New councils should resist the urge to plunge straight into policy firefighting. The real opportunity lies in the first hundred days, advises David Hammond, the Head of Consulting & Public Sectors at Tribe Executive.
Every three years, local government undergoes its own peculiar rite of passage. Democracy has its day, the votes are tallied, and new councillors file in with a mix of bright enthusiasm and dawning realisation of what they’ve signed up for.
Unlike a corporate handover, there’s no neat succession plan, no tidy folder of KPIs left behind. Local leadership succession is messy, political, and very human. Yet it matters more than almost anything else to the health of our civic life.
I recently conducted a three-year governance review for a council looking back on its 2022–2025 term. Outgoing councillors, seasoned by skirmishes and softened by hindsight, asked themselves: what do we wish we had known at the start? What lessons should we pass to the new team so they can begin not from scratch, but from wisdom?
Their reflections produced a set of insights that any incoming council, fresh from the ballot box, would do well to take to heart.
Respectful debate
Local government thrives on robust argument. We elect representatives to wrestle over priorities, test assumptions, and voice community concerns. But when disagreement slides from issue into personality, trust collapses.
One councillor put it crisply: “Play the issue, not the person.” Mayors and chairs, especially, must act as referees of tone as well as process. Debate is essential, but the way it is conducted will either strengthen or corrode governance culture.
Inclusion
Frustration grows when councillors discover major decisions have already been hammered out elsewhere, over coffee, in corridor conversations, or in small cliques.
The lesson is clear: inclusion is not optional. New councils must commit to transparent workshops, open information flows, and communication habits that prevent exclusion. A councillor who feels out of the loop is one step closer to distrust and disengagement.
Opportunity
Some councillors said they rarely had a meaningful channel to bring their own ideas forward unless they had already built a voting bloc.
Councils risk becoming little more than decision-factories if they don’t create pathways for members to raise issues from their communities. Pre-meeting workshops or mayoral forums provide room for ideas to be tested and refined. This isn’t mere process tinkering – it’s about ownership. A councillor who feels heard will more readily stand behind collective decisions.
Unity
Once decisions are made, they belong to the council, not the individual. Outgoing members were frank about the damage caused when fragmentation spilled into the public arena. Robust internal debate must be matched by external unity.
Citizens can live with tough decisions, but they quickly lose confidence when their representatives bicker in public. Unity is not about silencing dissent; it is about accepting collective responsibility.
Communication
Perhaps the hardest lesson of all is communication – not the press release kind, but the internal plumbing between councillors and mayor, and between the elected council and its chief executive.
Too often, messages are lost in translation, signals are misread, or critical information is held too tightly. Every council struggles with this, but those that succeed build deliberate communication disciplines: structured briefings, agreed reporting lines, and clarity about who speaks to whom, and how. Poor communication inside almost always becomes poor communication outside.
Governance frameworks
The familiar Code of Conduct, designed to keep councillors in line, often proves too blunt or too weak.
It tends to be reactive – pulled out when something goes wrong – rather than proactive. Outgoing councillors recognised this and talked over the move to a Board Charter approach. A Charter sets out, in advance, the expectations around behaviour, decision-making, communication, and consequences. It becomes a living framework for how any board wants to operate, not just a rulebook to enforce when tempers flare.
It’s telling that Local Government New Zealand (LGNZ) has been working on a new national Code of Conduct that runs to the size of a small book. That in itself says something about the challenge. Governance in today’s polarised world is under pressure, and the instinct is to respond with ever-more detailed rules. But no Code, however comprehensive, can substitute for a council’s own clarity about how it wants to behave together.
That’s why a Board Charter is vital: it translates lofty codes into lived practice, fit for the daily realities of the council chamber.
What these six lessons show is that succession in local government is less about who sits in the mayoral chair and more about what kind of culture is being handed on. The incoming council inherits not just policies but habits, not just budgets but behaviours.
New councils should resist the urge to plunge straight into policy firefighting. The real opportunity lies in the first hundred days: agreeing ground rules, drafting a Charter, modelling respectful debate, and embedding communication pathways. These are not soft issues. They are the scaffolding of effective leadership.
Leadership succession in local government is not a relay race where the baton passes cleanly from hand to hand. It is more like a powhiri on the marae, a careful, deliberate weaving of newcomers into the fabric of an existing community.
Get that welcome right, and the council will govern with trust and cohesion. Get it wrong, and three years can be wasted in cycles of suspicion and dysfunction.
After the ballot box, success or stumble depends less on the policies written in manifestos and more on the culture set around the council table.
That is the real handover.