Jacinda Ardern: Ordinary Woman, Extraordinary Leader

Former New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern
Tufts University, April 2024 (Photo: Alonso Nichols, Tufts Now)

As someone who studies and reads a lot of books and articles about political leaders, I have come to identify certain traits that are essential to positive and uplifting leadership. These include intelligence, wisdom, empathy, courage, the ability to listen to different points of view, understand people’s needs, acknowledge uncertainty, respect science and not be afraid to consult with experts, and prioritize the public interest over political advancement. In an ideal world, the best leaders also inspire kindness and decency in others. Although few people in history fit all these criteria, I believe that a genuinely compassionate and intelligent leader can govern a nation with kindness, empathy, and honesty while protecting the country’s interests and functioning as a trusted neighbor in the world community.

We live in a world dominated by oligarchs and strongmen. In the United States, we have a president who celebrates UFC fights and aggressive masculinity, demeans reporters, especially female reporters, and laces every speech and interview with insults and name calling. Our Secretary of Defense preaches that elevated levels of testosterone are the true measure of a man and essential to a warrior ethos while he systematically eliminates women from positions of senior leadership. From Russia and North Korea to dozens of countries in both hemispheres, political leaders frequently exemplify the worst traits of humanity.

Jacinda Ardern was a different kind of leader. As Prime Minister of New Zealand from 2017 to 2023, she proved that an effective leader need not sacrifice her humanity. Her honest, humane, and compassionate governing style was frequently described as an “antidote to Trumpism” and her popularity around the world reflected the sentiment. She was living proof that a head of state can be empathetic, sensitive, kind, and still be strong enough to lead a great nation with a proud history.

Recently, I finished A Different Kind of Power (Crown Publishing House, 2025), Jacinda Ardern’s refreshing and candid memoir about overcoming insecurities and self-imposed feelings of “imposter syndrome” to become the third woman to serve as Prime Minister of New Zealand. Ardern was only 37 when she became prime minister, the youngest person ever to hold the country’s highest seat of power. Her memoir, and the excellent CNN documentary “Prime Minister” released a few months later, depicts an ordinary, unassuming woman who became a consequential and highly effective national leader in difficult and challenging times. I came away from both with a sense of hope, for they confirmed my belief that kindness, decency, and compassion truly can make a difference in leadership at the highest levels of government.

A key ingredient of Ardern’s popularity and effectiveness as prime minister was her authenticity. She is extremely relatable. The daughter of a police officer, she learned at an early age that the ability to communicate, to use words effectively, was essential to establishing public trust. In New Zealand, police officers do not routinely carry guns. They are considered citizens in uniforms whose authority derives from the consent and cooperation of the community. As a young girl, she once saw her dad in uniform surrounded by a hostile group of men in leather jackets. As she walked across the parking lot, her father noticed her approaching. “Keep walking, Jacinda,” he said in a calm voice. Although she did as told, she worried about his safety. Later that night, her dad explained, “Jacinda, my words will always be the greatest tool I have.” It was a valuable lesson to her, and one she would use in later years.

As someone who grew up in a Mormon household, she valued its keen sense of community and understood from a young age how much personal connection mattered to people. Through its missionary work, she became comfortable with striking up conversations with people she did not know. Although she would later move away from her Mormon faith when it increasingly conflicted with her personal values, especially concerning the rights of women and LGBTQ persons, she always respected how loving and kind the people in her church were, and how focused they remained on service and charity.

Ardern developed an early interest in public policy and debate but never imagined herself capable or tough enough to run for public office. “I was the worker who quietly and steadily got things done,” she writes. “My elbows weren’t sharp enough; my skin was too thin. I was idealistic and sensitive.” And yet, she had witnessed two women become Prime Minister of New Zealand and the thought never crossed her mind that her gender would preclude her from becoming involved in politics. When she interned for a Labour Party MP during college, she fell in love with it. Parliament “was a place where laws changed and problems were fixed,” she recounted. Politics, when done right, could change the lives of hundreds of thousands of people for the better. And it could address issues that mattered to her, like poverty and inequality, climate change, repairing past injustices to indigenous populations, and advancing women’s reproductive freedoms.

