What my first month in Washington DC is teaching me about leadership, judgment, and institutions.

A month into my Harkness Fellowship in Washington DC, the research is sharpening. Stepping outside New Zealand is helping me see its system differently.

Fieldwork began with current and former senior public servants and ministers in New Zealand. In the US, I have spoken with government leaders, people working across political and administrative boundaries, independent oversight practitioners and academics.

Connections across the Harkness, Fulbright and Axford fellowship networks have helped me build a network of my own. People have been generous with their time and connections. One interview leads to another. My days centre on research, interviews, time at Georgetown, analysis and deciding who to speak with next.

The research starts from a positive premise: New Zealand has a public service many countries would be proud of. Rather than catalogue its faults, I want to understand what helps capable leaders do their best work, and where the system helps or hinders.

From competing demands to judgement

My thinking about that question has changed. I began with four leadership tensions: collective outcomes versus organisational responsibility; long-term public value versus immediate performance; adaptation versus assurance; and professional judgement versus democratic responsiveness.

These still make sense. But my interviews suggest a deeper question: how do capable leaders respond to competing legitimate demands when no rule makes the right response clear?

When should leaders take responsibility for outcomes they do not control? When does long-term public value justify immediate costs? When should new evidence prompt adaptation rather than consistency? When does professional responsibility require challenge, and when should democratic authority prevail?

These look increasingly like questions of judgement, not just discretion.

When constraints help, and when they hinder

More freedom is not necessarily better. Institutions matter, but they do not determine behaviour. Capability, relationships, trust and authorisation shape how leaders use their discretion.

Accountability, assurance and process can encourage defensiveness or weaken collaboration. They can also support leadership by building legitimacy, introducing challenge, containing risk and clarifying authority.

The question is therefore what kind of institutional friction is useful. Which constraints protect public values and improve judgement? Which encourage leaders to defend their decisions or narrow their responsibilities? How much friction should good leaders have to overcome?

The US is useful not as a model to copy, but as a comparison. Its different political and administrative institutions help test which leadership problems recur across systems and which reflect New Zealand’s own design choices.

An election-season backdrop

The midterm elections provided an extraordinary backdrop. Despite intense news coverage, daily life in Washington has felt normal. I have seen nothing personally concerning. A more confronting contrast with home is the more visible homelessness and apparent drug use on the streets.

The political advertising, though, was impossible to miss. The controversial attack ad in the Ohio governor’s race was a particularly stark example. More broadly, I have been struck by how much of the campaigning I saw focused on attacking opponents, and how little seemed to be about values, vision or policy.

Watching it here made me wonder whether we might finally be seeing the limits of culture-war politics, or whether this is simply another turn in a much longer cycle.

This connects to my research. Scrutiny and accountability are fundamental to democracy, but their form matters. If political and institutional incentives reward finding fault, what happens to candour, judgement and willingness to take legitimate risks?

Familiar connections, fresh perspectives

I was embarrassingly excited to vote in New Zealand’s general election at the New Zealand Embassy. An impromptu tour led to a classic Kiwi discovery: my hosts had lived on my Wellington street.

I’ve also been making the most of Washington’s free museums and galleries. They add another dimension to being based here, with American history, politics and culture constantly present in the city. And, if nothing else, they are a useful reminder that occasionally pausing the research is good for me.

After a month, I have fewer simple answers. Some assumptions hold; others are being challenged. The comparison is revealing things about New Zealand that are harder to see from within.

That increasingly feels like the fellowship’s value: not importing answers, but using distance to ask better questions about leadership in New Zealand.