In this episode of The Heidrick & Struggles Leadership Podcast, Katharina Hesse speaks with Nicole Pieterse, a seasoned board and CEO advisor and HR strategy thought leader, about shaping future-ready executive teams. Their conversation explores the drivers of high-performing leadership—from building clarity of strategy and fostering authentic team dynamics to breaking the “one-size-fits-all” mold for talent development.

Nicole unpacks the evolving role of executives in a hybrid, distributed world, highlighting the need for servant leadership and real connections across geographies and functions. She also discusses the challenges and opportunities of digital transformation, emphasizing adaptability, curiosity, and transparent communication as critical capabilities for leaders navigating technological change and AI adoption.

Welcome to The Heidrick & Struggles Leadership Podcast. Heidrick is the premier global provider of diversified solutions across senior-level executive search, leadership, assessment and development, team and organizational effectiveness, and culture shaping. Every day, we speak with leaders around the world about how they're meeting rising expectations and managing through volatile times, thinking about individual leaders, teams, organizations, and society. Thank you for joining the conversation.

Katharina Hesse: Hello. I'm Katharina Hesse, a partner in Heidrick and Struggles’ Zurich office and a member of our Financial Services Practice. 

Today, I'm joined by Nicole Pieterse, chief HR officer of Swiss Re’s Property and Casualty Division and an experienced advisor to boards and CEOs on HR strategy and leadership topics. At Swiss Re, Nicole has helped with the evolution of its leadership culture. 

You've worked on topics like pay transparency, career development, and the preparation for a tech-enabled future. You are passionate about embedding trust and resilience into leadership teams, and you have a clear perspective on what it takes to choose and develop future-ready talent in a fast-moving world. 

Nicole, welcome. It's a great pleasure to have you. I'm excited about our conversation. 

Nicole Pieterse: Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure. 

Katharina Hesse: Wonderful. Let's jump into the first area, the first section. Let's start with the concept of executive team effectiveness. In your view, what makes the difference between a group of senior leaders and a truly high performing executive team? 

Nicole Pieterse: For me, it starts very obviously with the strategy. I think any team is only as effective as they understand the mission. I think a team can be the same composition, the same type of leaders, and can be very effective in one situation and maybe not so effective in another situation. So, understanding the strategy, the mission¬—understanding each other's roles to achieve or execute on that strategy and having an open and transparent dialogue around everybody's strengths and also derailers in the team—is, I think, a really important ingredient for success. 

Once you understand that, then it's important to regularly reflect. How are we doing as a team? You also, of course, need the classical performance management by the senior leader to make sure that we are continuously raising the bar. 

Katharina Hesse: You mentioned a few ingredients already, but what are the most common barriers you've seen, especially in a global organization? What gets in the way of executive teams operating at their full potential? 

Nicole Pieterse: I think what mainly gets in the way in large companies is that we treat every team as one-size-fits-all. So, there's standard leadership programs, there's standard profiles, even, to hire people and to develop people, whilst actually it's the dynamic within a team that makes a team successful. 

So therefore, if you focus the programs on the individuals as such, and it's one-size-fits-all, I think you're missing what it really takes to become an effective team and to address the team dynamics. No one size fits all; that will be a good approach. 

And at the other side, it's also about understanding deeply what the strengths are that you can leverage in each other, but also understanding that, if that's your team, what you need to complement the team with to work to their full potential. 

Katharina Hesse: Thank you. You emphasized the topic of strategy just before. How do you ensure clarity around that topic of strategy, of culture, and the ways of working together? 

Nicole Pieterse: Yes, I personally like data. So, I love the assessments that we do with yourself and others, so that we make sure we deeply understand people's drivers and motivations, personality traits.

In particular, when you work with executives who have been around for many, many years already, they work with the assumption that they can be effective and truly be themselves; that is inspiring me most. We can have authentic leaders, being fully aware of their strengths and leveraging them, while at the same time being aware of the derailers. 

Where the data helps is that you can build sort of the ideal team based on the data. So, the data helps you to understand the commonalities of the individuals but also the differences. And of course, the tools that are available to us are much less biased than my own judgement can ever be. 