When Ardern first became a Member of Parliament on the Labour Party ticket in 2008, however, she experienced a crisis of confidence when the opposition verbally attacked her during a hard-edged debate on the Parliament floor. She figured the only way to cope was to toughen up, to develop thick skin and roll with the punches, so she sought the advice of a fellow Labour MP, a veteran politician known for his hardcore tactics. “Promise me you won’t try to toughen up, Jacinda,” he advised. “You feel things because you have empathy, and because you care. The moment you change is the moment you’ll stop being good at your job.”

Ardern resolved to remain true to herself. When she talked with groups of students, Ardern frequently asked them to describe what they think leadership requires. The students consistently used words such as “angry” and “aggressive.” Ardern would never be that kind of politician. “I didn’t want to choose between being a good politician and being what I considered a good person.” And she learned from exchanges with certain members of the opposition that “it was possible to disagree with your opponent without getting personal.” 

It turned out that Ardern’s empathetic style indeed was an effective way to lead and govern. In March 2017, the Labour Party selected Ardern as its deputy leader. She shared Labour’s vision “that our country be a place where everyone has a roof over their head and meaningful work, where education is free, where children live surrounded by creativity, not poverty, where we lead the world on environmental issues” and build a country “even better than the way we found it.”

Five months later, she was unexpectedly thrust into the leadership role when Prime Minister Andrew Little resigned following Labour’s poor showing in the polls. With national elections coming, Ardern ran a campaign of positivity and Labour’s popularity rebounded. In October 2017, when the New Zealand First Party agreed to a coalition with Labour, Ardern became New Zealand’s third female prime minister.

Only days before, unbeknownst to the public, Ardern discovered she was pregnant. Her daughter Neve was born eight months later. Although she was criticized for being selfish, for trying to have it all, she showed that, in the words of the Los Angeles Times, “the job of looking after a country’s people — and the mix of love and steel required to personally care for a child — might just go hand in hand.”

Before her swearing in, a journalist who Ardern had respected since she was eleven years old, asked her, “What is it you want to do?” She said what immediately came to mind. “I want this government to feel different. I want people to feel that it’s open, that it’s listening, and that it’s going to bring kindness back.” In her memoir, Ardern explained further:

Some people thought kindness was sentimental, soft. A bit naïve, even. I knew this. But I also knew they were wrong. Kindness has a power and strength that almost nothing else on this planet has. I’d seen kindness do extraordinary things: I’d seen it give people hope; I’d seen it change minds and transform lives. I wasn’t afraid to say it aloud, and as soon as I did, I was sure: kindness. This would be my guiding principle no matter what lay ahead.

Both the CNN documentary and memoir bring to light private moments that show Ardern’s ordinary humanity as she dealt with terrible bouts of morning sickness and her struggles to breast feed her newborn while balancing the responsibilities of prime minister with her desire to be a present mother to her child. Although she received criticism when she became the first prime minister to take six weeks of maternity leave while in office, most New Zealanders supported her decision, reinforcing a fundamental truth, “that politicians are humans first, and perhaps the public hadn’t lost sight of that.”

Throughout her tenure as prime minister, she displayed top-down kindness as a thoughtful, intelligent leader determined to act when necessary. After a white supremacist carried out two mass shootings on the same day at Christchurch mosques that killed 51 people and injured 49 more, Ardern immediately responded with heartfelt empathy. She mourned and grieved with the Christchurch Muslim community. She hugged and supported them, cried and prayed with them. She made clear the entire nation condemned the attacks and supported them in their darkest hour. Although some of the Muslim victims had come to New Zealand as refugees, this was an attack on “our community,” she said. “They are New Zealanders. They are us.” She received widespread praise from the Muslim and international communities for her personally empathetic response to the shootings.

But words, hugs, and prayers were not enough. Over the next three weeks, Ardern orchestrated and led the passage of sweeping legislation that banned most semiautomatic weapons, assault rifles, and higher capacity magazines from New Zealand, a country with a high rate of gun ownership. Through an amnesty and buyback program, tens of thousands of military-style assault weapons were taken off the streets. Horrified by viral social media posts of the Christchurch shootings, she launched the Christchurch Call to Action, an international commitment to remove and eliminate violent extremist content from the internet. Her tears generated toughness. She would not compromise public safety.

