3.5 Working with Auckland Council staff

Role of the chief executive

The Local Government Act requires the Governing Body [1] to appoint a chief executive and cannot delegate the decision to a smaller group. All other employees are appointed by the chief executive [2]. 

The chief executive is responsible for:  

Elected members

Elected members need to be aware that junior staff may perceive decision-makers as having more power than they actually have [5]. As governors, elected members should interact mainly with senior staff or with staff who are assigned to support and advise them.  

For the authority’s effectiveness, it is important to maintain a healthy and productive relationship between: 

Problems in this relationship can have a significant effect on all levels of the organisation. 

Check Elected members' conduct to learn more about how elected members act and interact while carrying out their duties.  

Relative responsibilities of the chief executive and elected members

Elected members and the chief executive need to have a clear and shared understanding of their different roles and responsibilities. Elected members mainly focus on setting direction and making decisions. The chief executive is responsible for managing the organisation and carrying out the decisions made by elected members. However, in practice it is not always easy to define where one role ends and other begins.  

Elected members should not play too limited a role or leave too much to managers. They should not get too involved in day-to-day managing. Both situations create risks. 

The Auditor-General describes the difference between local authority governance and operational roles as:

"[Having a] representational role and connection with the community is part of the role of an elected member, but so is the responsibility for steering and governing a substantial organisation with complex responsibilities."  "The governance role is about maintaining the broad view. It is about setting direction and policy, making significant decisions, testing advice to ensure that it is sound, monitoring the activities of management to ensure that what is being implemented will achieve the objectives, keeping an eye on risks of all kinds, and safeguarding the overall quality of the relationship between a council and its community. When members of a Governing Body become too involved in operational matters, the risk is that nobody maintains the broad view for the organisation and checks that the overall direction is still appropriate..." [6].  

Visit Auckland Council’s governance model for more information.  

Footnotes [h2] 

[1] Local Government Act 2002, s 42(1), Sch 7 cls 33-35. 

[2] Most of this section is from http://www.oag.govt.nz/2012/local-govt/part6.htm. 

[3] Local Government Act 2002, s 42(2)(g). 

[4] Local Government Act 2002, s 42(2)(a), 42(2A). 

[5] Unless a decision has been delegated to an individual elected member (or is otherwise set out in statute, e.g. the role of the mayor) elected members’ power is exercised through their collective decisions at formal. 
[6] Auditor-General’s Inquiry into the Mangawhai Community Wastewater Scheme (Kaipara) (2013), para 25.20 and 22.