Katharina Hesse: That's such a modern approach, especially also the topic of authenticity in leadership—I find that inspirational too. 

Has the shift to a more hybrid and distributed leadership affected team effectiveness at the top? And if yes, how? 

Nicole Pieterse: Yes, whilst organizations have become flatter, having more distributed teams actually means that you're less in front of the team. You're seeing people maybe not on a daily basis; you're not involved with the day-to-day execution. So, what I think has changed a lot is that leaders, despite the flatter organization, are actually further away, interestingly enough.

I like this idea of thinking about an organization as a reversed pyramid, so a pyramid upside down. So, rather than in the past, where you would steer that from far away from the top, you're turning it around and as a leader—as a servant leader— you're supporting the organization to execute on the strategy. 

This is a different way of leading: you need to have a clear vision and need to steer very clearly, but you also have to step away from the day-to-day, and you're also able to step away whilst people are a bit further away from you. 

Katharina Hesse: How do you help make it feel real, that concept of the reverse pyramid, and not aspirational and, you know, strategic in a way? 

Nicole Pieterse: I think leaders today actually need to be very close to the team. They need to understand what's happening on the ground. So, having people closely connected with each other, understanding what's happening in the market, is very important for senior leaders. 

So, I guess the good old ivory tower is no longer working. You really need to be with your feet on the ground, with the teams, to understand what's happening. That makes it real, and it makes you also understand what's different in the different markets, in the different teams, so that you can adjust your style appropriately. 

Katharina Hesse: A follow-up question to that: Does that mean that headquarters actually becomes less important if leadership is distributed more?

Nicole Pieterse: Yes, it's a nuanced one. I guess headquarters typically is a place where people come together, and I think that has value. 

But it doesn't have to be headquarters. It can also be in the office or in different places. I think when people come together, that's where you have an opportunity to connect more deeply at a personal level and start to really understand that team dynamic that I talked about before. 

But I do think that being more distributed and being closer to the clients, closer to your employees, does allow for a more tailored and a more effective approach. 

Katharina Hesse: Let's dive into another topic, a much-discussed topic: the topic of digital transformation. 

From our perspective from the outside, there's often a gap in leadership readiness at the very top, at the executive or even at the advisory or non-exec board level. How do you think companies can better prepare senior leaders to lead in more tech-driven environments today? 

Nicole Pieterse: Yes, you're very quickly out of date in the current environment. I think it's one of the biggest questions that lots of people have. How do I keep up to date in this current environment, both with technology but also with just news in general? I mean, you just have to open the different news apps in the morning and you get overwhelmed with all the different things that are happening. 

I think we need to allow leaders to explore, to be curious. We should be exposing them to things that they might not naturally be exposed to, whether it's by reverse mentoring, by inviting people from outside in, people who you're not typically having your network, or by somehow making sure that people have access to the unusual suspect. I think that's an important one. 

At the same time, we need to acknowledge that not everybody might be at the same level of understanding and have a transparent, open environment where people can acknowledge that they don't know. One where you can acknowledge that you don't know and can ask questions about the things you don't know—that's the environment you want to create. 

Katharina Hesse: That’s coming back to the vulnerable topic of being yourself in those executive positions. Very good point. 

You mentioned that digital transformation is more about behavior than about tools. What have you learned about encouraging the executive-level shifts regarding speed, experimentation, and cross-functional collaboration?

Nicole Pieterse: There's a couple of behaviors that are important, but for me, the most important one is actually communication. How do we communicate around digital transformation? How do we communicate about the role of the employees? How do we communicate around the role of leaders? What do we think is happening? What do we think is not happening?

Because I think the way you communicate will either help with trust or work against it. And by trust, I mean the trust of employees in you as a good employer, and trust of clients in you as a good service provider. Having this trust is driven by how you communicate about it, and we often still communicate about it in a sort of boardroom way, in terms of productivity and cost efficiencies, instead of something that is making people thrive, making people productive, making people into higher performers.

And so, it's making sure that we talk about it in a positive way and take the human side into account.

