Some parts of the interviews dwelt on aspects of each candidate's self-image as a
leader. Initially, they were asked to explain their motivation for standing for the mayoralty. Jill White spoke about her desire to live in Palmerston North (rather than commute to the capital city as a Member of Parliament). She explained that she, and her partner, had both been approached by several people asking if she planned to stand for election. Finally, they discussed the possibility that she might join the list of candidates and, after a week of intensive talking, they decided that she should take the opportunity "which would not come again" or she would always have regrets.
Marilyn said that after she had been on council for a while she began to feel that it would be nice to aspire to the mayoralty. She had "no ambition to be in central government" though she had "been courted by both the Labour Party and the National Party" at different times. For her, the attraction of local government was that it was "about people, it is community level stuff and that is what I have spent most of my life involved in." She "would never have challenged" the sitting mayor, but when he decided to step down, she could see that it was the right time for her to stand in terms of her age, experience and leadership skills.
For Karen, the attraction of the mayoralty came largely from an intensely-felt need to change the community where her six year old daughter was growing up. She wanted to be an effective leader. Although others had tried to suggest that she would be well advised to wait until she had gained a place on council and gathered some experience, she felt that if she waited for an apprenticeship period, her sense of the urgent need to create a better community would have dissipated. She wanted to go in with a fresh approach, while she had the energy and enthusiasm, without having to serve time and possibly have her ideals become tainted by compromise and forming alliances.
In discussing her priorities as mayor, Jill White talked about a "reconciliation role". She saw a lot of divisions in the way council was working, between councillors and staff and between council and the city. She described one or two exchanges she had heard sitting in on council meetings as "quite fractious" and compared it with her previous experience on council in the 1 980s when "you could have quite profound differences with people, but there was still a sense of working together". She also mentioned that there was a perception that senior management were "running the show", and talked about the "important" and "interesting" relationship between councillors and staff.
She said that although councillors and staff needed each other and had to work together, "at the same time councillors are there as representatives of the people and so must challenge the bureaucracy to an extent". The challenging and working together had to be managed so that it was "a healthy tension rather than a destructive tension" and made for "a creative relationship". She also said that the relationship with councillors that she would want to develop, would involve "getting them to articulate their positive aspirations and then actually getting them into positions where they could develop their aspirations". She tended to think of this process as "community development within the council".
High on her list of 'things to do' if she became mayor would be "sitting down and talking over a wide range of issues with the City Manager, then speaking with individual counci llors". Also "very high on the priority list" would be reading Standing Orders "until I know them pretty well off by heart". She said that knowing Standing Orders well would be important in "being able to exercise the firmness that
will be needed at meetings, so that everybody does get a fair go". Jill White also talked about wanting to get together a "broad-based group of people from the city" to get their "intelligence on what's happening in the city".
She saw the range of interests as covering "education, science, business, community organisations, sporting groups" so that they could act as a "sounding-board", "an outreach into the city", and a way of "bringing different sectors together". She also said, "the other thing I 'd hope that such a group would do [is to] give positive support to positive initiatives". As she saw it, her greatest challenge would be within the council itself, in dealing with "the faction of negativism". Her plan would be to try to give everyone a positive role, but if there were a group that "did not want to come on board, to put them to one side and to get support from enough councillors to be able to go ahead with the positive direction". If she became mayor the things she would like others to say about her mayoralty were that "the city is a better place to live in, I'd like them to say that I listened and that I do what I say I'll do".
Like Jill White, Marilyn Brown said that if she became mayor, "knitting up the council into an effective unit" would be her greatest challenge. Her way of dealing with the dissension would be to "try to see what was at the bottom of things, try to uncover the real issues and deal with those". As for her priorities as mayor, she would want to start by "meeting the people". She would make a point of getting around as many "community groups, service groups, business leaders, youth groups and homes for the elderly" as possible and she would consult with ethnic groups. When asked what she would like to think people would say about her mayoralty, Marilyn Brown said that she would like them to say she was "effective", that she was "doing her best" and that she was "communicating", which she saw as the most important thing of all.
Karen Hyland felt that as her first priority she would get the council together and meet the City Manager and build her relationship with him. She would also concentrate on gathering all the information she needed to go through, as it would be necessary to have "the first three months as her learning curve", a three month orientation to the job. She also felt that there should be a city celebration, "which needn't cost a lot of money, everybody could bring a plate to the Square". She would deal with dissension
exercises and games to show them the value of co-operation. In terms of what she would like people to say about her mayoralty, Karen Hyland suggested that open, transparent, approachable, caring, businesslike, accountable would be "the right words", basically a balance among all of these.
