If the senior staff contract is a corruption risk, unimaginative and a shortcut instead of proper performance management, who’d be mad enough to put more people on it?

Final 2 480

Not these two blokes, surely!

David Farmer (on right in picture) is the go to GM in the industry to get councils out of significant financial trouble. He did it with Wollongong, then to Ipswich, and now is CEO of Central Coast. He is a numbers man par excellence but a little bit old-fashioned about how to motivate senior executives, holding the view that nothing motivates people like fearing for their job. He can be disarmingly charming, but if he has a fault, it has to be in his soft skills.

At a time when the industry has acknowledged the impracticalities and risks of “no reason” termination in the standard contract, David thought he’d take the opportunity before anything happens legislatively, to start flowing the standard contract down into the manager level below the directors. Central Coast is in the process of advertising three unit manager positions for Environmental Compliance Systems, Facilities and Asset Management, and Governance and Legal.

He gave an undertaking to the unions that no existing employee need become senior staff on the standard contract, but he will put new appointees on the contract, and have the Administrator Rik Hart as the Council enable this, by resolving they are senior staff positions.

As a GM at Warringah and Inner West he was no fan of the standard contract but was clearly prepared to be the Council that would introduce the inflexibility and misery of the standard contract down to the third level of managers.

And there’s setting the farce of the Council making a series of changes to those positions which are identified as senior staff, but then, if the jobs are filled by existing staff, the resolution would need to be rescinded. Really, why bother, when it’s so easy to have a proper performance agreement under the terms of the Award for even the most onerous and demanding positions?

Here is our most recent letter to the CEO dated 6 May asking him to stop, a compelling argument and with email exchanges between us as we tried to convince him that he was on the wrong side of history. We’ve not yet had a reply, but on 17 May we reminded him that we are expecting one. We may have changed his mind and you can read more about this next month.