Life’s Work: An Interview with Jacinda Ardern

The daughter of a policeman, Ardern grew up interested in public service but wary about the “blood sport” of New Zealand politics. Eventually, though, she found the courage to run for Parliament, party leadership, and, finally, prime minister. From 2017 to 2023, she led her country’s response to crises including a bovine disease outbreak, a mass shooting, floods, wildfires, and Covid-19. Her new memoir is A Different Kind of Power.The following are the excerpts from her interview with Alison.

ou faced so many crises during your time as prime minister. How did the early ones prepare you for the Covid-19 pandemic?  If we chose a path no one else was traveling and we failed, we would simply end up in the place that many others were in.  And that could be the path of least regret.

When you’re in uncertain, low-information situations, how do you think through and decide on a course of action?  If there wasn’t one obvious conclusion, the approach was to share openly not just what we’d decided but also the choices we’d had so that people could see why we landed where we did.

Politicians face constant criticism, especially in crises. How did you develop a thick skin?  Criticism—or a feedback loop—can drive us to reexamine decisions and work harder on issues. At the same time, you can filter out the things that might be just political or a personal insult by asking, “What’s the motivation of the person pitching that forward right now?”

You became a symbol of empathetic leadership after the Christchurch shooting, in which a gunman killed 51 people at a mosque. After that, you got gun control legislation passed in 27 days. How did you marshal support and mobilize action so quickly?  Yes, we led the charge, but we were simply channeling the sentiment in New Zealand at that time.

As all these crises hit, how did you make sure to manage and protect your time to ensure that you were also tackling the key policy issues that you’d campaigned on?  Even if you don’t have these singular, significant, large-scale events, there are micro versions of them happening behind the scenes all the time. Time management and making sure that you’re continuing with an agenda despite what’s happening day-to-day is critical.

How did you avoid burnout?  Maintaining stamina during five years of back-to-back crises was difficult. Thankfully, my team was very careful to maintain small portions of time for me to have with my family, particularly my young daughter.  Those connection points gave me a layer of extra resilience.

Did you sleep?  I tried to get at least eight hours of sleep a night. I failed miserably most of the time, but I really did try.

You were working so hard during this period and getting only 90 minutes a day with your toddler. How did you feel about that balance? Was there mom guilt?  Yeah. I think that when you’re handed a child in the hospital, you’re also handed a big old jar of guilt. It’s just part of the package. I was running a country, and I still felt it. But I tried to instead think about regret. If I divided my time or prioritized differently, what would I regret? I knew I was missing things, and I felt sad.

Are there any overarching leadership lessons that you took away from all your crisis-management experiences?  We have this notion that confidence in leadership comes through having all the answers all the time; we are trusted because we show no shred of doubt. But I think, in any crisis, trust is built by being open about information and knowledge gaps. Covid was an obvious example. The whole world was grappling with this new illness, and if we’d all known what to do, we all would have had the same plan, I imagine. But sharing with people everything we knew and everything we didn’t became a tool to build trust and confidence. I think leaders should be transparent in those moments.

How did you approach political negotiations when you and your counterparts were in deep disagreement or had differing needs?  What comes to mind is trying to work through difficult climate-change policy challenges. A starting point was just understanding the history of the debate and realizing when you were engaging with people who resented being blamed. And yet it was in everyone’s interest to find solutions.  If we agree on that, what do we do next? And then we have the ability to work through those challenges together.

How did you negotiate with foreign leaders on contentious issues like climate policy?  I always found that understanding the person across the table—how they would be thinking, what they needed, what they were looking for—was the best way to prepare.

What advice do you have for companies on how to handle political uncertainty?  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 environmental regulation. And my message was: When political parties are taking different positions, you should operate at the highest bar you can anticipate being set. Then whether the expectations lower or someone raises the bar, you are insulated. Some might say there’s an economic cost to that, but variability or uncertainty in the way that you are operating can be costly as well.

You pushed New Zealand to start measuring well-being, not just gross domestic product. Why?  This was an area of interest for me and has been for many politicians through the ages, including in the United States, who have often remarked that GDP measures everything except that which we value in life. I credit our then minister of finance, Grant Robertson, for implementing our well-being budget.

Let’s talk a little bit about how you came to manage all these crises as the leader of New Zealand. In your book, you say that growing up in a struggling forestry community was what initially got you interested in politics. Why?  To be clear, I was young, but when you observe with the eyes of a child, you ask questions like, “Why doesn’t that person have a home?” And as you get older and dig deeper, you find yourself acknowledging that something is very broken. In the 1980s, I lived in a place that really bore the brunt of New Zealand’s economic reforms. I didn’t understand the bigger picture. All I knew was that I saw kids at school who didn’t have food to eat or shoes for the winter, and that didn’t feel right to me. So that contributed to the way I saw the world and my motivation to go into politics.

How did you develop your own leadership style?  I wouldn’t call it a leadership style because I didn’t necessarily see myself on a trajectory toward leadership. But I was a politician, and I’d come into an existing culture that I found pretty hard. In New Zealand, we have Westminster-style debate, with heckling and yelling, all that noise and ruckus, whilst trying to stay focused on delivering an answer. It can get personal: When you’re in opposition, success is often measured by how many other politicians’ careers you end. And that never sat comfortably with me. I remember thinking: If that’s not the kind of politics I’ll engage in, I probably won’t be seen as successful. But then I said, That’s OK. Making peace with it was a way of deciding to do things on my own terms and see where it led.

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