myAIPMPandemic leadership: Lessons from New Zealand’s approach to COVID-19
Suze Wilson | Leadership
Abstract
This case study analyses the leadership approach and practices of the New Zealand government, led by Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, in the response thus far to the COVID-19 pandemic. It reports on how a shared sense of purpose has been established, that of minimizing harm to lives and livelihoods, for which the government has sought – and secured – New Zealanders’ commitment. Key leadership practices comprise the government’s willingness to themselves be led by expertise, its efforts to mobilise the population, and to enable coping, all of which serve to build the trust in leadership needed for transformative, collective action such as the pandemic demands. At the time of writing, New Zealand appears well on track to achieve its ambitious goal of achieving rapid and complete control over the COVID-19 outbreak – not just ‘flattening the curve’ as other countries are struggling to do – at least in part due to these leadership contributions. A framework of good practices for pandemic leadership is offered drawn from this case study, in the hope transferable lessons can be taken to aid others in the continuing struggle to limit the harm COVID-19 poses to lives and livelihoods throughout the world.
Introduction: Yes, leadership matters
As a critically oriented leadership scholar, I have long had a somewhat ambivalent relationship with my object of analysis. On the one hand, I’m generally both wary – and weary – of heroic narratives which attribute exceptional outcomes to the will and skill of individual heads of state or CEOs while ignoring the swathe of other contributors and contextual factors that are routinely at play when something difficult to achieve is accomplished. And, on the other hand, I am also much influenced by both research and personal experience that indicates poor leadership is both woefully commonplace and very harmful and that, in contrast, good leadership can indeed make a real difference to both organisations and societies.
The potentially life-altering consequences of good or poor leadership have, for many of us, likely never been quite so starkly apparent than at present. Evidence grows on a daily basis that the acts or omissions of some political or business leaders have contributed to the virus’s spread, resulting in mass fatalities which could have been avoided had these leaders followed the advice of scientists (see, for example, Telford and Kindy, 2020; Walker, 2020; Winfield, 2020). US President Donald Trump, unsurprisingly, continues almost daily to set new lows for reckless incompetence amongst world leaders (see Ladkin, this issue, also Lipton et al., 2020). But, sadly, he is not alone in failing to act as a responsible leader should. Severe missteps have also been reported in the approaches taken by Boris Johnson in the UK (Walker, 2020), Shinzo Abe in Japan (Mason, 2020), Jair Balsanaro in Brazil (Phillips, 2020), amongst others.
Watching all this from my home in New Zealand, where respect for science, facts and evidence, where calm but potent efforts to mobilise collective adherence to safety measures, and where a suite of efforts to aid in coping with the effects of the pandemic have all been such prominent aspects of our government’s response, the gap between good and bad leadership is something I experience viscerally. In this context, leadership scholars have a useful role to play in both exposing bad leadership and highlighting good leadership and I’m therefore grateful to be given the opportunity to contribute to this Special Issue. In what follows, I first provide readers with a brief overview of New Zealand’s approach thus far before considering the results to date in terms of public health and support. I then turn to analyse the leadership aspects of that response, offering a framework of the key practices that the case of New Zealand seems to indicate can be helpful for leadership in a pandemic context.
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Pandemic leadership: Lessons from New Zealand’s approach to COVID-19, Suze Wilson, Leadership, 2020