PwC's just-launched Crisis Leadership Centre (CLC) takes a holistic approach to professional training, focusing on the intuitive, "soft" skills at the heart of leadership. Founder Claudia van den Heuvel talks with PwC Crisis and Resilience co-leader Bobbie Ramsden-Knowles about the CLC mission to help leaders develop the skills, agility, and core of resilience required to guide a team through disruption – and thrive.
PwC's just-launched Crisis Leadership Centre (CLC) takes a holistic approach to professional training, focusing on the intuitive, "soft" skills at the heart of leadership. Founder Claudia van den Heuvel talks with PwC Crisis and Resilience co-leader Bobbie Ramsden-Knowles about the CLC mission to help leaders develop the skills, agility, and core of resilience required to guide a team through disruption – and thrive.
Bobbie Ramsden-Knowles:
Welcome to our podcast series, Emerge Stronger Through Disruption. I'm Bobbie Ramsden Knowles, and I'm coming to you today from London. I'm absolutely delighted to be taking over hosting duties for the podcast series along with my co-host and co-leader of our PwC Global Centre for Crisis and Resilience, Dave Stainback. Now we're here to really help tackle the challenges facing business during what we all know is an environment of constant change and crisis. And Dave will be joining us next time, but today I am absolutely thrilled to have Claudia Van Den Heuvel join me. She is a director in the PwC UK Crisis and Resilience Team.
Claudia, as you know, we've talked about this many, many times, but I absolutely am so supportive and love what you're doing with the PwC Crisis Leadership Centre. So I wonder if you could kick us off today by perhaps sharing a bit about your background and also why the work of training people to lead in [00:01:00] crisis is so important to you.
Claudia Van Den Heuvel:
Thanks, Bobbie, and I'm so excited to be here today as well. So thank you for having me. Well, you've introduced me already. I'm a director in PwCs Crisis and Resilience team here in the UK, and I've been working in the crisis management space for a predominant part of my career. But actually I'm a psychologist by background and I have a specialism in crisis decision making.
And so while for the better part of my career, I have been helping many organisations to define the frameworks, the policies, the procedures for crisis management, I truly believe that people really are at the heart of crisis response, and ultimately, how well you navigate a crisis depends on how resilient your people and especially your leaders are.
And so I'm really passionate about helping leaders understand why the environment they face in a crisis is so different to business as usual. And what skills and behaviors they need to develop in order to navigate them successfully. And so that's both learning how to set themselves up [00:02:00] and how to lead themselves resiliently, as well as building and leading resilient teams around them.
Bobbie:
I think you are absolutely right and I think the work we have both done with helping organisations respond to crises. I think the observation we've often talked about is the fact that it's people that manage crises at the end of the day, and whilst we absolutely need plans and playbooks and frameworks play an important role, it is people at the heart of a response.
So with that, can we just talk a little bit more about the Centre? Can you tell our listeners a bit more what it's about and why you think, now really is there a need for it?
Claudia:
So the Crisis Leadership Centre is something that I've launched recently here in the UK. It's a global centre, and we launched it really to provide professional crisis leadership training, and that's where both current and future leaders at multiple levels of an organisation. So those current and future leaders that have a role really to lead an organisation through a crisis, either now or in the future. And what we offer within the Centre are two and four day [00:03:00] foundational courses, as well as bespoke programmes for entire crisis teams within organisations.
And I think what really differentiates the Centre from some of the other work and services that we see provided elsewhere is that our approach focuses on those characteristics or the skills that you might not typically think about in crisis preparedness or response work. So we focus on things like the impact of stress on personal resilience, how you can build comfort with setting strategy and making decisions when faced with huge ambiguity or uncertainty, being agile, flexible, and of course, managing stakeholders, but managing stakeholders through leading with empathy and building swift trust at a time when you're entirely challenged in doing so.
So Bobbie, as I mentioned, and as you know, my professional background is in psychology, and so we've woven a lot of the cognitive and social psychology theories into our modules, but in a really applicable way. And in a real way, we use a combination of immersive learning, both in-person and virtual sessions, embedded [00:04:00] learning workshops, behavioral simulations, and I'm really fortunate to say we've got a great suite of guest speakers, and that includes both academic and practitioners who really bring the challenges to life or audience in our fireside chats within the courses.
