Roundup Unfiltered - Diane Kalen-Sukra

Today’s guest on Roundup Unfiltered is an acclaimed author, speaker, and culture transformation expert.

Diane Kalen-Sukra joins Chris Eddy from Canada to share insights from over two decades of senior leadership, including an award-winning tenure as a city manager and as a producer for a national television program on the CBC network.

Diane’s published works include the book Save Your City: How Toxic Culture Kills Community and What to Do About It, which is being celebrated with a 5th-anniversary edition this year.

Diane calls for a revival of civic values and civic education as key to fostering the type of culture that can sustain us, our democracy and our planet.

Find out more about Diane's work at dianekalensukra.com, and watch a short video about her book here.

Diane’s newsletter Civic Wisdom, shares timeless principles and modern insights for current and aspiring leaders (SaveYourCity.ca/newsletter).

Join her on LinkedIn

Transcript

Hello, I'm Chris Eddy, welcome to Roundup Unfiltered, another special edition from the Local Government News Roundup, brought to you by the Victorian Local Governance Association and Davidson Recruitment and Business Advisory Services. Today's guest is an acclaimed author, speaker and culture transformation expert. Diane Kalen-Sukra will share insights from over two decades of senior leadership, including an award-winning tenure as a city manager and as a producer for a national television program on the CBC network. Diane's published works include the book Save Your City, How Toxic Culture Kills Community and What to Do About It.

It's being celebrated with a fifth anniversary edition this year. For years now, Diane has been traveling the length and breadth of Canada and beyond, calling for a revival of civic values and civic education as the key to fostering the type of culture that can sustain us, our democracy and our planet. Stand by now for an all-new edition of Roundup Unfiltered. 

Lovely to have you on the program, Diane, welcome. Great to be here, Honour. Tell me a little bit about your local government background. You were a chief executive officer? 

Yes. Well, one of the interesting things about local government is that we all have a fascinating past. I certainly didn't begin my career thinking I want to be a municipal CAO or chief executive officer as you call them. I think for me, my interest in community building really began at quite a young age. I always seemed to have a natural concern for the fragility of democracy so I ended up studying political economy, political science, political philosophy and I pretty much had a solid classical education that I then took into various fields. One of those ended up being similar to your kind of experience in working in the media industry. I was a national television producer for our public broadcaster, CBC, and we had a program that actually went across the country and that was over 20 years ago and at that time, we knew there was already a democratic deficit happening at our local level and, you know, I think for local government officials, we can recognize people have been around for about 20 years know that for years, we were begging people to come to our meetings, right? So this was around those times where apathy was really the problem as opposed to a lot of negative engagement and so what we were doing was we were setting up town halls across the country of local governments and communities that were facing dramatic changes due to globalization pressures. So, for instance, if a particular municipality was facing a vast expansion of industrial hog farming or another one facing water privatization or something from a multinational and then kind of helping that community model a town hall that we would then broadcast nationally and we would set it up so that there was a true democratic discussion going on, you'd have people on all sides of the issue, elected officials, staff, experts from both sides and then have the public in attendance and an ability for people to ask questions and ultimately help that civil discourse in taking place. And so that also really shaped my thinking. That program was eventually ended by the broadcaster and something much more entertainment-like was its replacement, but I did find my way back to local government through the corporate officer, I'm not sure what you call them in Australia but it's like the clerk position, that route. And I was as surprised as anyone when I finally was a municipal chief administrative officer. I think today a lot of our staff are much more, when they're looking at taking a job in a particular municipality they think, once, twice and three times and they investigate the current culture of the municipality, its governance challenges and its sustainability and, how well received their contribution will be and we see this in local governments being challenged in terms of recruiting qualified staff and at that time, that was around ten years ago, I didn't think so carefully when I was taking a job and I ended up in a municipality that I knew had some challenges but really what we would recognize it as today would be a municipality facing governance collapse and I know you report on these kinds of things, it's actually now part of the daily occurrences and in England they have about one in five municipalities that are facing bankruptcy and for me as a Canadian I was astounded that we had municipalities that would be challenged in submitting financials that would have no functioning records management system, the public record wasn't functioning or that we would be challenged in meeting basic statutory requirements or, having qualified people to operate the water and sewer systems or just have legal challenges against it because of the inability to meet basic legal requirements. So that was shocking to me and so I was actually in a way quite eager and honored to take on the challenge of rebuilding that municipality. And to give some sense of the impact of civic leadership, there was an election that brought in a brand new council that was prepared to make the, to rebuild the municipality and, so we had that alignment of elected officials and staff and it was really a rather miraculous transformation within the term of one council we were able to turn the municipality around into a multi-award winning municipality and everything from, we won awards against, not against but with friendly competition that we have in the municipal sector, a much larger municipality in areas of good governance, in organizational development, in community partnerships, in asset management, sustainable community building and there was just this great enthusiasm behind the whole thing. And you can do that, I mean, it is possible to turn an organization around in a short period of time, particularly if it's smaller> It takes a bit longer for larger organizations but, as an organizational transformation person who's done a lot of this work, it can be between 5 and 10 years. But a community culture, it takes much longer, it's more like a generation and one of the things that became clear to me in this journey was that a government that, the local government that's facing governance collapse or even just challenges regarding its infrastructure or financing or staffing or any of these things:  a sustainable local government has a sustainable culture that accompanies it. All institutions have a culture that undergirds them and the, so I became really, this experience and plus some of the work that I've done before in my journey made me really aware of how important culture was to good governance and to the functioning of our communities and also how unaware we were in our sector that this was a primary area of focus, something that we could not neglect and because there are so many pressures on local government, it seems like just one more thing. But in my view, it was critically important and that's kind of how all this began. 

