The leader at the front and the workers behind the scenes

01/02/2018

Over the next few years, I will start blogging about the roles, responsibilities and competencies of Board and company secretaries in the context of the New Zealand public sector.

I suspect that most of these roles are underdone, misunderstood and an afterthought for most Boards and their chief executives.

I have long thought that this function should be undertaken by a dedicated cadre of accredited public sector governance professionals, led out of Treasury or the State Services Commission, or at the very least have a head of the profession.

I will borrow from the literature on boundary spanners and collaborative governance in exploring these roles. I will also lean heavily on my own experience and the training I receive from the Governance Institute of Australia. The GIA has been an essential source of information and accreditation for me (and thousands of others) as a board and company secretary in Australia and Aotearoa.

In exploring these roles, I will look at the broader State sector. I have chosen the State sector because there are over 3,500 institutional governance arrangements, from Crown entities to Crown companies to State-Owned Enterprises to various Trusts and Boards of Trustees. They all need some governance and secretarial support to make good decisions on behalf of the Crown.

I will begin by charting the institutional scape. I will then describe the roles and responsibilities of Board and company secretaries in the New Zealand public sector and compare them to the Australian public and private sectors.

I will then offer some ideas about what makes a good public sector governance secretary (Board and company). In doing so, I will also cover how public sector governance is different from corporate governance in a few things – all of which are material.

I also plan to share some of my own experiences and interview several Chairs about what they think a good public sector governance professional looks like beyond the usual communication, coordination, and compliance activity.

I suspect to find a considerable degree of commonality between the Board and company secretaries and the competencies required to support good public sector governance. I also expect to see one or two exemplars, with the rest being a mix of rudimentary administrative support or overly-sensitive legal advice.

I am doing this because I see Board and company secretaries facing considerable challenges in dealing with tensions and ambiguities arising from complexity, multiple accountabilities and confused governance forms. These challenges are contextual driven by the fact that most of these roles support a vortex of mixed objectives, including ministers, political appointees, Crown entity monitors, an
expansionist State Services Commission, chief executives, and senior leadership teams.

I am also doing this as I don’t see much local research or thinking on the vital role this cadre of governance professionals can play.

Much like marae tikanga with the speakers at the front and the workers are at the back, both jobs are equally important and are like the yin and yang, for without one, everything would fail.

Te amorangi ki mua, te hapai o ki muri