Leadership, and what it means to be an effective leader, has fundamentally changed. A repetitive notion, though it may be, the pandemic brought positive influence to the UK’s world of work. One such change was the (almost) abolishment of the stoic, intimidating archetype of a business leader.

Before 2020, leaders were celebrated for demonstrating the “hard skills” often learned via an MBA – things like being data-driven, having a strategy mindset and being highly analytical. Covid-19 made the UK's workforce vulnerable, and suddenly leaders needed “soft skills” – empathy, compassion and emotional intelligence.

For Roxy Kalha, founder of PR agency The Heard, this was a transformative period and presented her with a sub-conscious choice; should she follow the boardroom blueprint and manage through logic and results, or should she lead with her heart?

The moment

"It really changed how I viewed things, and how hard I was on myself."

“I was promoted to MD at The Romans at the end of January 2020. I was really excited to progress my career, and then lockdown happened. I had to send everyone home and I didn’t know what to do,” says Kalha.

“I had never been an MD before, and I didn’t know many peers at the same level as me. [At that point] I hadn’t joined the Women In PR group, and while there were many senior women that I could turn to, I felt intimidated.

“So, [myself and my workforce] went to work from home. I was at a defining moment in my career, without a plan or a blueprint. But, I am a planner.

“Suddenly, I had to work to keep a remote company together and progress forwards during a time when people were going through a lot in their professional and personal lives. I had to think on my feet; be quicker, agile.”

She says this time defined the leader she was going to be, as the external situation demanded an empathetic approach, but it also called for introspection and a shift in mindset – one that Kalha admits she didn’t fully appreciate until this My PR Moment interview came about.

“I think I had a tendency to be a bit neurotic and prescriptive on how [the world of work should be]. Rules on the workplace and social settings were changing every week and people were confiding in me about personal stuff to do with their families.

“Weirdly it [the pandemic] played into my strengths as a leader. It allowed me to do things I hadn’t got to test out and had an opportunity to explore, but it made me closer to the team and it put me in a position to really listen to clients and understand what changes they needed to make.”

She recalls that the PR sector felt especially volatile as agencies were “trying to hang on to clients for dear life” and worries about losing business were rampant.

“The Romans actually didn’t lose any [clients], it grew through that time and of course that’s down to the amazing team I had around me. We were giving clients creative solutions to things they weren't telling other people, just because we’d pulled on that bit of string [through informal discussions] where nobody else had.

During that time Kalha also hired approximately 25 new employees, and hiring remotely gave her the ability to “get to the nub” of who people are. These experiences ultimately led to her founding her own agency, The Heard.

“If I had already been an [established] MD for several years before the pandemic happened, I would have been different and tried to carry on behaving like [a typical MD], and then suddenly had to change [to softer, empathetic leadership]. I couldn’t get advice but I also didn’t feel judged. It was the first time I felt free to make mistakes.

“I can be quite hard on myself. But, because there was no blueprint to this situation I really embraced trying things and moving on if it didn’t work, which is not my natural personality at all. As I mentioned before, I like to plan.

“It taught me that you can give things a go, embrace failure and reframe things that didn’t go to plan as a positive learning experience. I was always very black and white on failure and that if you fail it's ‘really bad’. That has been the mentality of my life, so the pandemic taught me that failure isn’t a dirty word, it's actually growth. It really changed how I viewed things and how hard I was on myself. It taught me to loosen up, to not be a perfectionist and to see things as a journey as opposed to a binary win or lose situation.”

The takeaway

"...you don’t need to be a dick to be successful."

The key takeaway from the moment, is in fact a moment in itself. In 2022, Kalha left The Romans with a seven year tenure under her belt and a reputation – that she would insist is testament to the team surrounding her at the time – of tripling the agency’s headcount and driving notable financial growth.

By March 2023, she founded The Heard, and came to understand that her experiences of leading under the pandemic had set her up with the hard, and soft, skills to embrace being a PR agency founder. She had become the new-wave of leaders, an amalgamation of being profit-driven but people-centric.

“I thought I was fixed in the way I viewed work and the way I approached things, but it [being an MD during the pandemic] has taught me to be adaptable, question the way others do things and be critical about whether it's the best way for me. I was really scared to fail and in the pandemic there were so many failings, so it made me feel confident to take calculated risks, see failure as growth and move through tricky situations rather than staying safe. It made me resilient and helped me to loosen up. I was given a blank canvas to try new things as a leader.

“When I started The Heard I had the confidence that I could still be the type of leader I wanted to be and also be successful. The one thing that had previously stopped me starting up my own agency was the misconception that I had to be a certain type of person [leader]; a tough guy with no heart only focused on the bottom line. I’m not saying I'm a pushover, you can be firm but fair, but you don’t need to be a dick to be successful."