So you wrote the book, Save Your City. Was the book written while you were still a CAO or was this a project you took on when you left local government? 

That's a fascinating question because in one way, it was being written in my mind my entire life. And when I finally left local government, you know, I do have four children so I know what it feels like to be pregnant and it was very much like being pregnant, like I could not not write the book. Like I just had to give birth to this thing and for a few reasons. The first one was that I wanted to raise the alarm bells that, our political culture in our country was deteriorating, that this was not just an individual problem but a social problem that was going to affect the ability of our governments to govern themselves and that incivility, it spreads like a contagion unless you address culture intentionally. So there was that impact. 

I was also concerned by what I was seeing of levels of trauma that were, you know, happening within our sector, a lot of public servants were just like ordinary folk, right? People who run for council or they didn't sign up to be president of the United States and have security details and mass groups of people, you know, sometimes now a story can go viral and all of a sudden, a small town mayor is all over the international news for something that they didn't even realize was an infraction in the first place, right? So it can be a very volatile world, a very volatile situation and I wanted to talk about political culture as something that we needed to address but also one of the concerns that I had was the need to build a shared understanding between civic leaders and citizens. There seems to be this huge divide and I think it's primarily due to a lack of civic education between the works and efforts and, mechanisms and, , what's going on at the local government level and what citizens understand about it. The book's actual title is called Save Your City and then it's “how toxic culture kills community and what to do about it” and one of the challenges is that when we are in a toxic environment, it's not just that, people don't decide to do it, oftentimes it's like being in a dysfunctional family. You think that's normal behavior. People think the way to get things done sometimes is in a very negative way that has deep, like maybe they succeed in achieving their goal of stopping that policy or that initiative or intimidating someone into submission but they don't often recognize the impact that that has, a reverberating impact on the culture. It becomes the way things get done and once you have that kind of a dynamic going on, then people are living in fear, they're living in intimidation. 

There was a new report. This is probably one of the reasons why this never-ending civility tour, like I just can't seem to get…I'm always on this tour because the problem is escalating and there was a report that just came out three weeks ago in the United States showing that not only is incivility rising in our communities but, in frequency but also in the degrees of abuse. So what we were seeing maybe a few years ago was, you know, derogatory remarks, insults, efforts to humiliate people in order to, that was like, how people did politics to escalation of, more and more harassment we're seeing now, more and more threats and actually now violence. And this is the case, even I'm experiencing on my tour where I used to get calls primarily for, this is happening, sometimes like psychological harassment or, people doing little sidebar campaigns against them or divisions on council but now more than ever I'm getting calls from people who are afraid for their safety, elected officials who are afraid for their safety, staff who are afraid for their safety. And I remember in 2018 when I did my first keynote address on this topic, it was to a large group of senior leaders and some elected officials and, the room was pretty silent, people had never heard of this issue really. I mean, in Canada maybe it was a little bit more advanced in Australia at the time, definitely so in England but in Canada we were in a widespread denial that there was a cultural problem. And when I talked about how incivility, once unleashed spreads like a contagion will eventually end up in violence, people I think for the most part really didn't believe me and it took a bit of a, but now, I mean, it seems to be like everybody understands that we've got to find a way to address it. 

