Preventative Governance
An evaluation built so the board and the leader both come out of it stronger.
For the Council-CAO relationship. Treat the relationship at the top like the infrastructure it is: maintained on purpose, not repaired under pressure. Built on evidence, run by a neutral third party, useful to the board and the leader both.
The gap is the tool, not the effort.
Municipalities maintain roads, bridges, and water systems on a schedule, before they fail. The Council-CAO relationship runs all of it, and it deserves the same preventative maintenance.
The Municipal Government Act requires council to complete a written evaluation of the CAO every year. It says little about how: what framework to use, who facilitates, how goals get set, or how one year's evaluation connects to the next. So a part-time elected body ends up building the governance process for its most senior working relationship from scratch, most years, with whatever time and structure it can find. These are good people doing difficult work. When the room is warm, that can still work out fine. When it cools, the same process can turn vague, political, or late, and the CAO and council can walk out of the same meeting with a different story. The gap is the tool, not the effort.
If the evaluation were challenged tomorrow, what would you have on paper?
The cost of drift.
Our analysis of Alberta Municipal Affairs Financial Information Returns found about $5.6M in disclosed severance to CAOs, designated officers, and elected officials across the 2023 to 2025 reporting years, spread across 23 municipalities. That figure counts every kind of departure, including retirements and restructuring, and it excludes legal and recruitment costs. Not every one of those exits was avoidable, and this number doesn't claim otherwise. What it shows is what tends to happen when the relationship at the top is left unmaintained: the cost becomes public, expensive, and hard to repair. A single mishandled exit, once severance, legal fees, and a re-hire search are counted, can outweigh years of the maintenance that would have caught the drift early.
Why boards bring in an independent evaluator.
Bring in an independent evaluator and everyone leaves the room with the same picture: the board, the chair, and the leader all see where things stand and where they're going. That happens because the evidence is broader than any one director's read, the process is neutral, and nobody is grading their own boss.
Council members, board members, and commissioners are smart and well-intentioned. Evaluating a full-time senior executive is a specialized skill, and a part-time elected or volunteer body has a different role to play.
A structured senior-leader evaluation needs three things at once: an evidence base broader than any one director's experience of the leader; a process that protects confidentiality on both sides; and time, run over weeks, not packed into a single closed session.
An independent third party delivers all three. The board still owns the decision. The chair stays in the role of chair. The leader being evaluated gets a process they can trust. Everyone (board, chair, leader) walks out of the room with the same clear picture of where things stand and where they're going.
What a BlueChip governance evaluation looks like.
The output is The Annual Governance Review: a defensible record, and a relationship maintained on purpose, not repaired under pressure. Here is the process that produces it.
Six stages. Roughly ten to twelve weeks from kickoff to board presentation.
Scoping
A working session with the council or board chair to align on the questions the evaluation needs to answer, review Council's stated strategic priorities as the baseline the evaluation measures against, the stakeholder list, the timeline, and how the engagement will be communicated internally.
Stakeholder interviews
Confidential, structured interviews with council or board members, direct reports, and key external stakeholders, including where the CAO's execution is landing against the priorities Council actually set, not just how the relationship feels. A mix of in-person and video, scheduled around the realities of part-time elected and volunteer roles. Eight to twenty interviews, depending on the size of the organization.
Leadership assessment
A validated leadership assessment of the leader being evaluated, paired with a structured self-reflection. This adds a data layer that interviews alone cannot.
Report drafting and no-surprises review
Findings get synthesized into a written report. The leader being evaluated reads the draft before the board sees it. Errors get corrected. Misreadings get clarified.
Board or council presentation
The findings, presented in a closed session. Q&A. A facilitated conversation about what changes, for the leader, for the board, and for the working relationship between them.
Forward-looking performance plan
A written development plan with concrete commitments mapped to the direction Council set, owned by the leader and endorsed by the board. Six-month cycle, with an optional half-year check-in to make sure the plan is being executed.
What you walk away with.
- A written report: themes, evidence, leadership strengths, development priorities, and observations on the governance-leader relationship.
- A clear read on whether the CAO's execution and work plan actually line up with what Council said it wanted, not just whether the relationship feels fine.
- A validated leadership assessment with a private debrief.
- A board or council presentation that doesn't read like a slide deck.
- A forward-looking performance plan, written down, with concrete commitments.
- An optional half-year check-in to verify the plan is being executed.
How the leader being evaluated is treated.
Most leaders can handle a tough evaluation. What's harder to sit with is a process they had no hand in building, one that hands down its read on the year without ever checking in along the way.
A senior-leader evaluation that lands well treats the leader being evaluated as a full participant in the process, not a subject of it.
The leader being evaluated:
- Is briefed on the process and the kinds of stakeholders being interviewed (board members, direct reports, key external partners) before interviews begin.
