New Zealand’s Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern shocked the world with her unexpected resignation today. Sad as I am to see her go I can’t help but admire the way she announced her departure.
Her statement displayed the openness, clarity and humanity which characterised her communications throughout her tenure. "I know what this job takes, and I know that I no longer have enough in the tank to do it justice. It is that simple,” she said in a short press conference. When she thanked her partner for his support she seemed to throw in a marriage proposal to boot.
Ardern’s nearly six years at the helm were punctuated by horrendous events, such as a terrorist attack and a natural disaster as well as the once a century, years’ long challenge of a global pandemic. Even her political opponents will concede that, regardless of their opinion on the wisdom of every single decision she had to take as PM, Ardern is a great communicator, who managed to bring the country with her during some of its most traumatic moments in recent history.
Watching her from the other side of the world, two moments in particular struck with me. Her informal and familiar style in chatting to people from her home quarantine during the pandemic, with the chaos of family life unfolding around her, reminded the public at home that they truly were, for better or for worse, in this together, a feeling very few would have enjoyed in Britain watching Boris Johnson at that crime-tape festooned lectern night after night. (And that was before we got the official confirmation that we truly weren’t in it together and that while most of us pined and grieved alone some in Downing Street partied as if it were the last days of Rome).
The second unforgettable moment came a year earlier, when a tearful Ardern embraced some of the families of the victims of the shootings at two Christchurch mosques wearing a head scarf. Elsewhere the politician issued the usual formulas of condemnations but in those images the human being was able to reach out to her fellow humans expressing the pain of the rest of the country.
Ardern’s empathy is what made her such an effective communicator: she didn’t have to perform as if she cared, finding persuasive ways of expressing a sorrow or a concern she didn’t feel. She did care and she did feel those things.
But if empathy can turn into a communications superpower, it is also very energy inefficient. When politics is just a game you’ll be energised by its challenges, the reversals of fortune, the spite for your opponents. If you lead as a human being first, and as a politician second, you will have to give more than you can ever receive and the tank will empty sooner.
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