Leading through a crisis

Rowena Morris (RM): Welcome to the latest episode in the COVID-19 Business in Focus podcast, where we explore the business impacts of coronavirus. I’m Rowena Morris, a director at PwC, and I’m your host for this series.

The coronavirus outbreak has been stressful for many people, including those in leadership positions. We’re being asked to lead in a world that’s unlike anything we’ve all ever experienced. Fear and anxiety can be overwhelming and cause really strong reactions, making it difficult to look after our own wellbeing, and even if we’re not experiencing these feelings ourselves, being able to support others we’re working with is so important.

In this episode, we’ll be exploring some of the personal challenges leaders are experiencing right now, with a particular focus around anxiety. And we’ll outline some of the unique skills and capabilities needed to maintain strong leadership through uncertain times.

I’m delighted to be joined today by Dr. Rob Archer, a chartered psychologist at Cognacity, and Dr. Claudia Van Den Heuvel, who works in our crisis business.

Claudia Van Den Heuvel (CVDH): Hi, thank you for having us.

Rob Archer (RA): Hi Rowena.

RM: So to kick things off, what challenges are leaders experiencing at the moment?

CVDH: Well, while all crises are typified by uncertainty: with a lack of information, complexity, many moving parts, information overload, and dynamicity, they’re constantly changing, what we’ve found is particularly pertinent to COVID-19 is that leaders are having to balance priorities between these concerns over their staff health and safety, staff welfare, physical and mental health of their employees, and staff morale on the one hand, over these ongoing economic concerns about the company’s sustained future, operating model and even their viability over the long term.

We often talk about ‘wicked decisions’ in a crisis, and that’s what leaders are facing nowadays. They’re having to make these decisions that are do-or-don’t, or A versus B, which have very serious or significant outcomes and implications, but those outcomes and implications are unprecedented, and so they’re really difficult to anticipate and make sense of and understand in the moment. Yet we’re having to make those decisions right here, right now.

And linked to this, the decision-making structures that usually have worked for us in our day-to-day working environments on the office floors aren’t working as well as they would have done – they’re not fit for purpose. So within these virtual environments where we have a laptop ‘shield’ between ourselves and our team members, our fellow decision-makers, meeting etiquette might fall by the wayside, agendas aren’t being adhered to, the operating model is completely different, and that environment in which we’re making decisions is different. Leaders are having to be flexible and not afraid to change their ways of working and their ways in which making these difficult strategic decisions are done.

Now what makes COVID-19 particularly difficult of course is that leaders are tasked with all of this, all while experiencing heightened levels of stress and potentially anxiety themselves on a personal level.

RM: Thanks Claudia, and that point around virtual meetings really resonates with me, and I think it will be really interesting as we start to move back, with people starting to go back to work, how that balance plays out of still some people maybe staying at home and working from home, and then more and more people starting to come in and just seeing how that balance changes the dynamics.

So Rob, you have a lot of experience helping people deal with anxiety in your role, and I know that you recently led a virtual masterclass with 40 of our clients for managing anxiety, as part of our PwC Leadership Exchange, which I know got amazing feedback. So to kick things off from your side, can you just explain to us what anxiety actually is?

RA: Yes certainly, and you said that I have a lot of experience helping people deal with anxiety – of course that includes myself! So I am an anxious person, I get anxious all the time myself – and I’m a bit anxious being on this podcast – but there are things that matter more to me than my anxiety and I’m sure we’ll come back to that idea.

But in terms of what anxiety is, sometimes people use the word anxiety interchangeably with fear, but actually, they’re not the same thing. So fear is an emotional response to a real or perceived imminent threat, whereas anxiety is anticipation of a future threat. So in other words, I might be fearful of the virus for example, but my anxiety will be generated by thoughts like: am I going to catch the virus? Am I doing enough to protect myself? Will I be asymptomatic, or will my family catch it? And because anxiety is therefore internally generated, it tends to be infinite: we open ourselves up to infinite possibilities in the future that we cannot control. And this is partly why anxiety is associated with things like rumination, where we’re sort of going round and round in our heads with multiple – infinite, in fact – possibilities that we can’t control.

