Jacinda Ardern thinks world leaders need more kindness

Straits Times

15 hours ago

Jacinda Ardern at Harvard University's campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on May 31. After she resigned as prime minister of New Zealand, she got married, temporarily relocated to the United States and now has three fellowships at Harvard. PHOTO: LAUREN O'NEIL/NYTIMES
CAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts – It is easy to forget that Jacinda Ardern is a former prime minister of New Zealand.
Standing in line at a cafe in Cambridge, Massachusetts, wearing a suit by New Zealand designer Juliette Hogan, with sneakers and gold hoops, she flashes a disarming smile and says to call her 'just Jacinda'.
As she orders a cappuccino, the cashier wonders why she looks so familiar. Was she, by any chance, that person on TV? 'Toni Collette?' they ask, referring to an Australian actress.
Ardern, without security detail, waves off the misidentification and does not set the record straight.
The cafe is a 10-minute walk from Harvard University, where Ardern, who resigned as prime minister in 2023, now holds three fellowships. In the aftermath of her voluntary resignation, she married her long-time partner Clarke Gayford and temporarily moved her family to Massachusetts.
The day before we met, students and faculty had gathered for their commencement and remnants of the ceremony are everywhere: tents, stacks of foldable chairs lying in yards and students milling around with cardboard boxes .
The ceremony capped a school year in which the institution has been entangled in a legal stand-off with United States President Donald Trump's administration over allegations of anti-Semitism, with federal funding and the visas of international students enrolled at the university in jeopardy.
It is in that tense environment that Ardern, who during her time in power was frequently referred to as the 'anti-Trump', is publishing her memoir, A Different Kind Of Power.
The book, which was released on June 3 , makes the case that leading with empathy and kindness might be the solution for a range of global crises – an argument that has also been the subject of one of her fellowships at Harvard Kennedy School.
Whether such a book will resonate in a highly charged moment is an open question.
Ardern said she has been relishing the relative anonymity of life in the US. A step back has allowed her to spend more time with her six-year-old daughter, who, she said, has a 'greater awareness now' of the fact that her mother was prime minister, yet 'doesn't dwell on it'.
But the book and a global tour are part of what appears to be a re-emergence into public life, which also includes a documentary about her, called Prime Minister, that will be released later in June .
In the book, Ardern, 44, gets into the granular details of what it was like to lead a country through multiple crises, including a live-streamed terrorist attack in Christchurch, a major volcanic eruption and the Covid-19 pandemic.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
We are sitting so close to Harvard, which has been at the centre of heated debates, and now you are releasing a book about kindness and empathy in leadership. How does this all fit together?
I started writing it after I left office – in early to mid-2023. Though there was a lot of difficulty in the world, now feels vastly different from then. So it's not lost on me, the environment it's going into. But I would have written the same book regardless. Because, even then, ideas of empathy, compassion and kindness in leadership were treated as if there was a naivete there, and probably even more so now, and I just push back on that.
How do you push back?
First, I think there's a disconnect. People make an assumption that because we have a particular type of leadership on display at the moment, that must be what voters are seeking. And I don't think that's true.
There are very real issues that need to be addressed that I summarise as deep financial insecurity and uncertainty in the face of a very changeable world. Politicians can come into that space either with a message of fear and blame or they can take on the very difficult issue of finding genuine solutions.
I think it would be wrong to say people don't want to see kindness and compassion in their politics, and that they don't want to see politics done differently. It's not naive.
In the book, you say you worried that your compassion could be seen as a weakness and, by extension, that weakness could be seen as female.
I decided early on that I was just only ever going to be myself. And in New Zealand, if you're not yourself, they can sniff out inauthenticity – there's so much proximity to politicians and leaders that you need to be yourself. So that was the environment.
But did it come easy? Not necessarily, because I remember moments when I thought, I cannot let my emotions be on display. And there were certain times when it just wouldn't have been appropriate because it wasn't about me; it was about the situation, the victims, the circumstance. But I decided that sometimes, you're just going to have a human response and that's okay. In fact, maybe it builds trust, because people can see then that you're human.
Do you think people now expect this style from female leaders?
I get asked a lot whether these traits are gendered. I've worked with a number of politicians, and I see empathetic leadership in men and women. In fact, I like to think of it within the frame of what we teach our kids.
If you ask a room of parents, 'What are the values that you think are really important for your kids?', you'll hear the same things. People want their kids to share, they want them to be generous, they want them to be kind and empathetic, they want them to be brave, courageous.
Those values that we teach our kids, we then see somehow as weaknesses in leaders?
I was struck by the push and pull you describe in the book between what parts of yourself to share with the public and what parts to hide away.
In hindsight, when I look back on those moments, it's very clear to me that, if you are, for instance, only the second woman in the world to give birth while in office, you feel a burden of responsibility to still demonstrate that it's possible. And so I did hold back anything that might allow someone to question that I could be both a mother and a prime minister. But the thing that conflicted with that was also my desire to make sure that it didn't look like I was doing everything on my own. You know, the Wonder Woman fram e. NYTIMES
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