And that's the million-dollar question, like how do you actually do it [address rising incivility and toxic culture]? And I think that that's where I wanted to have a serious contribution. Usually when we're in the crisis we want just to solve our [immediate] problem. Like if we have a vexatious, citizen who's making our life very difficult, we want to, stop that from happening or we have a conflict on council, we want somebody to mediate or resolve it, but really, these are what I call, just coping mechanisms. You can maybe resolve the issue but don't actually solve the problem, the bigger problem. I wanted to point people to the fact that while we can—and it is important to invest a certain amount of energy in coping with the situation—we also must simultaneously invest energy in civic cultural renewal, in actually transforming the culture because you can't just legislate civility and civil discourse, it has to flow from the heart, it has to become part of our ethos, which is actually the democratic ethos and a muscle that we just haven't been using for really too long. 

Diane, are you describing behaviour that occurs between elected representatives, between elected reps and council staff or between those groups and members of the community or like a multiple choice question, is it all of the above? 

It's absolutely all of the above. There are no innocent parties, this is the interesting thing. We've all been implicated in this and so we should stop trying to point fingers. Local government doesn't exist separate from society and for years we've heard, stop bullying in the schools and bullying in the workplaces and bullying everywhere. Well, of course it's infected our local governments and all you have to do is look at the headlines: citizens spreading sewage all over the city manager's home and then you've got city managers implicated in unethical conduct and then you have elected officials. So, it's happening at the board level, it's happening vertically, it's happening horizontally and it's even happening among frontline civic workers. We have some municipalities where they've done third party surveys and found that 50% of the public servants, not the elected officials, not the senior staff, but our civic workers are facing gross levels of harassment. It's not just vertical, it's from the public, it's from each other. We've lost the art of living and working well together. 

And so, it's natural that we look to tools. And this is the thing that I often describe…this whole process of cultural transformation, as being like frogs in a tepid pot of water that's slowly being brought to a boil. So we haven't really, it's just sort of crept up on us and, one of the things that we started to do about 10 years ago is we felt the pressure, we felt the anxiety and we started to—you'd see it at the elected official conventions or at the staff conventions—we started to have little wellness sessions or we started to have conversations about personal resiliency, not really fully understanding that resiliency requires, social resiliency. You can only be so personally resilient if an environment's toxic, right? 

And then we didn't want to talk really about culture, so then we focused our attention on political acuity and, political acuity is necessary. I pride myself in having it, I'm sure you do as well. You need to be really agile, you know, ninja-like, Houdini-like to survive a difficult political environment. However, I find, most people engaging in politics today have some of those skills. It's when political acuity becomes a substitute for addressing truly toxic cultural situations that, that's its limitation. And then there were lots of discussions at the municipal level around, legal budgets getting way out of control because there was excessive reliance on lawyers to kind of solve problems and this misconception that just because something's legal that it's actually ethical. And I think we now are starting to have an understanding that that's not the case and that we are being held to a higher standard. And then we thought maybe the problem could be solved by simply increasing security, that, we just needed to protect people. Of course, WorkSafe required violence assessment plans and we have to protect staff and City Hall. And again, widespread denial. We just had a shooter come into one of our City Halls and it was probably one of the first times ever anything like that's happened in Canada. And it's funny because, like, it's human psychology. We immediately go, the problem's contained, it's a one-off, it has nothing to do with anywhere else, it's never going to happen again, we've got all the security in place. And in reality, yes, in a way, okay, that's great, but the truth is, we never used to have people coming in shooting in local government. We never used to have people driving their vehicles into City Hall. We never had to armor up our... and now it's necessary. And now in most of our large cities, our elected officials have security, not just, in the course of their work, but also in their homes. And so this just goes to show it's not a solution, it's a coping mechanism to an advancing cultural problem. 

And you describe a number of coping mechanisms, Diane, and I have noticed some similarities between Canada and here in terms of the use of codes of conduct, and a lot of conduct matters getting more and more attention in the press. But also we're in this phase of the government putting in municipal monitors and administrators, in some cases, removing entire councils because they've become dysfunctional. Has the problem gotten to that extreme in Canada as well? 