I think the second thing to understand about anxiety – I’ve noticed when I share this, it tends to, I think, help people feel a bit better about it. Because anxiety is an internal thing, we need to understand how the brain processes information, so there’s lots of different metaphors for how the brain works but one famous one is the idea of system one and system two, so Daniel Kahneman’s work. When we get information through our senses, it gets processed by system one first, so this is the older more primitive brain – that’s very very fast, makes immediate reactions. And then later, system two comes online, and this is the conscious brain, the brain that’s good at figuring out solutions to wicked problems.

Now, what’s interesting is that the awareness… so, for example, say that you get a piece of sensory information, say your email pings, it will be processed by the system one brain, the older, fast brain first, and then only later would you become conscious of that fact. Now, the old brain, the fast brain, because it is so fast, it has to use templates and algorithms to help you work out what to do in the moment. And these templates are very subject to our past experience. So for example, if you had a childhood that was very turbulent, or you have had experiences that show you the world isn’t a safe place, your pre-conscious brain, the fast brain, system one, will be very quick to show you that template, and you will have a particularly ‘better safe than sorry’ approach, and you might well be very prone to anxiety. Now that’s not your fault – that doesn’t mean to say that you’re a weak person in any way. That just means to say that your brain has learned certain templates and algorithms.

Now, there’s one more implication that comes from all of this. Very often people feel bad about how they feel. They feel like they should be able to control their anxiety or control their immediate reactions and their emotions. But if anxiety has happened pre-consciously, and only a few milliseconds later do we become conscious of that fact, that explains why we cannot control our anxiety: it is literally like trying to control something that has already happened. It’s like trying to control the past. So I think understanding that often comes as something of a relief to people. So Rowena, and Claudia, what are you anxious about at the moment?

RM: I suppose for me… actually, this all really resonates what you’re talking about and it’s really interesting hearing a bit more about the system one versus system two thinking. So I think for me, where I’ve felt most anxious over the last few weeks is whether I’m there enough and in the right way for the people that need my support, so my family, my friends and my team, and really thinking through: am I being there for those people in the right way, and I think linked to that, where I’ve felt anxiety is… I suppose it’s more around the overall uncertainty of not being used to the feeling that I don’t necessarily have all the answers for the people that are looking for me to give them. So I think those are the top two from my perspective. Claudia, how about you?

CVDH: Yeah, similar actually, Rowena and Rob. For me, it’s the timescale piece, so not knowing how long this might carry on for, what we’re working towards in terms of that new normal. I’ve had to balance childcare and work which of course a lot of people are facing, but it’s how long is that sustainable for, and if we don’t have an end timing to work to, how am I going to make sure that I am there for my team and for my family enough, and I don’t spread myself too thinly and it impacts my mental health. So it’s really balancing all of those different priorities without knowing how long I need to do that for.

RA: Yeah that’s interesting. I’ve been doing lots of polling of people over the last few weeks and I think it’s fair to say that anxiety or anxious thoughts are falling into one of three categories. Firstly there’s the anxiety around our own health risks or health risks to our family. Then there’s stress and overwhelm at the change to our routines, and juggling childcare is a great example, but doesn’t have to be that, you know – any kind of change to routine can be stressful. And then finally, uncertainty about the future, as Claudia says – and it feels to me that the balance, when I’ve been doing the polling, it started off mainly focused on the health risks, but in the last few weeks it’s definitely moving towards uncertainty about the future, so it’s been interesting to observe the patterns.

RM: That’s really interesting, and I think something, you know when you were saying about the stress of changing our routines, it’s perhaps surprising, perhaps not, about how many people are missing their commutes. I think some people are finding that 45 minutes or an hour or however much time, where they are able just to have a bit of time by themselves to read or whatever without all of the other distractions, people are really missing. So I think it’s thinking through, how can you build in something similar, but probably a nicer experience than sitting on a train, using that time for yourself.

So Rob, building on those points, have you noticed any particular psychological responses, through the crisis, through the work that you’ve been doing?

