Nothing illustrates the current ideologic divide in the United States more than the rhetoric used in the 2024 presidential election. Harvard Kennedy School Dean Jeremy Weinstein called out this division in his introductory remarks at a recent John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum. People feel “quite strongly and quite differently” about politics, he said, and this can have dire consequences for democratic institutions.

The Forum, which focused on effective disagreement, was sponsored by the Institute of Politics and the Taubman Center for State and Local Government and was part of an HKS-wide initiative, Candid & Constructive Conversations.

“Beyond our campus,” he said, “polarization is now a persistent feature of our national politics. If we're going to be the best training ground for future leaders in democratic societies, we must find ways of developing and practicing constructive disagreement.” 

“At the Kennedy School,” Weinstein continued, “we strive to equip our students with the tools they need to succeed as public leaders.” Perhaps the most important skill, he argued, “the Swiss army knife of that toolkit,” is the ability to disagree, and to disagree respectfully and constructively. “It's essential for everything from negotiating a budget to getting buy-in to a legislative priority, to engaging constituents with a diversity of views.”

The panelists, governor of Maine Janet Mills and her chief of staff Jeremy Kennedy, and former governor of Arkansas Asa Hutchinson and his former chief of staff Alison Williams, illustrated how their own staff worked through disagreement to achieve results. 

Noting that this was first time governors and their chiefs were on the Forum stage together, Jeffrey Liebman, director of the Taubman Center for State and Local Government and the Robert W. Scrivner Professor of Public Policy, opened the discussion by asking the governors how they were able to create a culture where teams can disagree and yet move forward. To the chiefs, Liebman posed a different question: “There must've been situations where you felt like you were getting more information from the ground level than the governor was, and maybe even something where you thought he was on the way to making the wrong decision. In those kinds of circumstances how did you deal with that?”

Read the governors’ and their chiefs’ perspectives and responses below.
 

Governor Janet Mills

I got some good advice from Senator Angus King, when I first took office almost six years ago, who had been governor of Maine for eight years some time before. He said, "Look, your success actually depends on the success and who you pick and how you pick your staff, your cabinet, and your sub-cabinet members, because they're going to tell the world what you're about, and they're going to implement your strategies, your plans, and help design them. Don't pick people because of party loyalty or partisan politics. Just pick the best people you can find."

Angus also said, "For the people who will disagree with you, make sure you know that they know they have a different point of view, and they need to express it. All of us are more successful than one of us alone. You want to create that atmosphere."

I have an open-door policy, a policy I had when I was attorney general as well. Drop in and tell me what's going on, and if I'm shocked by something, tell me why I didn't know about it. And tell me good news, bad news, or news, I don’t know because I need to know not everything, but as much as possible. And that's been my policy, and I think we've carried that out pretty robustly. 

Jeremy Weinstein headshot.
“Polarization is now a persistent feature of our national politics. If we're going to be the best training ground for future leaders in democratic societies, we must find ways of developing and practicing constructive disagreement.”
Jeremy Weinstein

Governor Asa Hutchinson

It was a given that we [Gov. Hutchinson and former chief of staff Williams] disagreed on certain issues from the very, very beginning. The disagreements were always under the surface. Alison, as my chief of staff, did an incredible job creating an environment in the office of openness to make sure that we could talk to each other. I created this whenever we would have a meeting with others. And they knew that I would be asking down to the intern level, “what do you think about this issue”? You create that environment of openness and the ability to disagree.

And then you have to be intentional about bringing people in the office that have diverse backgrounds. During our rule, we had a very conservative Republican legislature, and they expected me to hire everyone who is an arch conservative. Well, I wanted to make sure I had people on my staff that the Black legislative caucus felt comfortable coming to as well as some arch conservatives.

I think you have to be very intentional about it. And we had a lot of hot-button issues in Arkansas that came up during my eight years as governor, and there was disagreement, but always, even though we had diverse opinions, whenever I made the decision, everybody supported it. It was never a climate of ugly disagreement. 
 

Alison Williams

A sort of more mundane but equally important aspect of Governor Hutchinson’s administration was reorganizing state government. When he came into office, he had 42 or 43 direct reports, cabinet and sub-cabinet officials that reported to him. I just thought, no way is that going to work. We ultimately got to 15, which was great. Compromising on that span of control and the ability to manage your enterprise made a real difference. And Governor Hutchinson, because he had been at the Department of Homeland Security when it was created, understood what it would take to transform state government in that way.

It was difficult dealing with cabinet officials who were being impacted, particularly those who were not going to become the secretary of a department, or they were subsumed into a department and suddenly they were going to be obligated to report on their activities to someone. It fell to me to manage the egos and the behavior of our cabinet officials who were unhappy. And the benefit of that, the outcome of that, was that we had very few cabinet officials attrit in the reorganization, and that benefit accrued to the taxpayers of Arkansas, both in terms of experience in the job, and in better services that they could expect from their governor and their government.

Was it hard to deal with demoted or dismissed officials? Of course. But a lot of it, in all honesty, is just listening. People just want to be heard. They want to feel that they are, or at least their position, is respected. And so there was a lot of care and feeding of an ego management and behavior management.
 

Jeremy Kennedy

When we came into office, even though we had known each other on the campaign side of things, and we were already friends, I had never worked in state government before.

But what we learned at the orientation from the National Governors Association is that the chief of staff is a gatekeeper. You're supposed to be the filter. You're supposed to keep things off your boss's desk, so that was my whole vision.

But what I soon learned about the governor is that, for her entire career, she had been connected to people on the ground, she was very in touch with people. Everybody in the state had her personal email, her phone number, her Facebook messenger. So my inclination when we won on election night was, shut it down. I bought her a new iPhone and got her a new number. But what I soon learned was that she was going to be a very unhappy governor if I cut her off from people. The whole goal of gatekeeping is to make the governor more effective at their job. So, if your gatekeeping is actually making them feel more isolated and alone and unhappy, then you have failed.

So, we had to come to a balance where she has to communicate differently. And what I've learned is I've got to let her be herself. It can be really easy for a chief of staff to see their governor as a product that you move around, you put the talking points in front of them, they do this, and then you need them to move over here. But their job is actually to run the state government.

The panelists’ quotes were lightly edited for clarity and space. The entire discussion is available online.  

Banner image: (left to right) Jeffrey Liebman, Robert W. Scrivner Professor of Social Policy, Director of the Taubman Center for State and Local Government; Governor Janet Mills (D-ME); Jeremy Kennedy, Chief of Staff to Governor Mills; former Governor Asa Hutchinson (R-AR); and Alison Williams, Chief of Staff to Governor Hutchison

Photos by Martha Stewart