- Completes the leadership assessment and self-reflection alongside the stakeholder interviews, not as an afterthought.
- Reads the draft report before the board sees it, with a private debrief to flag factual errors and clarify any misreadings.
- Is in the room for the board presentation, not waiting outside it.
- Gets a personal copy of the final report, the assessment results, and the performance plan.
Confidentiality runs in both directions. Stakeholder interviews are non-attributed: themes go into the report, names don't. The leader's responses during their debrief stay between BlueChip and the leader unless the leader chooses to share them.
The final report is treated as confidential personnel information. It goes to the council or board chair and the leader being evaluated, and is reviewed by the full council or board in closed session. It is not posted publicly or shared outside that room. Where Alberta's Access to Information Act and Protection of Privacy Act (formerly FOIP) apply, the report sits under the same personnel and personal-information exemptions that protect any other senior-leader performance record.
Done with them, not to them.
Why BlueChip.
Senior-leader evaluations sit at the intersection of performance review, political navigation, and risk management. BlueChip brings all three to the table.
An undergraduate degree in education and a Master's in coaching, for the development conversation and the plan that follows it. Senior HR background (training and development, recruitment, investigations) for the risk and governance work. Public sector administration experience, for understanding the kinds of organizations BlueChip evaluates from the inside. Twenty years in high-stakes competitive environments, for reading people who are guarded, defensive, or actively managing the narrative, which most senior leaders being evaluated are, at least at first.
That last piece matters more than it sounds. Reading a guarded room is a learned skill. Twenty years of decision-making under pressure, with money and ego on the line, is how BlueChip learned it.
What you get for it: a defensible record, and a relationship maintained on purpose, not repaired under pressure. Set that against the cost of a senior-leader relationship that drifts for a year without a clear read, or a contentious evaluation that ends up in the news. The evaluation is the cheaper line item.
Council stops guessing about its most senior working relationship.
One front door, a relationship that grows with you.
Every municipality starts the same way: a Governance Health Check.
Fifteen questions. About four minutes. A confidential read on where council and the CAO actually stand today. It's the first step, and completing it waives the $99 for the full session.
The free read above is where it starts. From there, we facilitate the full session together, council and the CAO in the room, working from the same read. It ends in a next step you both agree on, on the record. Normally $99, waived once the free read is done.
From there, municipalities step into an annual Governance Relationship sized to fit:
- Governance Essentials: The Annual Governance Review, the evaluation described above, including a direct read on whether the CAO's work plan lines up with Council's stated priorities, as the anchor event, plus a Mayor/CAO planning rhythm so it's never a cold, once-a-year meeting. Fulfills the MGA's annual-evaluation requirement with a defensible written record.
- Governance Alignment: everything in Essentials, plus a mid-year check-in built around one question: is the CAO's execution still tracking Council's strategic priorities, or has it started to drift? That's the difference between a small gap in spring and a contested exit in fall.
- Governance Partnership: a trusted governance partner across the full council term. Quarterly check-ins that keep the CAO's execution and Council's priorities in sync, coaching, new-council orientation, and difficult-conversation facilitation, available as needed rather than on a fixed schedule.
Pricing for every tier is scoped to your municipality's size and complexity and shared on the Clarity Call.
Approximately 10–12 weeks from kickoff to board presentation. The optional half-year check-in extends the engagement to roughly six months. Best practice is an annual full evaluation, with the check-in landing at the midpoint.
The fee includes everything: stakeholder interviews, leadership assessment and debrief, written report, board or council presentation, and the forward-looking performance plan.
BlueChip is based in Edmonton. Travel is broken out as a separate line item in every proposal.
Engagements typically start with a $99 Clarity Call. The fee is credited back against your first invoice if the call leads to working together, so there's no premium for the first conversation. Done a free diagnostic first? The $99 is on us, and the call is free.
Not sure where to start?
If you'd rather find out where the Council-CAO relationship stands now than read about it in a severance notice later, that's exactly what the Governance Health Check is built to do. The place to start is a Clarity Call: thirty minutes to talk about what your municipality needs, whether a Health Check is the right first step, and whether we're the right fit.
For some organizations, a governance evaluation is the right starting point. For others, a Leadership Academy makes more sense, particularly when the gap is leadership development across a team, not the performance of a single senior leader. We'll talk through both on the call.
Not a council or board? If you're an owner or founder running the team directly, Preventative Governance still applies. It just looks like Embedded HR + AI Advisory instead of a board evaluation.
Where to go from here.
Book a Clarity Call
You know the situation. You want a working conversation with someone who'll tell you the truth and map next steps. Fee credited against the first invoice if you engage. Done a free diagnostic first? The $99 is on us. The call is free.
Book a Clarity Call →