Oh, absolutely. It's exactly there and probably at a very similar timing. So it was around, five, six years ago that provinces began requiring local governments to have codes of conduct. And so you had charters and municipal acts all amended to do that. Except in my province, it's one of the few that it's voluntary, but every council must, by law, consider whether or not they're going to have a code of conduct within six months of being elected. And then there's all those requirements around training and renewal every year and all of that. Ontario is the most stringent in terms of, they were one of the first ones out the gate to require, which is our largest province, to require codes of conduct. But they also require all municipalities to appoint integrity commissioners to adjudicate those code of conduct violations. I have been listening to your podcast. I'm so grateful for the service that you're providing. It's rich, filled with information and I think really goes a long way to help civic leaders understand that the problems that we're facing are really quite universal and therefore, so must be some of the solutions, right? Yeah. So we are having, so Ontario is one the furthest and their bodies, like the Association of Municipalities of Ontario, have done some thorough analysis of the way that's actually impacted them. And they do have some concerns. So what we are finding is that they are requesting better standardized training for integrity commissioners.I think about it this way. Jane Jacobs, who's a great, North American urbanist, well-respected, 20 years ago talked about the mass amnesia that accompanies a society and cities on the verge of cultural collapse, that they can no longer remember, the democratic principles and practices upon which they're founded. So even if we're hiring lawyers, just because someone's been a lawyer, it doesn't mean that they fully understand the municipal context. And often there's confusion even amongst ourselves, even with the fact that we have to, you're bringing in monitors to train people. Well, we don't have comprehensive civic education programs. So we're actually getting in this situation where almost every election, we're having to provide very comprehensive, education on basic principles regarding democratic governance. And we want to be a self-governing people. This is a very onerous, way to approach things. But the next frontier in Ontario was also the issue of elected officials, the big mayors actually joined together. There was a bill introduced to expand the code of conduct to elected officials who were behaving in ways that violated the, that violated the rights and safety of employees. And that was ultimately voted down. But we do have situations where, for instance, elected officials are, engaging in sexual harassment or things that were really, really concerning. And I think that, and the recourse, there's concern around that there's very little recourse to actually a sanction, a 90-day sanction being not sufficiently effectual. But again, I mean, all of this points to the fact that these are not solutions. These are just very costly. There seems to be universal concern with cost. One of our municipalities in British Columbia just introduced a code of conduct a year ago. And within a year, they've had 17 complaints. They can't make it through, they're still going through 10 of them. Many of them are considered, they're not going to go anywhere. They've cost the municipality over $100,000. This concern with cost is everywhere. And it is very expensive to not know how to get along.  It's like people who complain about having gone through a divorce, you know, that it's not, you know, it's very, very costly.

Diane, if I can just jump in on that point. And we've had similar criticism here, not only about the cost, but also concerns that the process, which can be very timely, as in take up a lot of time, doesn't actually resolve any problems at the end, and in fact, entrenches amongst the parties, some of that hostility, some of that acrimony, so that you get to the end of the process and nothing's resolved effectively. Do you see it that way also? 

I do see it and I do understand it. And that even happens in situations where the resolution is what people apparently thought they wanted. Let's say they wanted to sanction a particular councillor, councillor sanctioned. But it only makes matters worse. People are only more angry. And you find this, this is the same situation and oftentimes in labor situations and organizations or where you have a strike, okay, the strike may have resolved, but then the negative feelings drag on for decades sometimes, right? And so, I think that is part of the, I'm sure some of that could be improved with better training, but it's no substitute for knowing how to get along and respect each other and being able to flexibly engage in discourse and really have an appetite for arriving at what is good, what is true and what is in the common interest. Like if that appetite doesn't exist, it's funny because Socrates said 2,500 years ago that the greatest evil that a people, that a city can suffer is the hatred of civil discourse. To not have that appetite to work together to arrive at what's in the best interest and to put aside our minor differences or our, personal animosities. It's just the beginning. It's the beginning of a very difficult, very strenuous road of, where the fabric, the social fabric just continues to tear. And unfortunately, civic leaders are so much more influential than they realize. And I think that's one of the things particularly I'm being called in a lot of places where we're having entire states or entire provinces where huge turnover, like you have 50% of the elected officials are brand new. And one of the things that escapes them is their actual power, their actual responsibility, their actual ability to shape culture and the extent to which people are watching it. What hope do we have of talking about civility at the citizen level when our councillors are behaving in ways that are certainly not model behavior? And so it's a bit of a realization process. And when people are going through these difficulties, you can't tell them, like, it is important to protect people today. It is important to arrive at certain levels of, there has to be some justice, there has to be the ability to move on. But it's not the ideal. It's not the ideal solution. 