Bobbie :
I'm interested in kind of the timing of the launch because I know from your experience you've worked with leaders for many years now on crisis leadership.
What really drove launching the Centre now? Why do you think the skills are really important for leaders to have right now?
Claudia:
Yeah I think that's such a great question, Bobbie, and you're right. I know it's not necessarily new to me, elements of this I've been doing throughout my entire career, but I think the world has changed really.
We live in an age of constant disruption now, I mean, you and I both know “permacrisis” and the word “polycrisis” are now in the lexicon. They are the two new words in the dictionary, and we're basically facing this world externally, where we're facing never ending crisis. And not only that, there's multiple catastrophic events happening simultaneously, and they're feeding off [00:05:00] each other.
So all of these things like financial depression or a huge viral outbreak, these things have happened sequentially in the past. But never have they all co-occurred as they are now. And in addition to these crises that are happening externally, organisations are facing a huge amount of transformation and change - for example, driven by ESG regulations or the technology drivers and this current pace or cycle of disruption, I think that really underscores the need for crisis and resilience training and experience. And my personal view is really that every future senior executive will be in a position to have to lead an organisation through some sort of crisis in their tenure, because that's just the state of the world nowadays.
Bobbie:
That's a really interesting point. Just so I can understand this a bit better, given your point around change and demand transformation organisations are going through. Does every leader need to be trained and understand? Have these soft skills in your view, or are we talking about leaders that need to specifically have crisis response [00:06:00] capabilities?
Because to me, it sounds like what you're doing through the Centre could be very valuable in terms of personal growth for training for many business leaders who, as you say, may be expected to lead through crisis, but almost certainly you're going to lead through transformation.
Claudia:
I think that's exactly right, Bobbie. You know, the day-to-day aspects and skills that are required for effective leadership are just not the same as those required for effective and resilient crisis leadership. I mean, the decision and operating environment that leaders or executives face in a crisis are just fundamentally different from business as usual.
However, the skills we build in preparing for those crises will put us in a really good place to navigate all sorts of issues that we can encounter in our career. So let me use an iceberg analogy here. We see a crisis head on - a ransomware attack, for instance, or some sort of external event that we need to respond to. And that's when we are really put in the ring and we need to tap into our peak performance capability there. We have to be at our most resilient selves. We have to bring our best selves. But of course, there [00:07:00] are these underlying issues and challenges that you don't necessarily see right in front of you, and those require a similar set of skills in order to lead your teams through.
So with that in mind, within the Crisis Leadership Centre, we basically take a holistic approach to leadership development. The skills, the behaviors, the mindsets that we teach for enhancing personal resilience both during “peacetime”, and for use, when under immense pressure, whether that's facing a crisis or some other event that disrupts your sense of resilience.
That's the epitome of the course leading an organisation through a crisis. But those are all transferable to many other areas, such as navigating complex transformation programs or other personal life events. So as such, we basically hope that our “graduates” who've come through our course, they leave with that ability to move seamlessly through day-to-day disruptions that characterise today's landscape. But they really have that agility and that flexibility and that resilience to not just bounce back, but hopefully transform and bounce forward and grow from those events.
Bobbie:
Absolutely agree and I think it's [00:08:00] such good timing that you've launched the Centre because as you know, we've got very soon in March, April time, in the spring, we'll be launching our Global Crisis and Resilience Survey.
Your iceberg comment there reminded me of a really interesting statistic that's come out of it, which is that organisations have experienced a serious disruption, have faced almost four additional challenges related to, or brought on by that initial crisis. And I think, you know, for us, we, we've seen this happen before, but actually to hear that from organisations and read that back through the survey, I thought was really interesting. So I think the point that crisis begets crisis and that they are layered often and they're complicated, there are often, various different scenarios we have to plan for and because of that, you require foresight and skill to be able to lead effectively. And of course, thank you for just setting out how the Centre does that, because I think it's so important that the skills of crisis leaders, that they're able to refocus and hone those skills now to do that effectively.