Katharina Hesse: Yes, I was wondering about that. You know, very often when leaders don't know a certain topic, there is sort of a barrier to go into it because of the vulnerability that has to do with it, but also because of the time. Do you see that a lot that, that leaders maybe just don't take the time to dive in topics that they don't know that well? 

Nicole Pieterse: Yes. I think the best leadership advice that I have gotten is that you have to move from doing to being. 

What that actually entails is that instead of constantly working, working, working to execute things and drive things, you actually have to sit back and make sure that you reflect and learn and understand what's going on. The world is super interconnected and it's very complex, and complexity comes with taking the time too for dialogue and educating yourself. 

So yes, from doing to being was the advice I got. 

Katharina Hesse: Very good advice. What about the implementation of AI more specifically? What's your view on that? 

Nicole Pieterse: On how to do it, or on the importance of it? 

Katharina Hesse: Where you're standing, what you're doing about it, and maybe also the importance of it? 

Nicole Pieterse: It's one of those things where nobody yet knows exactly where we're going. So, the way I look at it, we have to prepare the organization for a future that doesn't exist yet, which is somewhat unusual. Lots of us are not used to doing that because typically we know exactly where we're going—or at least we sort of know where we're going. 

In this case, you need to make sure that you have that level of adaptability and constant learning to adjust to the new features, the new technology, the new ways of working. But for me, it's clear that it's a significant shift in how we work, how people work together—with agents, with automation—and it's really going to be a significant change for the workforce in the future. 

Katharina Hesse: Has it already started, or is it still at the at the beginning? 

Nicole Pieterse: Well, many companies, including Swiss Re, are already using a lot of workplace productivity tools. So there, it already starts. And of course, outside of work, you have so many things available to you that already are featuring artificial intelligence, so people are starting to get used to it.

Now it's a matter of how you make sure that you use it appropriately, that we are aware of the potential pitfalls using it, and that we continue to train ourselves to make the right decisions. It comes with all kinds of considerations that we don't—I don't think we have even imagined what we need to consider. 

But what I'm concerned about is how do we continue to educate people in the right way? How do we make sure that people don't become completely reliant on the automation and can make the right decisions for the company and the clients? 

Katharina Hesse: Yes, you made a good point. I mean, it's still prone to error and we're in an industry where errors are—where we're allergic to errors. We want to know everything about everything. We love data, but having data in front of you and it might not be correct? That is still a topic that people have to get used to. And to think, “Oh, a system gave me an answer, but I have to actually be careful.”

Nicole Pieterse: It has to be complementary. I think today, we have lots of experts that are able to judge whether the outcome is right or wrong. Of course, the concern is more about the long term. How do we continue to have experts that know whether the outcome is right or wrong?

That starts with how we train the juniors to become the seniors, how we train the experts to do more complicated tasks than they do today. So, the question is: How do you keep on edge? How do you stay on the edge, I guess, of your expertise? 

Katharina Hesse: Let's move to a topic that's very close to my heart, the topic of succession planning, pipelines, and the future of talent. 
Succession planning is an ever-evolving topic, as our industry overall is evolving. What is your approach to leadership succession, especially regarding the topics of digitalization, changes in demographic, and the flattening of hierarchies?

Nicole Pieterse: First of all, it is no longer a once-a-year process. I mean, that has stopped a while ago and we are not thinking about succession plans only once a year. It's continuous.

It's constantly on people's mind. Almost every day, you’re sort of thinking, “Okay, what if things are moving? Am I still okay? Do we still have the right successors in place?” It's like a chessboard that you need to make sure that constantly is filled with the right pieces. So, that's one. 

I also see that we are no longer looking at one particular profile to fill the pipeline. You have one or maybe a few different profiles for the same role to provide optionality, because depending on when the role becomes vacant, you might need a slightly different profile at that particular time, depending on the strategic direction, depending on the challenge. 

At the same time, you want to continue to broaden that pipeline. You want to make sure that you continue to open up to talent that are maybe not always the obvious ones, who are coming from different parts of the of the world or different parts of work environment—which, in our industry, is always a bit of a challenge because we keep looking for the same type of profiles, often and often. 