What we really need, I think, is a cultural renewal and an awareness of our personal responsibilities in doing that. And one of the ways that I do that with elected officials and staff is to persuade them that what we're facing is an actual risk, that toxic culture, this kind of conflict, this protracted conflict, and even like the lust for destruction. We have more and more people getting elected that are just trying to, that are actually aiming for a certain level of chaos. Or we have people who ought to know better, people who were [previously] elected and then didn't get elected, then mobilizing little mobs, when they should be the people who are helping us create, build those bridges of understanding between civic leaders and citizens, because our municipalities are facing tsunamis of challenges, unprecedented challenges. So this is the time when we need each other to collaborate and cooperate. 

So just before we talk a bit about what you do see as potentially the solution, you talked a little earlier about the education that needs to happen after people get elected. We've seen here in Victoria in recent time, the introduction of mandatory training for candidates to try and elevate the level of understanding of the role that they're putting their hands up for. The flip side of that can be just this week, nominations have closed for local government elections in Queensland, in Australia, and the Electoral Commissioner says the introduction of mandatory training may have resulted in less people nominating, because they didn't want to go through that training. How do you respond to that as a measure that would or would not be effective in this space? 

Right, I don't think at all that it's a democratic infringement to require or expect or to offer training for candidates. I think it's actually a great service. I think though, to help make that argument, we need people to be outspoken. We need experienced civic leaders to speak out and say, and I'm seeing this happening in Canada, we're seeing it happen definitely in the United States, in many places. Just a few weeks ago, we had one of the longest serving mayors in Canada speak out and finally say it--we have a major civility crisis on our hands, something like he hasn't seen in 36 years as an elected official. We do need to up the ante. We do need to communicate. We do need to remind ourselves of some basic principles, because the kind of culture that we're fostering is antithetical to democracy. That's what they used to call mob rule, mob rule is the antithesis of democratic rule. So I think any type of training is good, but I also think that it makes sense for elected officials in a very public way to campaign for improved education at the elementary school level, at the university level. Our civic education has declined to levels that are intolerable. You can't sustain a society without maintaining the values that support it. And basic civic values and basic civic education, I think, are critical. But that includes also when elected officials go through their, what we typically call charm school. We really only talk to them about, when we talk about ethics, we normally focus on some really like, conflict of interest, but not really, some of the deeper issues around our obligations to each other, our duties as citizens, what the meaning of servant leadership. I think in some fields, you can have a choice about what type of leadership style you want to adopt in the public service, it's servant leadership. And what does that look like? And that's important because people come to local government from not necessarily the public sector, not necessarily, they may be a total command and control kind of person. They may have admiration of authoritarian leaders, but this is a democratic system. And what does that actually mean? And I think also certain social emotional skills are super important to do some training around resiliency and empathy, which has declined at exceptional levels. It really has been the historic role of civic leaders to weave together the social fabric. So I'm in favor of all forms of training that are being offered. And I would hope that there would be open-mindedness in people to participate in it because we need people who are champions of democracy wherever we can get them. 

You've talked about the role of ethical behavior in and its influence on cultures and the flip side of that is unethical cultures and this concept of ethical fading. Can you explain to me what ethical fading is? 

