In discussing the concept of leadership and what it was, the candidates tended to stress the relational aspect of leadership. They did not emphasise the leader's personal traits or abilities, but rather the way a leader relates to others. For example JiB White said about leadership:
I think it's the ability to bring out the best in others, so that you are all working in the same direction. And in spite of what I said about authoritarianism a minute ago, it is also the ability to say, enough -quite finnly.
As this quote shows, for JiB White the focus was on others, encouragmg and motivating them, but also restraining them. By comparison, Marilyn Brown highlighted the need for balance and recognising the boundaries between self and others:
It is balancing the competing interests and keeping your own integrity, not sacrificing it just to get people to agree. A lot like dispute resolution really. Standing aside in order to facilitate the coming together and still maintaining your own persona.
Here, having some distance from issues, maintaining an overvIew, allowing the decision-making process to take its course, facilitating the process but remaining true to your own ideals, is seen as the definition of leadership. Of the three women, Karen Hyland was the only one who had undertaken any fonnal study of theories of leadership. She talked about having made presentations about what leadership was
while doing her MBA. She discussed the idea that leadership is not necessarily attached to a particular type of person and the difficulty of summing up leadership in the fonn of a definition, but she too concentrated on the relationship between the leader and others:
I tried to sum it up that leadership, and it could be seen as negative, but leadership is the ability to influence others towards achieving goals. So, in the mayoralty, leadership would be the ability to influence people to work together as a team to achieve what the community's needs are ... leadership is a hard one really. And I 'm trying to explain it to the public, but I can't explain it ... it's like a hierarchy where you have the leader at the bottom, so to speak, and you have the people at the top ... a leader is a person who is a role model, but not a perfect person, just someone who can show that they're human, they're honest and admit mistakes. They can be single, they can be this or that, they can be whoever they are - but feel comfortable in that.
In this quotation, Karen Hyland emphasised the wide range of kinds of people who can be leaders, with two factors amongst them - the ability both to influence others towards achieving goals and to see themselves at the bottom of the hierarchy, thus putting the collective needs of the people they are leading ahead of their own. In talking about what makes a good leader, Jill White also emphasised the point that Karen had made about being comfortable with oneself as a prerequisite for being a good leader, saying that uncertainty or a lack of confidence could lead to feeling threatened by other people. She added, "you have to be prepared to make mistakes. I think you do have to be able to think on your feet. You have to do your homework superbly well. I think you've got to genuinely like other people."
Marilyn Brown expanded on the importance of being able to relate to other people by stressing interpersonal skills as the most important requirement for leadership. She gave the example of trying to reach people and get their agreement to your point of view by presenting what you were saying in a way that was relevant to their enthusiasms, "whether it's vintage cars or woodwork". She pointed out the importance of timing, explaining that people might agree with you one-to-one, but after talking to their colleagues could change their mind. So you had to be careful not to end up in a situation where you thought you had everyone in agreement only to find out later unexpectedly that a significant number were saying no, they were not in favour. She explained:
You need to have a really good sense of timing so that you get them all together while they have still got it fresh in their minds and they are still on board with it, and you present it in a positive way. It doesn't matter if it is council colleagues or sections of the community or whoever it is, the interpersonal skills and the ability to put yourself in the other person's place, rather than just say, 1 think, 1 believe, etc. On the other hand, you cannot
abdicate your responsibility altogether and say ' 1 have no idea, you tell me
what you want' . You have to have the bones of an idea, the germ of an idea. This quotation from Marilyn Brown shows her understanding of leadership as requiring the ability to formulate ideas and goals so that communication with others can be strategic, tactical and goal-directed. She also highlighted the need for leadership communication to be empathetic in order to enthuse others, as well as time conscious, so that individuals would not renege on agreements reached one-to-one in another setting.
Karen Hyland's VIew of the ideal qualities for leadership also centred on communication, particularly being able to communicate with a wide variety of people from different backgrounds, and on being able to "respond to individuals but still keep the big picture in mind H . She mentioned honesty, integrity, respect, the ability to
think on your feet and lead a team, as well as skills in delegating and facilitation. She also pointed out that in a leadership position you needed to avoid being too narrowly focussed, as you couldn't afford to "get tied into one area, like all into sport, or all into the arts ... in a way you've got to be a jack of all trades ... I don't think you should be on one bandwagon H . She gave the example of being community-minded, but
balancing that with a concern for business. She felt that it was necessary to have a lot of different interests and arguments to feed into robust decision-making.
The three candidates were also asked about their perceptions of what the job of being mayor involved. Both Marilyn Brown and Jill White distinguished clearly between the responsibility for chairing and leading the council and the need to be involved with people and groups within the city. Jill White spoke of being the "chairperson of the council and building the council team" compared with the mayoralty as being:
important to the people of the city ... [involving the] desire to have the mayor interested in what they are doing in the city, interested in their particular group, interested in advocating on their behalf, interested in promoting the city. And obviously there are sort of interrelationships, intertwinings between those two sides of the role, but 1 think that there is a distinction ...
