Future local leadership, challenges, and solutions: An Interview with Alicia McKay, Author of Local Legends

As part of LGIU’s Future Local Lab, we had the pleasure of interviewing Alicia McKay, strategy, change and leadership expert, and author of the book, Local Legends: How to make a difference in local government. In this interview, Alicia shares her views on the big trends affecting the future of local leadership and what local leaders can do today to be more effective and get ready. 

This LGIU article focuses on addressing upcoming challenges and trends, solving systemic inequalities, maintaining community cohesion, building quality relationships, respecting strategic planning and taking proactive steps for potential local crises.

What is your interest in local government, and how did your career begin?

I’ve been in local government since I left university. There was a job as a policy adviser at a local Council in the South Island, which I applied for (having no idea what it was), and I got the job. I knew nothing about how local government worked until I got the job, but once I started, I thought: ‘This is amazing; people should talk about this more!’

I worked as a policy analyst and strategic planner for four years at the Council but found the pace and bureaucracy frustrating. I went to work at a law firm for speed and novelty, but I hated it. I came back to local government as a consultant (side-stepping the internal frustrations!) and have been here in some form ever since.

I’ve been self-employed since I was 25. I started working as a freelancer and then as a consultant, and I’ve been in local government quite consistently throughout that time. I describe local government as a boomerang sector – you can leave, but it always pulls you back! I’ve worked with central, state, and federal government, as well as with corporate, but nothing quite matches the fulfilment and connection you get in local government. Your work is important, and you can see the results of your efforts.

What do you consider the most significant trends shaping the future of local government, and how should leaders prepare for them?

Local government is the first line of defence, at a community level, against any broader change. Councils are a front-line service, like health and police, so changes show up differently than they might for other tiers of government.

Environmentally, climate change hits local government hardest in the medium term because Councils clean up the streets after floods, fires and storms and work with coastal communities at risk of erosion. They see – and deal with – the tangible impacts of change.

Economically, when the cost of living is high, housing affordability drops and inequality worsens, people sleep outside libraries, public spaces become less safe and welcoming, and communities struggle to pay their rates. These are all issues that Councils must handle whether they want to or not.

When we look at technology and the increasing shift toward a digital life, we have to ask what a tangible impact that will have on the sphere of government most concerned with community connection, social cohesion, and local democracy. There are real threats to trust, engagement and consultation in a world where the algorithm drives targeted rage-bait and Councillors feel under siege from keyboard warriors on social media.

Socially, demographic change is particularly challenging for local government, and it’s a geographically diverse challenge. We’ve got inner city Councils battling with increasing urban density and an ageing population versus a rural or regional Council trying to attract young families because all the young people are leaving.

All of these changes have the power to radically alter the way Councils operate – but we’re not set up for success. The difference between local government and other spheres of government is the colossal constraint around funding that affects how well we can adapt to meet those changes. Financial sustainability is a core local government issue regardless of where you are.

So, how do we prepare to deal with all of this? That’s where local government’s unique advantage comes into the conversation. I call it our “collaborative advantage.” We can complain about funding for as long as we like, but if history is anything to go by, that won’t change anytime soon. Local government’s share of taxation over the last 100 years has steadily tracked downward, even though our share of public service delivery has tracked upward. Funding is getting worse, not better.

Ministers will blather about efficiencies and cost-savings, which is largely nonsense. The “amalgamation conversation” is one example of that. It’s a standard political football often used as part of a broader narrative accusing local government of being ineffective, irresponsible with money and inefficient. It’s a point of view that plays well in the media but is largely inaccurate. The data tells us that amalgamation very rarely delivers targeted benefits, financial or otherwise.

However, we can often relieve financial pressure and improve services through shared service agreements, public-private partnerships and community collaboration. Thinking creatively about how we can work with neighbouring Councils or businesses to deliver some of those more challenging briefs is an excellent fit for our unique collaborative advantage. We’re close to the action and can cultivate deep and diverse relationships.

A great first step is reaching out to your peers more often to share knowledge and ideas – which is why I’m such a big supporter of LGIU. We work in unnecessary silos within the sector, even though the challenges we face are so consistent. I’d love to see more collective action.

Nobody else can replicate our understanding of community needs and our capacity to come together. Local government is a lynchpin for community connection. If we lean into that and apply those principles to ourselves, that’s where the magic is. It’s something nobody else can do.

What essential qualities do leaders need to deal with these rapid changes and become strong leaders?

First, I would love to see a more enthusiastic celebration of public service as a vocation. If you’re a local government leader, you’re not just an engineer, accountant, communications or HR person – you are a public servant. Reconnecting to the meaning of public service offers an injection of fulfilment and pride, and having real conversations about what it means to operate in a political environment and uphold democracy can buffer some of the frustration our leaders experience in the sector.

Beyond that, leaders need strategic skills. Whatever your subject matter expertise is, your technical skills and know-how can be can be replaced by AI. But AI can’t replace the uniquely human qualities we’re looking for in the leaders shaping the future of our communities: building quality relationships within and outside Council and the community, creatively joining the dots, and bringing a long-term perspective to local decisions.

Strategic skills are the most important skills of the future – and the present! We need leaders who can make new and creative connections and who see our community and our world as a system rather than a collection of disconnected problems. We need leaders who bring an open, expansive perspective to important decisions and who engage meaningfully with the people those decisions affect. We can’t delegate those skills, regardless of how clever technology gets.

In Local Legends, I discuss three key strategic shifts for high-performing local leaders:  long-term legacy perspective, high-quality relationships, and more strategic decisions. These are the essential qualities for local government leaders.

What specifically do you see as the upcoming challenges in integrating new technologies into local governance?