Yes, it's actually very concerning. It's a social phenomenon that happens to people in groups, it's often said that people will do things in groups that they wouldn't do alone. And it's almost like, I'm trying to give you an example of in a municipal sector what would happen. For the most part, we have, quite ethical, our local government institutions are relative to other levels of government. There are higher levels of trust. Even a study just came out a couple of days ago from the National Research Institute in the United States. Local government is still the most trusted and it's low at 45%, but it's higher than other levels. So I don't want to raise the alarm bells on this, but wherever there has been unethical conduct in local government, you will find lots of people involved in it and people who would otherwise know better, people who would see themselves as ethical or who when put under examination after the fact would tell themselves, that's not in alignment with my values. And it could be something as simple as administrative assistance for directors or for civic leaders having a practice of just letting a few, personal receipts slide or something. And that just being a practice that's so common that, and there's a justification that happens in the group and it becomes normalized. So that's really what ethical fading is, is when people are brought down collectively by, usually it's a leadership problem. When unethical behavior goes unchecked, without accountability and often, sometimes promoted, those are environments where you see lots of ethical fading because the person has to leave ultimately if they want to not be involved in these kind of daily compromises that happen. So it's really important to talk a lot about ethics. In fact, in the ancient Greek context, this is where we get the very idea of politics. Politics and ethics were inseparable. They were considered like identical issues because politics was the issue of how do we, ethics can only exist between two people or more, and politics is the activity of leading two people or more in a community context. And so how can we do politics without talking about ethics? And like I said, for too long, we thought that the ethical thing to do is what the lawyer tells us we can get away with, and that's absolutely not the case. 

We're called to a much higher standard, and when people are behaving in ways that are ethical, it has a ripple effect of flourishing, and that's the very reason why we're in local government. We keep thinking that the reason why local government exists is to provide services, and that's how we achieve our why. The real why of local government, which has historically always been, is to bring about human flourishing, what the ancient Greeks used to call eudaimonia, and this is not just something I'm making up. If you look in any municipal charters, I haven't looked in the Australian ones, but if you look in the U.S. and all Canadian jurisdictions and you look up the purposes of municipal government, it says to provide for the social, economic, and environmental well-being of people. 

It's much the same in Australia, very similar words. 

It doesn't surprise me. To me, it's like this ancient remnant. It was like in the Athenian constitution. Because that really is our mandate. That's why we live together in cities, and that's why it's important to live by the golden rule. That's why it's important. Who are the standard bearers for that? It's civic leaders. It's like the greatest task. It'd be like a coach on the sports field. Well, the field for the civic leaders, it's the garden of community. Their task is to cultivate it, and the proper way to provide the proper nutrition, the proper lighting. By engaging in behaviors that are toxic, it's like feeding the weeds and stifling the oxygen. We can measure if we're doing well as a community when the people in our society are doing well. There are some municipalities you see adopting these well-being budgets, where they're actually starting to measure these things, but it really is the case that we measure what we treasure, right? In my view, it should be well-being.

So Diane, you talk about civic culture renewal as the answer to this issue of toxicity and incivility. Are there any examples of where this has actually turned around a culture to the point where you'd be happy to say that this place is an exemplar? 

Well, one of the things with renewal is that it's constant, and that it can't even stop for a second. It's like a garden. If you stop water one day, it starts to decay in that particular area. So you're never going to get it. I mean, this is an aspirational goal. You're never going to get a situation that it's an ultimate in all aspects of society. They've solved the homelessness problem. Everyone treats each other with respect and dignity. But there are initiatives, and what I did in establishing the roadmap to renewing civic culture was looking at some of those causal issues, those systemic issues behind toxic culture, and trying to address them in a systemic way. And what we can do is…so I work with civic leaders to come up with their own cultural roadmap, because we all have a different sphere of influence. And whether you're a citizen or a civic leader, you can have this roadmap and have your particular impact. So what we do see is excellence in certain areas. And I was particularly impressed, like one of the most impressive civic education initiatives I ever saw was in San Antonio, where the mayor, Ron Nirenberg, declared his city to be a compassionate city. And then he engaged in this mass, I mean, not every municipality can do this. Most municipalities, just don't have the resources. It's one of the, it's like the seventh largest city in the United States. They were in a different situation. But they did an educational initiative that reached through the entire city hall, through every single educational institution from the elementary school to high school to every college to every university, because there are massively declining levels of empathy in the United States, in Canada, and around the world, actually, something like 40% decline in the past 20 years. And they've been measuring this since World War Two. And so when you have a lack of empathy, you have a lack of social cohesion, you have a lack of care. And so this campaign was all about cultivating empathy, civil, civic duty, community care. And it was a rather extensive educational program that now everyone's participated in. So that would be like a really good example of education. But there are also, without going through the entire, without going through the entire renewal map, there are different initiatives, like the first one begins with being civil and being an upstander yourself. And so I celebrate every civic leader that I see that steps out, and says something like in the face of, let's say, staff is being mistreated. You'll see some civic leaders punch back and draw the line and say, that's not acceptable. We see other municipalities, for instance, that will begin their council term with a declaration of principles and values that goes even beyond and then like regular, efforts to renew those and live them out. And, all of it has to do with leadership. But a mayor could leave or a leader could leave and that initiative could disappear. I have worked with municipalities that have radically turned around their culture. So we have these culture audits, and you can assess the culture of a municipality, the level of cultural entropy and dysfunction that exists within it. And if you have the courage to look at it, and there are some where you can have even council and staff be willing to look at that dysfunction and to work together with all the staff to move the needle. I've seen that happen, and that happened really effectively. And that massively increases productivity and service delivery. 