RA: Yes, and actually, this is a piece of work that we’ve been doing with PwC, who created the ‘100 percent remote teams’ team created a nice three-stage model, where they talked about the stage one of initial disruption, stage two of transition, and then stage three of returning to whatever the new normal looks like, and you know, you can probably anticipate a hit on engagement, employee engagement and performance, that steadily returns to normal. What I did is I overlaid the likely psychological reactions at each stage, because you can kind of predict the psychological journey that teams will go on. So in stage one, and this is not just with COVID, this is with any crisis, you can predict in the early weeks something called acute stress, which is characterised by two things – very strong emotions, so things like shock and anxiety, fear, but also high levels of adrenaline, and adrenaline is what gives us lots of energy, and I think my experience has been, particularly in PwC, people are very busy in those early weeks, they moved into action, and they got huge amounts done. And because this is high energy stage, this is often quite exciting – I’ve noticed that people often talk about those early weeks as being quite exciting, there’s a bit of a buzz to it.

But there are a couple of downsides. So adrenaline does tend to make it harder for some people to sleep, and secondly of course it’s not sustainable over the long term. So eventually, the energy does drain away, and then that leads to the second stage. The second stage is very different psychologically, so this is more characterised by what we would call chronic stress, and chronic stress is characterised mainly by fatigue. So somewhere around the four- to seven-week mark, it kind of hits people, the adrenaline’s worn off, and the fatigue takes over. Now, fatigue’s perfectly natural but again it has downsides, so people start to make more mistakes, ordinary tasks take longer, you have to try harder for the same results, and it does tend to mean that we find it harder to emotionally regulate – so this is where many people feel they’re on a sort of emotional rollercoaster in stage two. So something good happens and you feel great, I can do this, but then something bad happens and you feel like it’s the end of the world, and I think this emotional rollercoaster is where many people are now. Overall, the mood is lower in stage two, so people find it harder to motivate themselves and for some, this would even translate into depressive symptoms.

So that’s stage two, and the good news is that’s not where the story will end, so in stage three, whenever some semblance of normality returns, if you look at all the evidence in crisis research, what happens with most people is that in stage three, rather than post-traumatic stress, which is what… many people have heard that phrase, we should really be talking about post-traumatic growth. So post-traumatic growth is the sense that through the crisis, you’ve actually learned something about yourself, that you’ve clarified maybe what matters to you, and you take that learning and that psychological agility with you going forwards. So it’s not like you’re the same as you were before, but you’ve actually learned something about yourself, you’re in some ways better than you were before. And this is the idea of being anti-fragile – we’re not the same, we’re in some ways better for having gone through the crisis. Having said that though, obviously some people, depending on what happens to them and the support they get, some people will carry forward more psychological scarring, some rigidity, and some signs and symptoms of burnout.

So the work we’ve been doing is trying to give people practical tools and tips in each stage, to try and ensure people get into option one rather than option two, and just very briefly, to share what those things are. In stage one, when people are acutely stressed, we’ve identified three Cs that people need. So helping people to think clearly, so clarity is number one, because it can be hard to think clearly when stressed. Control is the second C – all the evidence suggests that if people have got very high demands, if you also give them high levels of control, they start to experience those demands much more positively. And then finally compassion – and I think for high achievers, this is less about compassion for others, although that matters, it’s often about self-compassion, and instead of having that harsh inner voice, actually applying some self-compassion can be a very important foundation skill.

And then finally, in stage two, which I think is where many people are now, we’ve identified three Hs that can deal with chronic stress and fatigue. So firstly, honesty – what this is about is being honest with ourselves about what is and isn’t working. Very often the habits that we lay down in stage one under stress become the new normal, they become our new routine, even if that routine isn’t that sustainable. So being honest with ourselves and others about what isn’t and isn’t working is really important. Humanity is the second H – the virus is very cruel to humans because it’s asking us to stay alone and indoors when we like to coregulate our emotions, so tapping into your own human needs – what is it you need today as a human being to be at your best – and also being aware of other people’s human needs I think is really important. And then finally, hope – there’s a lot of evidence that says that if we can orientate ourselves and others towards a sense of hope and possibility for the future, it does tend to promote this idea of post-traumatic growth. Now you wouldn’t try and persuade somebody that life was going to get better, particularly if they’re stressed or really really tired – you wouldn’t try and persuade somebody ‘don’t worry, it’s all going to be OK in the end’, because that creates resistance. But if we can tease out from ourselves and from others a sense of how the future could be better than before. This does tend to promote post-traumatic growth and suppress post-traumatic stress. So at the right time, applying hope and possibility is a really good idea.

