As prime minister of New Zealand from 2017 to 2023, Jacinda Ardern managed one challenge after another: from natural disasters to a terrorist attack to the Covid-19 pandemic. To navigate that complexity, she had to learn how to gather experts and gain consensus on decisions even when information was scant or changing, to transparently communicate her plan of action, and to convey both calm and compassion, all while avoiding burnout. Ardern offers advice to business leaders grappling with geopolitical and economic uncertainty and disruption. She’s the author of the book A Different Kind of Power.
ALISON BEARD: I’m Alison Beard.
ADI IGNATIUS: And I’m Adi Ignatius, and this is the HBR IdeaCast.
ALISON BEARD: Adi, imagine that you have just been appointed to a big leadership position and the people and businesses you’re responsible for are hit by a series of crises. Disease outbreak, a terrorist attack, several natural disasters, and then COVID-19. Do you think you would be able to navigate through all of that?
ADI IGNATIUS: Definitely not, but I have to say, it reminds me a little bit of the era we’re in right now. The details are different, but we’re in an era of perpetual crisis, and I think business and political leaders have to just accept that. There’s no smooth sailing. It really is crisis management all the time.
ALISON BEARD: And that’s why we wanted to talk to Jacinda Ardern, the former prime minister of New Zealand, who during her tenure from 2017 to 2023, managed her country through all of those crises, one after another. We do think she has really important lessons for business leaders today who are having to deal with so much geopolitical and economic uncertainty, that volatile, complex, ambiguous VUCA world that we don’t love, but we have to deal with.
ADI IGNATIUS: Yeah, I want to hear what she has to say. We’ve just launched a new subscription offer called HBR Executive that really is aimed at exactly everything we’re talking about, which is how to help leaders in this very, very, very difficult, very volatile, very crisis filled time.
ALISON BEARD: Yes. So she has lots to teach us about crisis management, how to make decisions when you don’t have a lot of information or that information is changing, how to gather experts with different views and find consensus, how to communicate those choices when other people might not agree, and how to navigate burnout.
Crisis management may be the most important skill that leaders can have today. So here is my conversation with Jacinda Ardern, former prime minister of New Zealand. She also has a new memoir called A Different Kind of Power.
Jacinda, thanks so much for being with me today.
JACINDA ARDERN: Thank you very much for having me.
ALISON BEARD: You did face many crises during your time as PM. How did the early ones prepare you for the global pandemic?
JACINDA ARDERN: Probably the one that bore the most relevance was the biosecurity incursion that we experienced. The major take home for me was making a decision in a really uncertain environment where there wasn’t a template. So when Mycoplasma bovis came into New Zealand, we brought together those who are most affected, and that was our farming community. We gathered together an expert advisory group to give us advice on how to respond. At that point, we also panned around other countries. I particularly wanted to know who else had ever tried to eradicate this illness from their national herd, and the answer was no.
One of the questions we asked ourselves was, well, if we seek to get rid of this disease and we fail, we’ll ultimately end up being no worse off than any other country and the response they then had and the aftermath, and that path of least regret. Probably there was a psychology in that that played out then in the approach that we took during the pandemic. If we choose a path no one else is traveling and we fail, we simply end up in the place that many others are in.
ALISON BEARD: And so when you’re in these very uncertain, chaotic environments, when there’s a dearth of information, how do you approach decision-making? How do you make sure you have the right people in the room to advise you? And then how do you work through and finally decide on a course of action?
JACINDA ARDERN: This is where I found that one of the traits that perhaps I carried into leadership that I might’ve previously seen as a bit of a weakness, this notion of imposter syndrome or a confidence gap really actually drove me towards an approach that I think helped me in decision making. It meant that I wanted to fully understand everything I could about a problem. I would read as much as I could. I would then bring in people who had expertise in the issue.
After reading all of the research, observing all of the data, speaking to all of the experts, then a decision needed to be made. It wasn’t the case that after doing all of that, there was a one obvious conclusion to reach. And I think the most important approach at that point was sharing openly, not just the decision that we’d made, but the choices that we had and sharing that openly. People could often see why we landed where we landed, and that really helped with then enacting the decision because we needed people to be on board with the approach that we were taking. And so that was really critical.
ALISON BEARD: So as a person who was making some of the most important decisions that your country would ever face, how did you get over or get past that notion of imposter syndrome? I’m young, I’m a woman, I’m responsible for a population, and this is a life or death situation. So how did you have the confidence to make those calls?
