Dear Chamber Members and Partners,
Over the next few weeks and months, our mailboxes will fill with campaign flyers, endorsements, and eventually, ballots.
Like many of you, I’ll spend time reading about the candidates and thinking carefully about who I will support. But before I do, I always remind myself of something I learned during my years in the Legislature.
Public service is hard.
Harder than most people realize.
It asks a great deal of the people who choose it. Long nights away from family. Weekends spent at community events instead of birthday parties. The constant pressure of making decisions that will inevitably disappoint someone. Financial sacrifices. Public criticism. The mental weight of knowing every vote will be celebrated by some and condemned by others.
Whether I agreed with someone politically or not, I never questioned that most elected officials genuinely wanted to make their communities better.
The public often assumes the hardest part of public service is getting elected.
I learned the opposite.
Getting elected earns you a title. Governing requires you to earn trust every single day.
Those are two very different things.
One of my favorite political quotes comes from former New York Governor Mario Cuomo: “You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.”
Campaigns are supposed to inspire. They paint a picture of what’s possible. They ask us to imagine a better future.
Governing is different. Governing is budgets, implementation, compromise, uncomfortable conversations, and sometimes telling people who supported you that they’re wrong.
Unfortunately, our political system often rewards the campaign more than the governing.
It celebrates the speech more than the meeting. The press conference more than the negotiation. The promise more than the implementation.
But communities aren’t built on speeches.
They’re built on thousands of difficult, often invisible decisions that rarely make the evening news.
One of the biggest surprises when I arrived in Olympia was discovering that the legislators who agreed with me the most weren’t always the most effective. Some of the people I disagreed with the most became trusted partners because they cared more about solving problems than winning arguments.
That changed how I approached the job.
Whenever I worked on a bill, I tried to talk with three people before moving it forward.
First, someone who disagreed with me.
Second, someone whose life would actually be affected by the bill.
Third, the person who would have to implement it.
Those three conversations made almost every bill better.
The opponent usually spotted the unintended consequences.
The person affected reminded us that life is more complicated than committee testimony.
And the implementer had an uncanny ability to explain why our brilliant idea would never survive contact with reality.
I also discovered something else. You get a lot more done when you stop worrying about who gets the credit.
And sometimes, you get a lot more done when you’re willing to stop asking what will help your next campaign and start asking what will help your community.
There’s another quote I’ve shared with new legislators over the years. It’s from Harry Potter.
“It takes a great deal of bravery to stand up to our enemies, but just as much to stand up to our friends.”
The older I get, the more I think that’s one of the most important lessons in leadership.
Some of the biggest barriers to progress aren’t our opponents. Sometimes they’re our allies.
Not because they’re bad people. Not because they don’t care. But because good intentions don’t always produce good outcomes. Leadership means being willing to say, “I know why we did it this way, but it isn’t working anymore.”
That’s especially true here in Seattle.
We don’t lack compassion. We don’t lack intelligence. We don’t lack ideas. We need leaders who can bring those strengths together with the courage to challenge assumptions, adapt when the facts change, and move us forward.
Over the last six months at the Seattle Metro Chamber, I’ve found myself relying on many of the same lessons I learned in the Legislature.
The Chamber doesn’t exist to agree with everyone. It also doesn’t exist to disagree for the sake of disagreement.
Our job is to bring together people who don’t normally sit at the same table. Business leaders. Labor. Neighborhood advocates. Nonprofits. Local governments. Sometimes those conversations are uncomfortable. They rarely produce unanimous agreement.
But they almost always produce better ideas.
Not because the Chamber has all the answers.
Because none of us do.
That work isn’t glamorous. It rarely makes headlines. Often, nobody notices it at all. But if we can help people move past talking points and toward solutions, then we’ve done something worthwhile.
As ballots arrive over the next few weeks, I’m not looking for the candidate who agrees with me the most.
I’m looking for someone who listens before they decide. Someone willing to disappoint their own supporters when the facts demand it. Someone comfortable sharing the credit and accepting the blame. Someone who understands that politics is about winning elections, but public service is about earning the right to govern.
At the Chamber, that’s the kind of leadership we’re trying to model. We won’t always get it right, and we won’t always agree. But if we can bring together people who wouldn’t normally sit at the same table and leave with a better answer than anyone brought into the room–that’s progress.
It’s also an invitation.
Democracy doesn’t end on Election Day. That’s when governing begins, and when all of us have a role in helping our communities succeed.
Joe Nguyễn
President and CEO, Seattle Metro Chamber