RM: Rob, really interesting to hear some of the ways that you cope with dealing with your two and four-year old just downstairs. And building out on those coping strategies that you’ve been talking about, what are some of the ways people can manage their own anxiety?

RA: I think the buffer point is a good one – that can just be literally taking a moment before you leave your workspace to consider the kind of impact you want to make in the next phase. So if I speak about children, that’s because it personally resonates, but if I take a moment to pause before I leave my workspace, to think about what kind of dad I want to be when I re-engage with my kids, even if that’s a minute’s worth of thought, that helps me make a different impact, it’s kind of a mini-buffer.

There are lots of other things we can do practically to cope with anxiety. One of the techniques which is a little bit counter-intuitive is to schedule a time to worry. So believe it or not, this is an evidence-based approach, but you actually put a time in your diary, maybe 15 minutes’ worth, and sit down at your desk, write down all of the things that you’re anxious and worried about, and then if you have time, you start to brainstorm some solutions and a possible plan. Now this has two effects: first, you start to listen to your anxiety, and take it seriously – you’re no longer pushing it aside. But secondly, it can free up your time and attention outside of your worry spaces, because if you do have an anxious thought, you can just write it down, whatever it is that you’re worrying about, set it aside, and then save it up for your next scheduled worry time.

Another technique which is also evidence-based and a little bit strange, but naming… there’s a lot of evidence that suggests that naming your anxious thoughts, or naming your anxious mind is a helpful way of giving yourself some distance between you and your anxiety. So whenever we say ‘I’m feeling so anxious’ or ‘I’m feeling completely overwhelmed’ we’re sort of implying that it’s the whole of us that is anxious; there is no bit of us that isn’t anxious. Whereas actually, this is just a part of us that’s anxious. So in our resilience training, we sometimes use the metaphor of the ‘inner chimp’, this idea that the limbic system, part of system one, is constantly on the lookout for danger, and I think this idea that you have an inner chimp in your brain for some is a helpful idea, you know, naming that part of you implies that you are more than just your anxiety, and I have a client actually who when we did this exercise started to call her anxious mind Aunt Susan, because she has a real life Aunt Susan who is full of well-meaning advice – don’t spend too much, don’t walk home too late at night, don’t eat food that’s past its sell-by date – Aunt Susan is full of very well-meaning advice, but my client doesn’t just sort of sit down and listen to Aunt Susan constantly, she says ‘thank you Aunt Susan’, and then goes on to live her life and make decisions, and I think naming the anxiety therefore creates a slightly different relationship to the anxiety.

RM: I’m intrigued to know if Aunt Susan knows that she’s got that use for that client in that way!

RA: It would be interesting to know!

RM: It really would, it really would. Claudia, if we move on to thinking about how leaders can help their own teams through this difficult time – so even while they might be personally struggling to look after their own wellbeing, I wonder if you can share a few tips from that perspective?

CVDH: It starts with leading yourself, right? So the challenge is really to be self-aware and reflective enough to recognise your own stress response, and how that might be impacting your ability to lead or to make decisions while facing pressure and uncertainty. But of course, the other part of leadership is being aware of others in the team or the organisation and how they’re faring through these waters. So really trying to get to grips with how the situation is impacting your immediate teams, your staff, your employees. Supervisors and managers are now being called upon to recognise when employees may need additional psychological, or physical, or health and safety help. And I think part of this really is knowing your team well enough to go and ask yourself, are they acting themselves? Are they functioning, are they coping, or are they saying they are, and again, I go back to this idea that there’s a shield between yourself and your team now, a virtual laptop shield between you and your team, so you do really need to understand what makes them tick and what they act like on a day-to-day basis when we observe them in person.

And part of this is being wary of something called the fundamental attribution error, which is a term coined in social psychology, whereby we attribute people’s behaviours, when we don’t know them very well, we attribute people’s behaviours to personalities, rather than taking into account the situation that they’re faced with, and the pressures that the situation might be bringing to them. So, a great example is if you had been dining in a restaurant prior to COVID-19, and the waitress is very grumpy, you might think ‘why are you in a profession where you need to interact with people all the time if you don’t like interacting with people?’, but she might just be facing a really difficult situation at home, she might not be earning enough, she might have just had an argument with the manager – we don’t understand and take into account the situation that the waitress is facing. So really, it’s making sure that you are attributing people’s behaviours to the situation and the pressures that they’re facing rather than to the personalities and dismissing them in that sense.

