An interview with Noelene Duff, CEO at City of Whitehorse, Vic
Noelene Duff believes working to a limited
budget and ensuring environmental sustainability is at the fore, are pressures felt daily by Local Government leaders.
“We are continually faced with the challenge of meeting community expectations, which is increasingly difficult at a time when the community is financially stretched,” she said.
Noelene has worked in Local Government since 1991, initially working in Human Services at the City of St Kilda, before moving on to manage a range of other service areas, including waste, environmental health, local laws, and customer service.
With much experience managing and leading teams, Noelene believes the key qualities necessary for leadership include stamina, resilience, integrity and courage.
“A good dose of common sense and humour, as well as a willingness to be flexible, are key qualities needed to get issues and projects completed,” she said.
Noelene said that there are a number of hurdles involved in recruiting good leaders.
“The diversity of work we do is very challenging and it is hard to get this message across to our younger generation, who are moving very quickly through their careers,” she said. “Local Government provides people with an opportunity to be a specialist, as well as to branch out. We need to publicise this and get this message out to people interested in a sector where they can move around and get plenty of good solid professional experience, while serving their community.”
In achieving best practice, Noelene Duff said it is crucial that councils are not attracted to fads with staff or service delivery.
“It is easy to follow the latest management book or ‘inflight magazine’ management style,” she said. “But it is far more effective to use these as models that may or may not apply to your own setting. The best approach is to listen to your organisation and be adaptive to the changes in your community so that you can deliver the best and most relevant services.
“We need to be in touch with our community and be in a position to prompt their interest in issues that we know are of importance now and in the future.
“A good example is environmental sustainability. Here at Whitehorse we have worked to integrate these values into the way we do business everyday and to implement them sensibly. Over the past few years, Council has implemented the ‘Whitehorse EcoVision: A Strategy for Ecological Sustainability’. This strategy is assisting Council in making its operations more sustainable and also acts as a platform to educate and involve the local community in expanding sustainable practices into businesses, homes and other organisations.
“Within Council, among other initiatives, we have already installed rainwater tanks at Council buildings, are promoting alternative transport and are involved in the Greenfleet program, which offsets carbon emissions produced by our fleet.”
With the focus on working together with communities gaining focus over the years, Noelene said it is critical that councils communicate with their communities on a level they understand.
“Communities cannot be expected to understand all of the demands on Local Government, particularly the challenge of maintaining and updating infrastructure,” she said. “We face different costs to a domestic environment, with many additional requirements and goals, such as heritage, sustainability and very high wear and tear on highly used community facilities.
“We also have the challenges of maintaining many assets that our ratepayers do not see, such as drains, and also that they are probably not aware that we have a role in, such as street lighting.
“Whitehorse is working hard on good planning for managing our assets and ensuring that we are effective in communicating this with our community.”
