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 experienced.
I thankfully had a team that were very careful to try and throughout everything we were going through, try and maintain just small portions of time that I would have with my family, particularly my young daughter. In the evenings they would try and give me 90 minutes at home to put my child down, read a story, do bath time, and then I would go back to it whether it was working at my home office or back into the building for meetings. And that long-term plan I think helped act as a layer of extra resilience by just giving me that connection point back to my family as often as I could, that helped build up the stores a little bit. And sleep.
We martyr ourselves I think in leadership to sleep where people assume that we don’t sleep. In fact, if they ask, you feel like it’s wrong to tell people that you try to get enough sleep. But actually as decision-makers, I think we need to be much more protective of sleep because it is a decision-making tool. And without it, I think we are the poorer for it.
ALISON BEARD: I am a big proponent of at least eight hours of sleep a night.
JACINDA ARDERN: I failed miserably most of the time, but I really did try.
ALISON BEARD: I’m sure. And are there any sort of overarching leadership lessons that you took away from all of those crisis management experiences?
JACINDA ARDERN: I think probably one of the most significant is this notion in leadership that we have that confidence is built through absolute knowledge and displaying a sense of the fact that we have all of the answers all of the time. We should be trusted because we show no shred of a gap in that knowledge at any point.
I think confidence is built through trust, and trust is built by people seeing that in whatever moment of crisis you’re in, that there are inevitably going to be gaps in what information is available to you. And COVID was such an obvious example. The whole world was grappling with this new illness, and if we all knew what to do, we all would’ve had the same plan, I imagine possibly at least. And so being open about our knowledge gaps, sharing with people, everything that we knew and everything we didn’t know, I think became a tool to build trust and confidence. And I think we should be more willing to be open in those moments and transparent as a tool to build trust.
ALISON BEARD: And as someone who had to negotiate with opposition parties as labor leader, had to negotiate with foreign counterparts as prime minister, how do you approach high stakes negotiations when there is big disagreement over what the right thing to do is or sort of differing needs?
JACINDA ARDERN: What comes to mind as an example is some of the times in office where we were trying to work through really difficult policy challenges around climate change. Often I think a starting point was just understanding the history of that debate was really important because I often found that the people that you might be engaging with might represent communities that felt a sense of blame for an issue that actually it was in everyone’s interest to find solutions to and blame took us nowhere.
And so the first thing that we did on some of those tricky things, like for instance, addressing agriculture as a contributor to our emissions profile was to get everyone, the leaders of those communities who were affected around a table and just find a point of consensus. When we did that, it was really clear that actually for almost everyone around the table, the environment did matter to them. It did. Our reputation mattered to them. Our profile on the international stage and our value proposition as a clean green nation, as an exporter mattered to them.
When we found that starting point, that really opened up the conversation, well, if we agree that then what do we do next? And having the ability to work through those challenges together, there were practical questions that without them around the table, we just could not have designed appropriate policy without them. I found that really key for some of those really tricky issues.
ALISON BEARD: And what about when you were discussing issues like climate change, like the COVID crisis with foreign leaders?
JACINDA ARDERN: When you come into those conversations, often you’ll be coming from entirely different political perspectives. You’ll often have very different value sets that are dictating the way that you are operating in your own home environment. But actually when you leave the country and you sit down to a bilateral conversation with someone else, what is sitting in front of you at that point is, how do I advocate best for my country? How do I advocate best right now for New Zealand’s needs?
And so I always found that in those circumstances, understanding where the person across the table, how they were going to be thinking in that frame, what they needed in that conversation as well, what they were looking for, that was the best way to prepare walking into those conversations. So a lot of my conversations were about trade. They were about tariffs. They were about New Zealand’s interest on the world stage, about the importance of a rules-based order because that is how I could best represent New Zealand’s interest and needs.
ALISON BEARD: Tariffs are obviously a hot button issue right now. What’s your view on whether adversarial trade policies are good or bad for business?