When it comes to steering organisations or teams through difficult or challenging times, some of the research in psychology has found that establishing what they call a superordinate goal really brings people together – it reduces competition, it increases collaboration and cooperation. What is a superordinate goal? It’s really a ‘what are we working towards together’: what’s driving us, what is that organisational value, that principle that we as an entire company need to work towards. And something that has been shown to really work well in research across demographic groups and populations and across industries, whereby previously competing teams who really didn’t know how to cooperate very well then actually make it work and become very effective teams. So having that superordinate goal really clearly stated, constantly reinforced, bringing hearts and minds together but also focusing the mind and giving people something to work towards so they understand the purpose of their work while they’re still feeling a little bit more removed from their day-to-day jobs.

RM: And as leaders, we know that that’s a really important aspect, whether in normal times or these extraordinary times, so I think it will be really helpful to maybe reflect a little bit more on to get that right, and to really have those goals in place, you really need to have the information to hand to be able to make those decisions, but actually, we might not be able to have all the information to hand to be able to move things forward in that way. So can you just sort of build out a little bit more on what are the sorts of things leaders should be thinking about when to be able to make decisions, we might not have all the information and datasets that traditionally we might have otherwise had?

CVDH: No that’s absolutely right Rowena. And really there’s two things, there is definitely grounding whatever decision you’re making in that value that your organisation adheres to, or in that superordinate goal. When we’re making decisions with a lack of information, we have to make assumptions – we need to make assumption-based decisions. And that’s absolutely fine. We can’t progress and we can’t operate if we don’t do that. But being extremely clear on what those assumptions are, and separating those from facts, from the known facts and what is projection and what is assumption, and then always driving back to the value. So if you start scenario planning the way in which that decision might play out, the ultimate outcome – the company that you’ll be when that decision has been made ten months down the line, are you still being true to yourself, are you being true to your values, it gives you something to ground that decision in, it gives you a hook to almost hang your hat off as it were.

And of course, when making assumptions, it’s really important we have someone who can challenge our thinking and the assumptions we’re making, because we might make the wrong assumptions, and when making decisions on a huge amount of assumptions, you want to make sure that they’re at least as reasonable as possible, so as a leader, making sure you have that devil’s advocate within your team, someone you trust, but who can also stand up to you and say ‘I don’t think that’s a fair assumption to make’ or ‘I don’t think what we’re doing is right by who we said we would be or what we’re trying to achieve here' et cetera.

Another piece is really coming back to what we reflected on at the start, Rowena, which is how the team structures nowadays might not necessarily fit this type of virtual decision-making environment. So traditionally, as I said, crisis management teams are made up of seven to 12 members, a democratic vote almost is taken, there’s a very structured meeting agenda, and we go around the table, everyone provides their update. It’s not been working for the organisations that we work with, and what we’ve found is that decision-making groups need to be slimmed right down to three to four people, but surrounded by the expert advisers, and this is a really important point in COVID-19, where the experts might be situated well below the executive team. And whoever they are and wherever they are in the organisation, they need to be identified, and their voices need to be amplified and heard so that they’re actually supported by leadership.

And finally that flexibility piece – staying resilient and being flexible, so have that end state in mind, have that goal you’re working towards, that superordinate goal, but be flexible in the process by which you’re going to get there, because we cannot predict what the next nine, ten months are going to look like, we just to make sure that we’re navigating the constantly changing roads. So be flexible about what methods you take, what pathways or routes you might take, in order to reach those goals.

RM: Some really good tips and advice there, and I really like that point around thinking through who is your mentor or who is your challenger, because again, I think in a normal working environment, maybe where you’re facing a difficult challenge, you might have those sorts of conversations with people while you’re making your cup of tea, or while you’re walking down the corridor, and I think just not letting that go in terms of thinking through just who can you run an idea past or test something out with is really really critical.