What I do to with to convince people on the need for this [civic culture renewal]—because some people can be convinced on the basis of what's right, and what's just, and I think others need to see that this is actually something mandatory because it's costing us way too much money. Like, if we look at what all of these, what we call the coping mechanisms are costing us, that would, like I said, in my view, is a culture risk. And so I do believe that with all risks, managers and leaders are responsible to manage risks. And that would involve first understanding that we have a problem, looking at some of the root causes of it, assessing what it's costing the municipality to be dysfunctional and/or toxic or not to have a culture that supports good governance, and then be able to diagnose where their culture is and ultimately to address it. It was very saddening to see in 2021, I believe it was during COVID, when that Handforth Parish Council meeting went viral. What impact it had in Australia, was that kind of a surprise for people? 

Look, it made news and people, I think, were shocked and appalled and amused by it, which seems to be a range of reactions, doesn't it? 

It really does. And you know, it was embarrassing, of course, but I think it's a good exercise for all of us to ask ourselves, you know, that could happen to any one of us. And it was educational for the public. I think so much of the public had no idea that that type of paralysis, it's not just in Handforth, it's in too many places. And, you know, a kind of honest reflection, I would say, even for students to look at what actually happens in that kind of a case, like look at that level of reactivity, how much does it, how much trust is lost in that and how much reputational damage happens? What would be the morale of the employees after something like that? We do know a couple of those elected officials resigned, we know that they had to do costly elections, we know there was an investigation that was like, over, 85,000 pounds in cost. And, and again, like you said, the ultimate resolution is not necessarily positive, right? After all is said and done, it's a lot of money, a lot of negative energy expended. And there just simply is no substitute, we can't outsource leadership. I'm reminded of what Plato said2500 years ago, that “the city is what it is, because the people are what they are”. And we've got to be good, ethical people. I mean, there's no substitute for that. And I think that, that's kind of what is an inspiration for me. And no doubt, anyone who's passionate about local government, and strong communities. 

Diane, what do you just very quickly, what do you advise civic leaders who come across those people who just simply do not accept that they should be held to those sorts of standards, that it’s their right to behave however they wish? You know, they might, in some cases, have been elected to go down a certain path, and they have the support behind them. How do you help leaders navigate those issues? 

Yes, I think as, I speak with all this flowery language about love. But what we can replace it with to make it more palatable for more people is basic humanity, rather than immediately demonize those individuals. Sometimes there are people who you won't get through to, like, that's just the case. But I think it's important that when you have people with what I call this lust for destruction that get elected, that really have an anti-authoritarian mindset, maybe they're anti-tax, they come with vendettas. There, it's really important to first listen and first understand, why, why are they so angry? We have to accept that there are real reasons why people are angry in society. And when we are, when we're facing the kind of loneliness, the disconnection, the financial challenges, the fact that life is so unaffordable for so many, that we no longer have local national governments that talk about a job, 100% job economy. I mean, people don't have jobs. There's a lot of frustration out there. And some of it is misdirected at the local government. And I've actually seen it happen before, where a truly humble local government, council and staff can bring in a people, and this happened where there was a slate of individuals that just spent their entire, time pre-election bashing the local government, bashing all the staff, and actually getting themselves elected, and un-electing some long-standing good elected officials. And when they got in there, and when the staff humbly showed them the actual books, and what was really happening, and how much they were doing with so little, these folks had the decency to not only realize that was actually the case, but they actually wrote a letter in the newspaper apologizing, and acknowledging the good work that had been done, and committing to continue with it. And that's not always going to be the case, but it never hurts to continue. Like, don't join it. If we start to demonize these individuals, they're human beings, and they belong in the community, and, never, in my view, it always makes the best sense to continue to argue for what is right, for what is true, for what is in the common good, and to work collaboratively as much as you can. And when those folks become incredibly disruptive, if they continue to do that, then there are other mechanisms to deal with it, right? And if it does happen to be the case that you get a whole series of people there that decommission the local government, well, that is the will, then, of the people, because they've allowed that to happen. I mean, you can't stop the people who are not, don't want. It's happened, we have entire jurisdictions in Canada where they have to extend the nomination periods, because nobody's coming forward to run for office. It's just such a shame, and it's made people who sacrificed their lives for democracy, it brings them to tears, like, how could this actually be? But it is the reality, and we need to live within reality, and to build from where we're at. And where we're at is that democracy is very fragile, and we have this incredible opportunity at the local level, like, rather than focus so much, especially now in the United States, everyone's focusing on the election, but truly the heart of democracy, ground zero of democracy, is in your local community. And that's where we can bridge the divides, where we can rebuild trust., You know, so goes the city, so goes the nation. If we can rebuild our cities, then we can rebuild the nation. And to me, it helps to look at it as a great opportunity, as opposed to a treacherous path. 