JACINDA ARDERN: New Zealand has long been a proponent of free trade. And not only have we advocated, I’d like to think that we have been key in trying to establish agreements that acknowledge the role that trade can play in development, but also in acknowledging some of the really significant issues of our time, incorporating environmental issues into trade agreements, acknowledging labor issues in agreements.
So we see them as tools that can achieve a great deal and sometimes address some of the domestic harms that people worry about. New Zealand’s really prospered as a result of the significant agreements that we have.
ALISON BEARD: What is your advice to business leaders about how they handle their positions on political issues like tariffs and climate change, but then also how they can work with governments to help solve these sort of big existential challenges?
JACINDA ARDERN: One of the things I heard the most from business leaders during my time in office was how much they valued certainty. Often that conversation would be focused on climate policy, how can you give us the most certainty where we can around climate policy, environmental regulation, and so on. My message always back to them was that if you’re seeking certainty in an environment where from time to time you’ll see political parties taking different positions, if you operate at the highest bar that you can anticipate being set, then actually you’re creating a level of certainty for yourself. Because if the expectation drops lower, then you’re already operating at a place where you are insulated against that.
If someone raises the bar, then they’ll simply meet you at the point that you are already operating. And some might say, well, there’s an economic cost to that, but policies that are highly variable or creating uncertainty in the way that you are operating comes at a cost as well. And alongside that, I would also argue that there’s a moral case to be made for operating at a bar that demonstrates you’re taking climate action within your own organization.
So that was often my message. They equally saw where we would be operating as a progressive party. One example that might illustrate the point is that when we came into office, we placed an end to the offering of offshore oil and gas exploration permits in New Zealand. Now, those were future permits. We honored all those that were already in place, but we said we would not continue to offer the chance to keep exploring for fossil fuels offshore. And some might say, well, the next government will come in and put them back on the table, but they knew where we stood. And the now labor opposition has continued to say, and we will honor that. You might call that uncertainty. Actually, we would call that certainty. You know that if there’s a change in government exactly what’s going to happen, and it should indicate at what level you would choose to then operate at.
ALISON BEARD: Yeah. Let’s talk a little bit about how you got in a position to manage all these crises as the leader of New Zealand. You say that growing up in a struggling forestry community was what initially politicized you. So why?
JACINDA ARDERN: To be really clear, and I was small, I was young, these were the observations, observations through the eyes of a child. But I think there’s anyone who’s ever heard a child observe a rough sleeper and ask questions, “Why doesn’t that person have a home?” And then they dig deeper and deeper, and you really find yourself acknowledging that there is something very broken. And so there’s something about the simplicity of the way that a child views the world.
And I was living in a place in the 1980s that had really felt the brunt of New Zealand’s significant economic reforms during that period. I didn’t know about that. All I knew is that I saw kids that didn’t have food to eat at school or didn’t have shoes in the winter, and that didn’t feel right to me. And so with hindsight, I’m sure that that contributed to the way I see the world and my motivation to go into politics.
ALISON BEARD: And when you first went into politics, New Zealand already had its first female prime minister, Jenny Shipley, and she was succeeded by the second Helen Clark. What did that mean to you as a young woman at the start of her career?
JACINDA ARDERN: I mean, how lucky was I? How lucky was I? And for all the young women and girls in New Zealand who, as a result of those two women, grew up thinking and believing that political leadership was in reach.
When I think about some of that period, in our history at one time, we had a female speaker of the Parliament. We had a female governor general, we had a female chief justice. I did not grow up thinking that my gender would get in the way of me doing what I might’ve aspired to do. And instead, as I talk a lot about, I thought my character would. Because although I saw female leadership, I didn’t see imposter syndrome because people don’t often talk about that for really obvious reasons. I didn’t see always what I would label as someone who wears their heart on their sleeve. You saw a bit of it, but not too much. And so that was what I questioned.
ALISON BEARD: So you saw diverse female role models, not just sort of one type. How did you develop your own leadership style?
