Consulting services

Our consultancy services help to get your council humming, providing tailored services, best practice guidance, business solutions, and governance and management support.

Whether it’s support for executive recruitment to help you secure and retain top talent, services to promote effective management and strong leadership or the provision of a council ‘health check’ we’ll help to build your capability and embed strong practice.

We can help with the following:

Project/programme management

Managing projects and programmes effectively through a virtual Programme Management Office, ensuring good project management practices and acting as a model for positive change.
Organising and connecting all aspects of the business, including purpose and strategy, in a more cohesive and efficient manner to aid governance in making informed decisions.
Providing individual project support, including reviews, risk assessments, business cases, and project rescues.

Governance excellence/executive performance

Giving Chief Executives and Leadership Teams the opportunity to understand their performance, strengths, weaknesses, and improvement plans.
Enabling councils to understand their performance, strengths, weaknesses, and improvement plans.
Conducting capability assessments that serve as an annual or bi-annual performance benchmark.
Incorporating feedback and analysis from council, mayors, committee chairs, and individuals.

Organisational 360/culture feedback

Providing consistent, research-validated data and measurements on leadership skills and operational performance/barriers for every leader and their team.
Offering a mechanism to measure the effectiveness of all your leadership development initiatives.
Conducting self-assessments and gathering feedback from direct reports, peers, and managers.

Shadow CouncilMARK assessment

Providing an introductory experience for those seriously considering the CouncilMARK journey.
Offering a mid-point perspective to gauge preparedness for a future CouncilMARK assessment.
Functioning alongside CouncilMARK as a standalone tool, allowing councils to challenge and transform themselves, fostering development and growth across the organisation.

Long-term planning and infrastructure support

Engaging with elected members to define and articulate collective priorities and outcomes sought.
Considering and challenging options through assessment and sound advice from council’s senior managers and leaders.
Capturing stakeholder inputs and views to formulate a coherent document understood by all parties.

Maori partnerships

Building, implementing, and owning your own Māori cultural capability strategy.
Developing a framework to work in partnership with Māori.
Measuring staff confidence in Māori culture skills and using this information to build a capability plan.

Executive recruitment

Leveraging our extensive local government network to bring in and retain the best talent.
Conducting needs assessments with key stakeholders to develop the attributes and skills required before searching for an ideal candidate.
Conducting short-listed interviews, providing advice on post-interview assessment, and following up with candidates until successful placement.

Partnership programmes

Our partnerships and subscription-based services offer access to new tools to help councils to deliver maximum value to communities.