The three candidates were asked what aspects of themselves they were emphasising in the election campaign. JiB White said that she had emphasised her experience and the value of knowing the system in both local and central government. Apart from her experience, she was also highlighting her networks, her capacity for hard work and her commitment to the city. In campaign advertising she had stressed being prepared to listen, to do her homework and:
to give due consideration to other ideas ... to look at different ways of consulting. The word 'consultation' is getting to be a very abused word ... but, and this partly relates to the fact that we're small enough and we're big enough, there are an awful lot of people here [in the city] who are prepared to be involved and who have got ideas ... and I believe that you don't want to waste ideas, any more than you want to waste anything else in this world. But it's looking to whether forums and workshops and that kind of thing are more effective than asking for written submissions.
Marilyn Brown explained that in her campaign she was also emphasising experience as well as "my energy, and my belief in the future of Palmerston North. I don't allow myself to be negative about things and I feel that I can make a career out of being positive." As a newcomer to local government, Karen Hyland emphasised creativity rather than experience, being able to think outside the square (which she used as a campaign slogan) along with being capable, strong, approachable and able to listen actively. In her campaign advertising she highlighted commonsense, creativity and community focus, linking these to thinking outside the square.
The candidates were also asked to describe their own leadership styles and to give an example of a time when they had been required to show leadership. In describing her leadership Jill White used the word "reconciling" and talked about bringing people together, but said that she knew that she could be tough when she had to be and that "people can sometimes be surprised by my determination". She said that she remembered a women's group meeting where she spoke with two other women who were also local government politicians: "they were asking us about qualities we saw
as essential and the one that I remember that came from all three was determination". When she was asked to encapsulate the essence of her leadership style in just three adjectives, Jill White chose fair, honest and inclusive.
Marilyn Brown said she would describe her leadership style as consultative, persuasive and encouraging. She also thought that she was good at following through, implementing decisions and setting up monitoring and review systems. Karen Hyland described her leadership style as positive and decisive and said that she liked to gather all of the facts and then make a decision. Karen Hyland gave as an example of showing leadership her calming a controversy by clarifying, summarising and exploring everyone's knowledge in the group, until a resolution was reached. Jill White gave the example of having to bring together a lot of opposing views when she was on the Regional Council chairing the Regional Policy Statement.
Marilyn Brown considered that she had had to show leadership in chairing the New Bridge Site Selection working party. She explained:
We had a great spectrum of views and backgrounds and opinions, and we consulted with the public and at the end of the process the public said 'x' and the committee said 'x', they were in agreement. Then it started to unravel and some of the committee members said 'y' and that was really the result of one person lobbying and that was quite hard to control and keep on track ... It was resolved on the vote with a good speech from me, but those people who didn't agree have always regretted they didn't get their own way and they have been very devious and underhand. Not only to try and topple me, but also to try and derail the decision.
The exploration of the role of mayor led into a description of the candidates' models of leadership. The three models volunteered by the interviewees without the prompt of an interview question relating to leadership models, were community development, risk-taking and entrepreneurship, and dispute resolution. The dispute resolution model saw the mayor as reconciling competing demands which could not all be satisfied. The risk-taking model considered that the mayor had to push some things out to the edge of innovation and be prepared to fail, because a cautious approach was unlikely to break new ground. The community development model focussed on getting people to express their aspirations and then finding ways of giving them the resources and support to meet those aspirations. These approaches are interesting in the way that they cover all of Clarence Stone' s ( 1 995) styles of mayoral leadership apart from the
caretaker style, which IS a conservative, ceremonial approach to the role. Stone's
other three styles are the broker (negotiation and conflict resolution), the social refonner (community development), and the entrepreneur (initiating and problem solving).
CONCL UDING COMMENTS
The information presented in this chapter shows how deeply the three candidates
interviewed had thought about what was involved in being mayor. They were able to articulate their ideas about leadership and give reasons for their views. They have shown that they see leadership as a process based on relating to others, communication with others and having the ability to involve different interest groups in decision-making and goal-setting. They see the mayor as an important source of pride in the community, giving people a sense of belonging.
While there are several areas of overlap and similarity in their viewpoints, there are also different points each candidate makes that are not echoed by the others. Examples of these are Karen's point about leaders being at the bottom of the hierarchy, supporting rather than dominating, Jill's example of too much ego involvement in public life being a problem for some male mayors, and Marilyn's example of bullying as ineffective leadership. In other words, the candidates have been able to answer the questions asked and volunteer examples from their experience that give insights into their perspectives of leadership. The information gained will be valuable in understanding the candidates' views of exemplary mayoral leadership and relating their views to leadership theory. This chapter has shown that three interviews can provide a substantial amount of fascinating data. In the next chapter, the data from 1 8 interviews with mayors who have had widely different experiences of being mayor in 1 8 different local authorities will present an even more complex and interesting pattern of information relevant to this study.