In describing how she saw the two sides of being mayor, Marilyn Brown spoke of the social aspect of the role, "getting about in the community" and contrasted it with the "politicking" and the "hard work" and the "endless meetings". She particularly emphasised the need to be persistently creative in finding ways to encourage harmony within council, talking about the need for:
constantly coming up with new and better ideas to keep people working together in a harmonious environment. That is not to say that they are ever going to all agree, I don't think that's desirable, but just that they are not plotting against one another. I have heard it said that the art of politics is offending the least number of people. I don't think it is. I think it is knitting people up together. Now, it is a huge ask in this particular council, given that we are likely to get a good number of incumbents back again.
By contrast, Karen Hyland did not focus on the separate areas of responsibility that the other two candidates had distinguished, but listed the ways that a mayor would need to approach the role, the capacities that would be called for from a mayor. She listed - facilitator, strong PR, liaison person, lobbyist, listener, leader and lead by example, 'can do' attitude, problem solver, good delegater, team leader and a keen creator of the team spirit. Nevertheless, some of these capacities are more relevant to the council role and some to the community role, so Karen Hyland may have been aware of the two main areas of responsibility that a mayor has, even though she did not make the distinction explicit. For example, working as a facilitator would be relevant mainly to the community role and a delegator mainly to the council role. All three candidates emphasised the role of building a team, but Marilyn Brown i n particular gave a more detailed account of the importance and difficulties o f teambuilding on council. Jill White did, however, expand on the difficulties of building a team in this particular council when she talked about her communication priorities, explaining the need for reconciliation. Her account of this need is covered in the section of this chapter on candidates' personal views about themselves and being the mayor.
In order to gain candidates' perspectives on transactional and transformational leadership, they were asked about their image of a competent mayor, compared with an outstandingly successful mayor. Jill White saw a competent mayor as having the ability to chair meetings well, as "an absolute minimum". She also mentioned ceremonial functions and speech-making, being there to hear annual plan
submissions, answering correspondence and following up issues individuals brought to your notice. Other essentials, from her point of view, were establishing a good relationship with the city manager and getting out with the message to central government on key areas.
As an outstanding mayor, she gave the example of Vicki Buck as someone who had: the intelligence, the drive, the ability to infect others with enthusiasm, the ability to pull things together and get all the different things happening that have made Christchurch come alive. And people feeling that she really is on their side ... and that the whole council is on their side ... they've got a real pride in what's happening and an involvement in what's happening ... being there, really being supportive ... [as well as] working through with council and with the community to make hard decisions and to have people with you.
Jill White made the point about negative, counterproductive qualities that could work as barriers to the leadership process saying, "without naming any names", that there had been mayors who were both pompous and controlling. Without being in any way authoritarian, she said, "one can still be strong". Marilyn Brown also saw authoritarianism as a negative quality of the mayor she mentioned as an example of someone she would not want to emulate - Sir Dove-Myer Robinson, a former mayor of Auckland - although she explained:
It is a bit unfair to criticise him in this day. In his day he was very popular and he was mayor time in and time out, but he was just too authoritarian. He was the leader and what he said went, and he was only about five feet high. You need to be a lot more consultative than that and more of a team player. It is not the case of the ringmaster getting all the animals into line, although it can feel like that sometimes.
Marilyn's view of a competent mayor as opposed to an outstanding mayor was that competent mayors had the ability to put themselves in the ratepayer's place, to think of things in broader terms than just a project and to sit back and see the overall scheme of things. She felt that the difference with outstanding mayors was that they did everything with style, went the extra distance, had enormous energy reserves, always presented themselves well, were always organised, prepared and able to cope, even with the unexpected, such as having to make a speech without prior warning. Her examples of outstanding mayors were Fran Wilde, Vicki Buck and Cath Tizard. She also saw Paul Reiger, the former mayor of Palmerston North, as a good role model who she admired for his ability to make hard work look easy, for his personal
dignity and his genu me chann and ability to fit III with all kinds of people
comfortably.
Karen Hyland saw the difference between a competent and outstandingly successful mayor as being related to the degree of recognition a mayor has from all of the people in the city. She said:
I think a very successful mayor is someone who everyone in the city actually recognises as their mayor and feels comfortable about approaching, who creates a sense of belonging. The mayor who's really successful, everyone will know, not just the business leaders or movers and shakers, but even kids will know who their leader is . . .
In tenns of mayors with qualities she saw as outstanding, Karen Hyland mentioned Vicki Buck's innovation and Georgina Beyer's courage. She also mentioned Mr. Lawrence, a former Mayor of Waiuku, and his way of treating everyone with respect. She felt Tim Shadbolt as mayor was not an example she would want to follow because he was "a bit of a sham" and difficult to respect, and she considered it essential that leaders should be worthy of respect as leaders.