I think what has become more important than maybe in the past is how you retain the people that are on the succession pipeline. Because of flatter organizations, it takes a lot longer before the rules become vacant. 

Katharina Hesse: Yes.

Nicole Pieterse: And therefore, what do you do to grow them? To keep them doing stretch assignments, to make sure that they are enthusiastic about staying in that role longer than maybe they had envisioned, especially when these are talents who have been growing fast. They would have been three years, four years in the role, and then they would have jumped to the next role. Maybe that last role before the big, big role, it might take seven, eight, even nine years before the role is available. How do you keep that interesting? 

Katharina Hesse: Yes, that's hard, especially since the rest of the world is speeding up. 

Nicole Pieterse: Yes. 

Katharina Hesse: So, having more patience than before in a world that feels like it's slipping through your fingers in a way. Very interesting. 

There’s also the topic of optionality; I see that a lot as well. When we are preparing succession plans, we look much more broadly. We present our clients with much broader options than maybe ten years ago, when we had those three or four main topics that needed to be checked and we would look only for that option. 

It’s a very interesting topic around skills. How do you make sure that, on one hand, you still have that match with the skill set—with technical skills—and on the other hand you have an alignment with Swiss Re’s purpose, culture, and vision? 

Nicole Pieterse: So, what is very special around Swiss Re culture is what we define as the Swiss Re spirit. This is about how we collaborate and how we join forces to bring the best of ourselves to our customers. That is a special characteristic that we're all very proud of. 

I think for any external candidates to understand that that's important, that is sort of the only thing it takes. Because we're also very open and inclusive to other perspectives and other ideas. It’s just being open to be part of that community and making sure that you can immerse yourself in that community whilst being different. That is something that is an important thing to check on external candidates. 

When we’re assessing skills, track records are important, but we more and more start to look at whether people have a variety of experiences. That can be somewhat narrow, so within the same line of business maybe doing two or three different markets or a very wide variety of having done property, casualty, life, and health. So, we're looking at whether people have different experiences, because we believe that's an indicator for being able to adapt to new experiences going forward as well. 

Katharina Hesse: Forward-looking more than backward-looking, in a way, in those profiles. 

Nicole Pieterse: Yes. 

Katharina Hesse: What role does diversity and inclusion play in this? 

Nicole Pieterse: It’s extremely important, because the more we are going to think about the team dynamic and effective leadership teams, the more diversity you have; the more different perspectives and strengths that complement each other, the more effective the teams will be. But also, the world is so complex that looking at same problem from different perspectives is going to make us better. 

Katharina Hesse: Yes. And one final question—I think it's a very difficult one and I don't know if there's even one answer to it—but looking ahead, what one capability or mindset trait do you think will define successful executive teams in the next 5 to 10 years? 

Nicole Pieterse: The ideal world would be that you have leadership teams that can reinvent themselves, depending on the mission ahead of them; you don't want to constantly change the leadership team if you have a different challenge ahead of you. As the different challenges are constantly changing at a higher pace than maybe we have seen in the past, you want to make sure that the team can say, “Okay, this is a slightly different challenge we have ahead of ourselves, so let's try to reinvent ourselves and how we work together, how we work with the organization, and then adapt accordingly.” I think that would be ideal.

Katharina Hesse: That's a big shift.

Nicole Pieterse: That would be ideal. I also think, considering everything that's going on and with the focus on artificial intelligence, you want teams with uncompromising standards. There should be no compromise on the standards we set for ourselves in the organization.

Katharina Hesse: Standards, in terms of values?

Nicole Pieterse: Values, ethics, how we treat people, yes.

Katharina Hesse: A very good one. Thank you very much.

Thank you so much for your time today. This was a great conversation. 

Nicole Pieterse: Thank you very much for having me.

Thanks for listening to The Heidrick & Struggles Leadership Podcast. To make sure you don’t miss the next conversation, please subscribe to our channel on your preferred podcast app. And if you’re listening via LinkedIn or YouTube, why not share this with your connections? Until next time.

About the interviewer

Katharina Hesse (khesse@heidrick.com) is a member of the global Financial Services Practice; she is based in the Zurich office.