Claudia:
Absolutely Bobbie. I mean, they're deep-rooted, these crisis that leaders [00:09:00] face these days, right?
And they not only crisis begets crisis, but they feed on each other and the impacts are just exponential. And I agree to that point, those same survey respondents, I know that they ranked training future leaders in crisis and resilience competencies or skills as the most important area when they were considering the future of their resilience program.
So that's coming back to your previous point - “why now?” I think people are also finally realising we need to upskill current and future leaders in this, and it's a whole new skillset.
Bobbie:
So let's then dig a little bit deeper into the actual skills themselves. So, as you know, we together work across our global network across PwC.
We have capabilities across crisis management, business continuity, cybersecurity, and supply chain. But what in your view does every business leader need, not just to navigate the “permacrisis” and “polycrisis” scenarios we've talked about, but also to be resilient, just be capable of tackling those day-to-day disruptions that might emerge as well. How do you help through the Centre leaders build the skills needed? [00:10:00]
Claudia
So the way we talk about it within the Crisis Leadership Centre, we've identified these levers or skills that we think resilient leaders pull on when faced with disruption. And this is based in years of academic research, but also stories from the field, to be honest and to name a few:
First of all, it's absolutely vitally important for leaders to be aware of their own personal resilience levels, and they really need to understand how their own stress responses emerge before a crisis strikes, so that they can understand how that stress may be impacting their own levels of functioning and in specifically their decision making and their leadership approach.
And we teach that they should benefit from having predefined high performance routines. And that's just to really elevate your personal resilience day-to-day, raise your baseline, understand what that personal resilience baseline is that you should really look to adhere to on a day-to-day basis to navigate those little disruptions as you call them.
But, also to understand and to set what a minimum viable routine should [00:11:00] be to maintain performance during times of crisis or immense stress and pressure, and whether that's sleep routines, getting outside for daylight or air, diet, whatever it is that is critically important to you, what are you gonna hold yourself accountable to to make sure you're operating at your best self when going through weeks and weeks of disruption?
Secondly, is leaders’ ability to be strategic and directive. Now, this involves purposefully defining very early on in the crisis, even though you're facing huge ambiguity and uncertainty, those values to guide the response and recovery, and really already starting to think long-term and define what success looks like even though you might not be able to see it.
So critical part of this is scanning the horizon, preempting future risks or potential impacts. Second and third order consequences, and crucially opportunities that the crisis might present in the long run. So using that to inform the scenarios that could occur, and then you can choose your course of direction to getting that one step [00:12:00] closer to your longer term successful strategy.
And this is so vital to fostering decision making and leaders don't have the information they need, and in that sense, they're also very prone to decision inertia and bias. This really helps overcome that. And ultimately as well, from a hearts and minds perspective, we know that it serves to drive collective response actions and behaviors, the right behaviors in the right direction, all beneath and around the leader.
So it really strengthens collaboration among a very diverse set of stakeholders to really bind together in a crisis.
Bobbie
Yeah, I get that. So I guess the ability to look around the corner and know what's coming is a really critical component of effective crisis management. Now, we also talked a lot to our clients across the network, and we talk about helping them to align their strategic vision, their business vision with their organisational values, but also to be flexible, particularly when they're responding to crises.
What's your point of view on the need for adaptability?
Claudia:
Oh, great question, Bobbie. Yes, absolutely. I mean, successful leaders in a crisis are [00:13:00] hugely agile and they're flexible, and they're adaptable. Basically, they need to know what their role is, when, and how the phase of the crisis, but also the stakeholders needs may change the demands on them and their role.
So they cannot be wedded to a policy, even though policy is there for a reason and it's a really good handle, right? You need to understand when the situation is different and it will require a creative solution because it's a novel situation. And then when searching for those solutions, seeking input very widely, destroying the hierarchy and the traditional sort of assumptions and biases, and really being broad in their thinking and just being really agile and adaptable.
So truly effective crisis leaders, in my mind, they harness this heterogeneity so they know that the relevant expertise may be found outside of that typical hierarchy, and they can really think creatively despite being under that pressure and under that sort of stress.
