG's 2026 AI at Work Research report found that 72% of workers say skill expectations in their roles have changed, and 88% believe they will need major upskilling in the next five years. Dhar said that employees who seek clarity about their roles and build new skills may be better positioned to keep up.
Employees across industries are grappling with a moment in time when AI disruptions are fueling anxiety about the future of work. Rather than getting stuck in fear, Dhar said high-agency workers focus on what they can control and take action wherever possible.
"The more you take action, the more that it ends up expanding the surface area of opportunity," Dhar said.
What does that look like in practice?
It's the employee who sees a recurring problem and builds a solution before anyone asks, Dhar said. That could mean creating a tool to help remedy a frequent team frustration, she said. Or, it could mean automating a process like organizing customer feedback.
It could also take the form of proactively talking to customers about the features or products they want to see next, or taking time to research and understand competitors.
What sets these employees apart isn't that they're trying to check a box because they think they're supposed to, she said. They're self-starters and don't need perfect instruction before creating value, Dhar said. She added that high-agency employees progressively improve their instincts by getting feedback on their efforts.
"You can think about it as the person who is asking one more question, or doing a tiny little bit more than we might expect as a natural baseline," Dhar said.
Her advice comes as AI reshapes the workplace and agentic AI becomes increasingly embedded in day-to-day workflows. While 42% of workers surveyed in BCG's research report said they save a full workday per week with AI, 66% received no guidance on how to use that time.
At a time when organizations may not be providing their workers with explicit direction, Dhar said the employees who thrive are those who can identify valuable work, improve handoffs, solve frequent problems, and reallocate time to higher-impact activities.
As individual contributors are increasingly expected to act like managers — overseeing agents and automated workflows — the ability to drive work forward without specific instruction is becoming more important.
For example, Dan Diasio, EY global consulting AI leader, said that many entry-level hires are now expected to oversee AI workflows, and they need to think more like managers earlier in their careers.
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