That's a great note to end on, except I did want to ask you, you've been doing your civility tour now for nearly five years. I don't think you expected it would be going on so long. Do you see a time where you won't need to travel the country talking about why this is such a problem, and calling for civic culture renewal? 

I hope so. I do believe that there is the possibility for a transformation in consciousness. We did see it with the civil rights movement. We saw it with apartheid. There could just be a point where people, like, even with civil wars, they mostly end from exhaustion. And I do sense that people are exhausted with the conflict. And in the United States in particular, there seems to be a lot of philanthropic organizations able to fund a lot of really great grassroots initiatives around breaking the polarization and bringing people together. But less so in Canada. But, we're all interconnected now. So what happens in one place, will affect what's happening in others. And I think it's becoming really rather, I don't want to say uncool, but at a certain point, it doesn't look like responsible conduct. People are looking for that kind of, I think there's an appetite for wisdom again. I think there's an appetite for good stewardship. And I've actually seen it, like, we have in one city, we have a previously, a previous councillor, who was a conservative, and he had done a lot of work in the finance area. He took a platform on the basis of unity, to unite all the division in his city and all the huge social problems that he was facing. And because he'd done, he'd worked in finance, you know, the more liberal candidate for mayor, who was an incumbent, who was supposed to definitely was expected to win, was offering a zero percent tax increase. And this conservative guy reflected objectively on the finances of the city and the number of potholes, the infrastructure has to be done. And he's like, you know, folks, we're going to need to have a substantial tax increase, and a levy, and we're going to deal with homelessness, because the people need to be cared for. And we're going to do this and all these things that sound wildly unpopular, and he won. And so, you know, people were asked, why? Like, how did that happen? Like, nobody expected, even the media was shocked. And there was a sense that because he was talking about unity, because he was telling the people the truth about the impacts of COVID, the impacts of inflation, what it was going to take to be sustainable. He wasn't just promising these white elephant projects or what people want to hear. He was really just trying to, in a very not, like, very humble way, tell them the truth of the situation, and try and collectively work together. And he committed to working with all the community organizations, which he continues to do to this day in a nonpartisan way. And so, I think there's an appetite for that kind of leadership. And when that happens, then we're going to be focusing more in the creative energy of how do we renew culture, as opposed to how do we just beat these toxic situations. Because, how long can you have a lust for destruction, right? 

Exactly. There's a thought for some positivity in the future. Thank you, Diane. It's been wonderful to speak with you and to get your thoughts on just why incivility is such an issue for communities, and what you and others hopefully are doing to address that. All the very best with those endeavors. 

Thank you very much, and thank you again for this incredible podcast that you're running. And I do expect, you know, it's already gone global, and I expect it to reach to go even further. 

That's very kind of you to say. Thank you, Diane. My guest today, Diane Kalen-Sukra. You can find out more about her work from her website, DianeKalenSukra.com. I hope you've enjoyed this special edition of the podcast, brought to you by the Victorian Local Governance Association, with support from Davidson Recruitment and Business Advisory Services. Regular editions are returning soon when we get underway with season four of The Roundup, but check your podcast queue for more special editions of the program in the meantime. Thanks for listening, and bye for now.