My parting gift as Mayor – The General Manager’s Performance Agreement FY25
In my first six years as a Councillor, the General Manager?s performance management process was always a debacle.
The Mayor of the day would set the GM?s performance metrics at some undisclosed date, and then at the end of the 12 month period the Mayor would call all ten councillors together to rate the GM?s performance in each area (usually over 40+ items).
The scoring system is typically as such.
5 Outstanding – GM consistently achieves extremely high-performance standards.
4 Exceeds Expectations – High standards are set and achieved. At times performance exceeds requirements.
3 Meets Expectations – Satisfactory performance and meets expected requirements.
2 Improvement Required – Minor shortcomings in performance but major requirements are usually met.
1 Improvement Required – Major shortcomings and important requirements are not being met by the GM.
NA – Milestone is not yet due, and progress cannot be reported on.
In the corporate world (which is where I come from), most employees typically score a 3 on each measure. If they have done poorly, then they may get a 2 and it would be accompanied with constructive management feedback. But if they get a 4 or even a 5 on any measure, it needs to be supported with extensive commentary and evidence to prove that they earned the score that they deserve.
But at Council, this has never been observed to date. We have had councillors who, because they liked the former General Manager, gave him 5?s without any substantiation whatsoever. On the other side we have had councillors who, because they were not satisfied with the General Manager, gave him 1?s without any constructive feedback.
Meanwhile I would give a mix of 2, 3, and 4 with appropriate feedback if I ever deviated from the 3.
With Council?s composition and numbers, the scores from all ten get averaged out and it always ended up with a score that was above 3. The headline promoted by the Mayor of the day would then be that the General Manager scored above average in his performance metrics and therefore should keep his job.
But of course it?s easy to score above 3 if it?s heavily skewed with multiple unsubstantiated 5?s.
What?s worse, the councillors were not shown the GM?s performance metrics until the end of the 12 month period. As a councillor, I had no way of knowing whether the performance metics were agreed to at the start of the period, or whether it was done just a week before the performance review.
Also on multiple occasions when I would give constructive feedback on the GM?s performance, instead of deciding to address the issue and lift performance the following year, the Mayor of the day would just delete the area from the following year?s performance metrics. So rather than seeking to improve for the benefit of ratepayers, she deleted anything that was too hard.
I was incredibly frustrated by the multiple manipulations of the process and it led to one of my election objectives for December 2021.
Align General Manager Performance Reviews with Office of Local Government Guidelines, setting ambitious but realistic performance targets and holding the General Manager to account.
Fortunately as 2024 Mayor I have had the opportunity to start this process. Together with Deputy Mayor of Ku-ring-gai, Cr Christine Kay, Councillor Kim Wheatley and Councillor Alec Taylor we have cast a vision of what we would like the General Manager to achieve in the next four years and then built his 2024-25 performance objectives to align with achieving this vision. This was completed last month.
Furthermore, the scoring for each area will be more difficult to game as we have provided constructive guidelines as to how each should be scored. For example on the topic of community participation we have said the following.
Initiative 1.2 Improve community consultation and notification (frequency, reach, timeliness)
FY25 Activity: Community Participation Plan and Community Engagement Policy updated to reflect community expectations
FY25 Success Measures:
[For a 2] CPP and CEP are rolled over from prior terms
[For a 3] Genuine overhaul of documents to reflect how we will engage the community in a range of different scenarios
[For a 4] Details of the overhaul are publicly accessible and well accepted by the community
Consultation and notification practices consistently implemented in line with policy
This makes it pretty clear what needs to be done to earn a 2, 3 and 4 and it makes it more difficult for a future council to just give 5?s and 1?s based on how they feel about the performance of the General Manager and our council staff. It also gives the General Manager and the staff a clear objective to stretch to if they want to be recognised for their performance.
I?d like to thank the residents of Ku-ring-gai and the councillors for the opportunity to reform this most-critical element of Council?s governance, and I hope that the next Council decides to continue this practice of shaping Council?s outcomes through proper professional performance management.