JACINDA ARDERN: There was a series of experiences that particularly I think made me feel more resolute in the way that I wanted to do politics. I wouldn’t call it a leadership style because I didn’t necessarily see myself as a leader on a trajectory towards leadership, but I was a politician. I’d come into an existing culture that I found pretty hard. We have a Westminster style in New Zealand, which crudely, I would describe a bit of a bear pit. So when you’re in the debating chamber, there’s heckling and yelling, whilst you are meant to stay focused on delivering an answer across all of the noise and ruckus.
Often, it can be personal. And when you’re in opposition, success is often measured by how many other politicians careers you end. That never sat that comfortably with me. So I do remember through a couple of experiences that I talk about in the book, just determining, well, okay, if that’s not the kind of politics that I’m going to engage in, I’m probably not going to be seen as that successful, and that’s okay. So making peace with that was a way of deciding I was going to do things on my own terms, and I would just see where that led.
ALISON BEARD: You were going to stay human.
JACINDA ARDERN: I was going to stay human.
ALISON BEARD: Yeah. So when Andrew Little, who was prime minister before you, said that he was standing down as Labour Party leader and asked you to step up, your initial reaction was hesitant. What-
JACINDA ARDERN: Oh, I just said no. So very clear hesitancy, I would say.
ALISON BEARD: Okay. So why did you ultimately realize you were up to the job and say yes?
JACINDA ARDERN: I think anyone who reads a different kind of power will see this lifelong battle between questioning whether or not I’m the person that needs to do something versus this overwhelming sense of responsibility that for whatever reason, I have always had. And that was just a really clear example with our party, roughly seven weeks out from the election, our internal polling telling us that we are sliding badly and the leader of our party deciding openly to talk to me about whether he should stand down and I should take over. And my immediate reaction was that it would be bad for the team, that it would be perceived by voters very poorly, that we needed stability and that a campaign would help us revive our chances.
That was my instinct. Underneath that was also a concern that I would not be able to carry the party to where it needed to be. Ultimately, not to create a spoiler, because it’s fairly obvious what happened. The leader of the party really forced things by coming to work a week later and resigning, and they’re nominating me. And at that point, whatever questions I had immediately flipped into, this is now my responsibility and I am not going to let people down. So I do think it’s possible to have those two conflicting emotions and still stand up with confidence and say, “Here I am, and I’m here to do a job.”
ALISON BEARD: Yeah. And you won. So you said that burnout was not why you ultimately gave up the job. Why did you and then how did you think about your second act?
JACINDA ARDERN: Coming into year six, we were approaching an election. We were a year out. And so that was the point where I really needed to decide, am I renewing this potential contract for another term after this? If I was going to stay that year, I needed to stay, commit to a term.
And having gone through, close going on six years where we’d had significant crisis, I knew what you needed to have in reserve should another one arise. And my view was I could have kept going, but I didn’t believe that I would be operating at the capacity and the level I needed to do the job well. And all of the traits that I valued so much in leadership, curiosity, keeping a handle on a sense of defensiveness, being open-minded, high levels of energy, the reserves, I could feel them waning. And so again, I pulled on that sense of responsibility. Initially, I thought considering the idea of leaving felt selfish to me, but when I reversed it and thought about the responsibility, I had to make sure I was operating at full capacity. And if I wasn’t, then the duty I had was to go. And so that was how I made that decision.
ALISON BEARD: Well, thank you for being a wonderful leader, and I hope that everyone learns from you.
JACINDA ARDERN: Thank you for your time.
ALISON BEARD: That’s Jacinda Ardern, former prime minister of New Zealand, an author of the book, A Different Kind of Power.
Next week, we’ll explore the question of whether hybrid work is working well, and we now have more than a thousand IdeaCast episodes, plus many more HBR podcasts to help you manage your team, your organization, and your career. Find them at hbr.org/podcasts or search HBR in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.
Thanks to our team. Senior Producer Mary Dooe, Associate Producer Hannah Bates, Audio Product Manager Ian Fox and Senior Production Specialist Rob Eckhardt. And thanks to you for listening to the HBR IdeaCast. We’ll be back with a new episode on Tuesday. I’m Alison Beard.