From an application point of view, one of our dangers is we move too fast out of FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out), and don’t realise any benefits from it; we make life more complicated. Having an LLM (Large Language Model) running inside a Council is extraordinarily unhelpful if you don’t know where your data is and it’s not organised.

My bigger worry, if the transition is not carefully managed, is the potential disruption to democracy from the nefarious use of these technologies. Thinking about submissions to long-term plans and community plans, for example, if those are being generated en masse by a non-human and/or non-local entity, that has the potential to skew or derail consultation and engagement processes. Councils are already struggling with boilerplate content and social media bots. With the exponential rate of technological change, we need to ensure we’re putting the integrity of our democracy and the quality of our relationships first before we worry about getting a chatbot right.

Besides, in an era where chatbots have replaced customer service, and it’s almost impossible to get phone or email access to a human, Councils currently offer better customer connection and service than most other industries. I reckon we embrace that.

I’m increasingly becoming a fan of embracing analogue and real life. The most common advice I give Councillors is to get off the internet. Get off Facebook. Local government is uniquely placed to put real-world engagement first. It’s that local collaborative advantage again. We can be at the local meetings, in public spaces, knocking on people’s doors, and having honest conversations. That’s where the focus needs to be.

How can local leaders approach policy-making to address systemic inequalities and maintain community cohesion?

Number one, get off the internet. Go and talk to people. But not just those who have already spoken to you or feel entitled to your time. Talk to people who you don’t understand or don’t already know. Get out into your community and understand the lived experience of every kind of person who lives in your place. I’m very wary of comments made on behalf of “The Community”. There are more differences in values, beliefs, and circumstances than we can imagine, and most people, quite understandably, stay ambivalent or silent. It’s our job to find out what’s going on and bring that perspective to Council decisions.

Fostering that connection between Council and community, but more importantly within the community, especially when things are going well, is also how we build cohesion and resilience. It means that when things do take a turn, people already know and trust their neighbours and are more inclined to turn to them.

Councillors, in particular, have two choices: they can either perpetrate existing inequity by privileging the views and perspectives of the squeakiest wheels, or they can find out how everybody else is living and put the feedback they’re receiving into perspective.

It’s all about that collaborative advantage. Use the strategic levers available to you as a connector, facilitator and advocate for your local area. Build relationships with Ministers, higher tiers of government, other Councils and funding partners. Take your community’s data, stories and voice, and use it in the media, submissions, and meetings. Find the opportunities to make a difference, support the people already doing great work, facilitate their success, and unite around a shared future. You already have all the tools and access you need, so use them, instead of getting tangled in the complaints and day-to-day minutiae.

How can local government leaders balance the need for long-term strategic planning with the constant demands of day-to-day operations and crisis management?

First: role clarity. In a Council, hundreds or thousands of people are hired to manage and execute day-to-day operations and crisis management. We don’t need our senior leaders there too. When we have role clarity, politicians understand it is not their job to muck in at the ground level, and executive leaders understand their job is to design an organisation where the people they’ve hired can do the work they’re supposed to do.

Once you have role clarity, we need a shared long-term vision and aligned medium-term focus – these are the jobs of our elected and executive leaders. When we get that right, your operational superstars bring your vision to life in ways you can’t even imagine. Every time they hire someone, scope a project, or make a decision, they shape that choice to align with your direction… as long as you’ve been clear about what it is.

When Councils set focused priorities and communicate them clearly, by saying something like “For the next three years, our top priorities are community connection, economic growth and biodiversity” then Council staff get out there and make it happen. A trust leap between governance, management and delivery is needed here; we need both sides of the fence operating as allies, not adversaries.

I also talk to leaders about going off plan but staying on strategy. If all you’ve got is a plan and a multicolumn table with times, dates and actions, you’re in trouble once your context shifts, because you don’t have an overarching logic for why those things were in the table in the first place.

However, if the focus is on the strategy rather than the plan, we know exactly what the outcomes we want to see in our community are, as well as our priorities in the medium term. Then, when things change, we can easily change our plan by applying the same strategic logic to the new conditions.

If we have role clarity, strategic focus, and organisational alignment, we don’t need to balance the need for strategic planning with day-to-day planning; everybody just does their job.

What lessons can local leaders learn from global crises like the pandemic for future leadership and policies?

Stop trying to predict the future and stop planning to death. Your time horizon is too long for prediction; there’s too much complexity and uncertainty. Instead, focus on strategic risk and strategic reward so you can go off plan but stay on strategy. Play a long game, focus on the big picture, build meaningful relationships and get that trust and connection in the bank now because you’ll need to draw on it soon enough!

What we learned from the pandemic specifically is that local government is critical. When we have to send everyone home, and only the most essential things happen, most of what Councils do is essential. We need the rubbish collected, the taps to work, and the roads to be drivable; local government does the fundamentals. In Australia, local government delivers 25% of public services for 4% of the tax. We’re significantly more productive and effective than any other sphere of government. So what we can learn is that our work matters.

Can you give us three words to describe your aspirations for the future of local government?

Connected, strategic and creative. Councils should be connected to communities, each other, industry, and the broader public and private sectors. We need people looking out for the future, connecting the dots, seeing the big picture, and not getting stuck in the weeds. There is so much potential to do interesting and innovative things if we are willing to think outside the box, take risks, work with others, and get creative.

If you’d like to learn more from Alicia, check out her new book Local Legends: How to make a difference in local government or explore her website to find out more.

This interview is part of LGIU’s new Future Local Lab – a holistic programme of resources aimed at helping you to prepare for and respond to the emerging challenges facing local government everywhere. It’s open to everyone, make sure you’re signed up today.