Bobbie:
I think you're spot on actually, because it really differentiates them from those leaders and organisations who become [00:14:00] quite inwardly focused during crisis.
Maintaining that external perspective as you go through a crisis response, as we know, is so important and understanding how your decisions and actions may be perceived. That use of external sources is so important.
Claudia:
Yes, exactly. And of course looking for creative solutions to a novel situation is required in a crisis, but it's also gonna feel really uncomfortable when everything is unknown and everything feels uncertain.
And so really, I think also for a leader, you have to have this ability to create a culture of empowerment and of autonomy and acceptance of failure, right? We're gonna try things here that might not work, but it could also be a step closer to that solution that we're looking for. And so really promoting swift response actions and that fast learning, while also being comfortable with tolerance of failure.
I think that's so essential when you're coming up with these new solutions quickly to changing environments. We know that crises are characterised by uncertainty and volatility, so the chances are that you [00:15:00] will fail often. It's only by embracing that failure that you can hope to learn and avoid failure overall and in the long run and get closer to that long term success.
But of course, that all requires whole new mechanisms of trust, and that takes courage.
Bobbie:
I would also add, I think it also takes building a culture where failure's good and actually embracing it and learning from it. And I think we're starting to see organisations change their mindset around the fact that disruption is inevitable, and that requires that failure point there as well.
So yeah, I guess for me, I would completely agree. Courage and trust are really important components to this. Setting that from a leadership perspective and driving that top down culture. I think the notion of repeated failure as part of growth, of course, is going to feel daunting. We know that, but actually it can really contribute to building that culture, as I said.
So let's get really, really practical for our listeners. Can you talk me through what would be the three things businesses can do right now [00:16:00] to think about their own personal resilience baseline and increasing that, but also their ability to manage effectively through a crisis?
Claudia:
So, first of all, and I briefly mentioned this, but knowing your own stress signature is so vitally important So really knowing what your go-to stress response is because it's so deeply personal and defining their high performance routines and their minimum viable routines so that they know day-to-day they can raise their personal resilience baselines. But also whenever faced with disruption, pressured, challenged, they can set sustainable rhythms for themselves, right? That they can run on for weeks on end. And this should not be different on day three or on week three of a crisis.
Secondly, I really think that, and we don't see this enough, Bobbie, running horizon scanning planning sessions with stakeholders and experts from a variety of functions in your business, and using those to identify and work through those worst case scenarios and impacts.
I've had a chief constable say to me, we need more foretellers of doom - a bit of an intense one. But using these sessions to [00:17:00] just stop and think, scan the horizon, understand the risks, but also understand the opportunities that are presented by both mega trends and potential acute crises. What could they mean for you from a transformative perspective?
And of course, practice, practice, practice. And this doesn't need to be, and in fact, it should not rely on solely annual desktop or simulation exercises. Be creative - use micros simulations or tactical decision making games that you can have on a repeated basis through a push notification on your phone or even just a notepad that's slid under a door.
Anything that is brain training very frequently, and it really allows for the rehearsal of roles, responsibilities, but also the decisions and actions that you'll be faced within a crisis. So that stays fresh, it stays top of mind. And of course, if they're interested in developing the mindset, skills and behaviors for effective crisis leadership, they can come on one of our courses.
Bobbie:
Brilliant. I think that is a great place to wrap up. And of course Claudia for people who are interested, they can go to [00:18:00] your website as well. There is the PwC Crisis Leadership Website, which is easy to find. Thank you so much, Claudia, for joining me. I really appreciate it. It's been a fascinating effort. It always is with you talking through this, so thank you for making the time.
In our upcoming episodes of Emerge Stronger through Disruption, we will continue to tackle the topics that keep our business leaders up at night and this spring, as I mentioned earlier, we’re really were excited to say we're launching the report for our Global Crisis and Resilience survey, so stay tuned to our site and we will be back to talk more about that next time.
We'd love to hear ideas from the listeners about topics you'd like us to tackle, so please do get in touch via LinkedIn and in the meantime, remember to subscribe to Emerge Stronger wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks so much for listening. We'll see you next time.