Tragedy struck New Zealand again in March 2019, when a volcano erupted at Whakaari/White Island that killed twenty-two people and severely burned many more. In the following days, Ardern visited with the survivors and family members of those who died and personally thanked the first responders who risked their lives rescuing survivors. When a social media post claimed she was only visiting the community so she could be seen “hugging people,” Ardern acknowledged the criticism bothered her. But she would do nothing differently. “First of all, of course I’d gone,” she writes. “This was a major disaster in our country and I was prime minister. And criticizing me for hugging people? … I would rather be criticized than stop being human.”

Less than a year later, she would be tested in ways never anticipated. “Leadership is a test for which you can only partially prepare,” she noted. “If you’re lucky, the information you need is out there—somewhere, in some form.” But when the world first confronted COVID, there was little information to draw on. As an island nation, New Zealand had some advantages. Twenty days after its first documented cases, her government closed the nation’s borders to everyone except returning citizens and established isolation and tracing protocols. But the pandemic was moving too quickly, and if she did not take more drastic action, the data and science showed that tens of thousands of people would die. That would be catastrophic in a country of five million people. For Ardern, it was not an option.

In April 2020, Ardern’s government ordered a Level 4 lockdown, shutting down most businesses and schools as people sheltered in place. Within six weeks, New Zealand had no new COVID cases. A few weeks later, the government reduced alert levels so people could dine out again, invite neighbors into their homes, and return to the world. For the next two years, New Zealand would have long stretches of normalcy followed by occasional periods of rising alert levels. But compared to the rest of the world, life looked ordinary in New Zealand, as kids returned to school, restaurants were open, and families gathered for weddings and funerals. By the time vaccines arrived and the country had achieved a 90 percent vaccination rate, the crisis in New Zealand had been mostly avoided. While COVID raged around the world, causing millions of deaths (including over 1.2 million in the United States), New Zealand experienced only twenty-five deaths and an infection rate 80% lower than in the United States.

Ardern writes also of the threatening and ugly backlash she faced with a vocal minority of anti-vaxxers and conspiracy theorists, fueled by disinformation from the United States. But she defends her actions to this day. “We came out of COVID with one of the highest vaccination rates in the world and fewer days in lockdown than nations like the U.K., and during this time our country’s life expectancy actually increased.” That is what leadership is all about.

New Zealand is known for “punching above its weight” on the world stage and Ardern’s diplomatic approach represented New Zealand well within the international community. Domestically, in addition to enacting major gun safety measures following the Christchurch terrorist attacks, she took decisive action on climate change, committing New Zealand to carbon neutrality by 2050. She enacted pay equity and parental leave laws. She launched a mental health initiative and a Child and Youth Wellbeing Strategy. Her government reformed the state benefits system to make it more accessible and friendly, built more state housing than any government in the last fifty years, expanded access to childhood education and health care, and invested in violence prevention programs. And for the first time in the country’s history, Parliament decriminalized abortion and advanced the cause of reproductive freedom.

But six years of nonstop work, pressure, anxiety, and crisis after crisis, finally took its toll. Ardern decided to resign from public life in 2023. She had done her best, and that was enough. As she wrote in her memoir:

[W]hen I was prime minister, I saw moments of true darkness. … But there’s an inverse feature to seeing the world at its most brutal, because those are also the moments that show people at their most humane. Those are the moments when I saw that it was possible for people to galvanize behind their collective humanity. Sometimes, those moments are small. Other times, they create a ripple that sweeps across the country.

Ardern continues to work for change and tries to make the world a little brighter. As she told a gathering at Tufts University in 2024, whatever her future holds, “I am going to talk about what it means to be human first, and a leader second, because I think we need more of that in the world.”

Jacinda Ardern is an appealing and refreshing voice in a world that increasingly turns dark and brutal. I hope that her example inspires other men and women of kindness and decency to enter politics and follow in her example. She challenged misperceptions and assumptions about young female leaders. And she proved that common sense combined with sensitivity, compassion, and empathy are towering strengths. We need a lot more leaders like her.