JACINDA ARDERN: I think it’s really interesting because often I think there’s an assumption that if you doubt yourself, that means that you won’t be decisive. Actually, I found the reverse to be true. Yes, I carried some self-doubt, you know, would question myself or from time to time feel internally that lack of confidence. But because, as I say, it drove me towards being very well-prepared. I wouldn’t walk into an interview without fully trying to understand the problem that I was being called in to address. The same with every policy decision. All of that led to me being confident in the decisions I was making.
ALISON BEARD: Politics is inherently sort of a tough business. You’re always going to be criticized in these heightened crisis situations it gets even worse.
JACINDA ARDERN: Yeah, it’s a blood sport.
ALISON BEARD: Exactly.
JACINDA ARDERN: Yes.
ALISON BEARD: So how did you develop the sort of thick skin that you needed to get through your early career, but then also these really high stakes situations?
JACINDA ARDERN: I’m not sure I did, which probably means that at various points, politics for me felt like sometimes quite a difficult experience. But again, the idea of being thin-skinned or maybe if you’re being uncharitable, describing it as being emotional. Actually, isn’t that just empathy and isn’t that a character trait that we want more of in leadership?
One of the things that surprised me though is I knew going into politics, I was thin-skinned and I thought that the way that I needed to deal with that was to toughen up. Over time, I think I learned that the most important thing was to try and feel the things I needed to feel because we shouldn’t isolate ourselves from criticism. Criticism and a feedback loop can drive us to re-examine decisions we’ve made, motivate us to work harder on issues. And in politics in particular, we need to hear that, but then filter out the things that might just be political or might just be a personal insult. Those things didn’t bother me as much.
The way I was able to decipher between the two often was just asking the question, what’s the motivation of the person pitching that forward right now? And if the motivation was purely political, it was a little easier to compartmentalize that.
ALISON BEARD: So you became a symbol of empathetic leadership after the Christchurch shooting, and that was a shooting at a mosque where 51 people were killed. After that, you got gun control legislation passed in 27 days. So how did you marshal support and mobilize action so quickly?
JACINDA ARDERN: Here, I really have to credit the New Zealand public. People were really seeking a response that was a never again approach. What do we do to prevent this ever happening to us or anyone else? That turned us towards gun control. In our case, it was an Australian who came to New Zealand with the intent to take the lives of members of our Muslim community and illegally acquired multiple weapons including AR-15s.
And we are a country with reasonably high gun ownership, but New Zealanders still looked around and said, “Is this a weapon that we need to have widely available in our country?” And the answer was no. It’s worth noting that 119 of the 120 members of Parliament voted in favor of that legislation. So yes, we led the charge, but I believe we were simply channeling the sentiment that existed in New Zealand at that time.
ALISON BEARD: Yeah. As all of these crises were hitting you, how did you make sure to manage and protect your time to ensure that you were also tackling all of the critical policy issues that you’d campaigned on, not just sort of moving from crisis to crisis?
JACINDA ARDERN: Great question, but actually even if you don’t, in politics have these singular, significant large scale events, there are micro versions of those happening behind the scenes all of the time. And so that time management and making sure that you’re continuing on with a policy agenda in spite of what’s happening either politically or day-to-day is critical.
One of the things though that we tried to deploy particularly during COVID was this notion of a crisis is upon us, it requires a response. We have these persistent other issues, be it inequality, child poverty, a housing crisis, climate change. How do we do both in singular policy ideas?
We, amongst many other countries, were told that we would have the potential of an economic slowdown. High levels of unemployment were a particular concern. So we produced a package to try and ensure that we maintained high levels of employment. And part of that was, for instance, creating schemes around climate adaptation, where we were employing people to build flood banks, for instance. We had child poverty issues. We rolled out a food and schools program, knowing that the hours would suit those who are often in precarious work who had lost their employment during COVID. So we created thousands of jobs whilst also addressing child poverty. So making sure that in those moments of crisis, you use that, if you can, as an opportunity to accelerate your other policy agenda. And that was something we focused on.
ALISON BEARD: A lot of win-wins.
JACINDA ARDERN: Double duty.
ALISON BEARD: So how did you avoid burnout?
JACINDA ARDERN: I like to think that I did. And some people have, in some cases, misinterpreted my departure when I did as being burnout, when that was never the way I would have characterized my decision to leave. And so maintaining a level of stamina during that five years, it was difficult, particularly with those back-to-back crises that we experie