So as we look to wrap things up, Rob, can we just finish from you on some top tips for people who might be struggling with their own mental health at the moment? You’ve shared some really useful insights across the podcast, but I think if we could have your top three tips, that would be really really helpful.

RA: I think when it comes to top tips for mental health and dealing with difficult thoughts and emotions, it’s partly contextual but I suppose I could probably identify some tips that I’ve noticed people tend to generate value from most generally. I would say number one might be that we can’t control how we feel. We’re actually not that in control of our own emotions and immediate reactions for the reasons that I stated around system one – that’s not really in our control. And so how we feel is how we feel. All we can control is the response from that point on. So no matter what situation you’re in or how you’re feeling, you have choices to make, and so who is making those choices? And I liked what Claudia was saying about being guided by your values. One of the strongest findings from clinical psychology is this ability to develop psychological flexibility, which is roughly defined as the ability to make your own choices even when you’re feeling like your own mind is beating you up – who is in control? Is it your own difficult thoughts and emotions or is it your own values? So that would be number one, focus on your response and drop the internal battle to change how you feel.

Secondly, I think if you think about where anxiety thrives, it’s generally in the dark, it thrives indoors, anxiety often interrupts our sleep, and sort of paralyses us in terms of making plans. So give it a hard time. Ramp up the self-care. Think about the things you need to do today as a human being to be at your best. If you can do anything in the areas of sleep and sleep hygiene, exercise and movement, daylight, getting some daylight every day: critical, and also diet – if you can do anything in terms of marginal gains in any of those areas, it tends to improve mental health, and anxiety has a harder time.

The third I think is to use our difficult emotions, to see them as normal, and also to see them as data. Difficult emotions are often telling us something. Anxiety is telling you that something matters to you in life. After all, if you didn’t care about anything, you wouldn’t be anxious. I think it was the Queen who once said grief is the price of love, and I really like that quote, not just that it’s by the Queen, but I think she’s getting at something that’s really important, that unless we’re willing to pay the price, unless we’re willing to risk grief or risk rejection in our lives, we’re not actually going to have access to one of the greatest things in a human life, which is love. And it’s the same with our anxiety – can we pay attention more to the thing that we care about than our anxiety itself? And I’ll give an example maybe. So I’m anxious about the impact of the crisis on my family, and I’ve got two very young children, and I kind of worry about that somehow this will rob them of a little bit of their childhood – I’m anxious that my kids get to be kids when they’re very young. And so, one of the things I try to remember is, well, let’s focus on that. Rather than the anxiety, let me focus my energy on trying to ensure that we have a laugh. One of the things that I do is that I chase my kids around pretending to be the coronavirus. Now maybe that will store up years of trauma for them, who knows, but it’s fun and it’s part of my value of trying to make this period of time enjoyable and focusing on the things that matter rather than the anxiety itself.

RM: I love that example Rob, and I really like that whole idea of just paying more attention to the thing that you care about, rather than the feeling of the anxiety. Claudia, maybe we could turn to you and just go to some top tips for leaders looking to explore ways to better support both themselves and their team through this difficult period, could you do the same and outline a couple of top tips?

CVDH: I would say it’s lead by example – take care of yourself, manage your own individual resilience, healthy body, healthy mind, happy life – and don’t be afraid to show vulnerability. Second, I’d say when managing teams, it’s all about creating a sense of safety, structure and control, so that people know what they’re doing and feel supported. And from a decision-making perspective, it really is about creating headspace in whichever way works for you, and being flexible, to stay resilient and adaptive.

RM: Thank you so much both for sharing your insights, and of course, thanks to everyone for listening. If you’ve been personally affected by any of the issues we discussed in this episode, there are lots of really useful resources out there to provide you with the help and support you need. Whether you’re concerned about yourself or a loved one, organisations like Mind, Samaritans and Anxiety UK can offer expert advice to support you through this time. If you’d like more practical advice, go to our website at pwc.co.uk/covid19. Here you’ll find our special wellbeing webcast, featuring Phil Hopley, a consultant psychiatrist from Cognacity, and Laura Hinton, our chief people officer. Thanks everyone – until next time, please do stay safe.

Participants

• Rowena Morris, director, PwC
• Dr. Rob Archer, Chartered Psychologist, Cognacity
• Dr. Claudia Van Den Heuvel, PwC