Rhiannon McKinnon and her three lives: day, night and evening
Link to original article by Kevin Norquay - Senior Writer
By day and deep into the night Rhiannon McKinnon is Kiwi Wealth chief executive, overseeing the country’s largest specialist KiwiSaver provider. It’s early evening where she has less control, parenting three children aged under eight.
Then, it’s “who are these people? They’re not listening, and it's really chaotic,” the Cambridge University educated McKinnon laughs.
“Actually flipping between those modes is quite hard. It goes with the territory you are in charge of. Sometimes when I get home, and it's chaotic for whatever reason, part of me just wants to retract back into work.
“Because even though work can be chaotic in its own way, you kind of feel, ‘I have got some sense of control here’.”
She’s just arrived with two glasses of water, plonking them on a table in an office tower, with its Wellington harbour glimpses. No minions are sent to do the basics here.
McKinnon talks of keeping many balls in the air, a lifestyle skill she is trying to master after landing herself a lead role.
It's a juggle,” she tells Stuff.
“I've spoken publicly about that juggle and whether it's something that is doable, and what flexibility does to make that possible.
“Some of the things that I've been really proud of in my role as CE is the women who've come up to me, often late at night at the Christmas party, to say they've taken roles here, just because they've seen me as a female lead to the organisation.
“So that's very flattering, potentially sycophantic to hear,” she says.
“I've had other people who say they've only gone for promotions because they've seen that I've been able to juggle my life as CE and thought, ‘well, if Rhiannon can do that, then perhaps the promotion that I thought was beyond me in terms of my home and life balance, maybe it's manageable after all’.
“In generations above me, it's been very hard to do both. And it's almost been, you can have a really great career, but trying to get home to see the kids every day has been probably more challenging than it is today with the advent of much more flexible working.”
For McKinnon, flexibility involves bombardment in office hours, family in the early evening, then a reflective sofa session after the kids are in bed. That quiet time has proved ideal for writing board papers and planning.
“I think the most clearly at the end of the day. It's something I've come to accept doing, on the sofa at home in the evening when there's no other distraction. During the day, there's normally quite a lot of meetings, people wanting to talk to you, the phone ringing or messaging apps, so that disturbs my train of thought.
“My board papers are written in the evenings because that's when I hit a flow … suddenly one or two hours have gone by, and I haven't noticed it, whereas finding a time during the day I find to be a real struggle.
“One of those things you read when you first take over the role is that you need to have time to think deeply and forward.
“I often talk about my brain percolating. Often people will ask me my opinion, and [I’ll say] ‘I'll come back to in a few hours’ time or tomorrow’, because my instant answer will often be different to the one where it's just been dripping through my head slowly.
“It is percolation, rather than light bulb moments. I just leave it alone, and you come back to it.”
She never set out to be a chief executive. At Cambridge - she is of Welsh and Chinese heritage - she studied history as it was interesting, not because she planned to be a historian.
Her finance tree climbing started with craving a decent summer job.
Rhiannon McKinnon “I've spoken publicly about that juggle and whether it's something that is doable, and what flexibility does to make that possible.” Pictured at home with her children.
Rhiannon McKinnon “I've spoken publicly about that juggle and whether it's something that is doable, and what flexibility does to make that possible.” Pictured at home with her children.
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“I wanted to go somewhere where I thought the work would be interesting and well paid, and both of those things are true,” she says.
“So the job has always been interesting in some way, shape, or form. When I did my internship at the age of 20, it was better paid and going down to the local job centre and getting the latest thing that was in for the summer holidays.
“I did data entry, I did a bit of credit control. So I’d call people up and ask them why they hadn't paid their bills. I wasn't bad at it, actually,” she laughs.
A better paid job doing data entry for appliance company Dixons followed. There, McKinnon developed her first super powers.
“The best thing from that was how to use the number side of the keyboard really fast, I got really good at that. I also had to zone out, I just created little milestones to beat myself, to keep going for eight hours a day.”
And here we are, two decades and a bit on the data entry ace is CE of Kiwi Wealth after a career that took in the London financial world.
Since, she has developed skills in collaboration, relationship management, leadership, mergers and acquisitions, corporate finance, valuation, financial analysis, and equity research.
“I certainly never woke up or set out to be a CEO, but I do think I took a first step into a career in finance because I thought that might be a sensible place to start a career,” she says.
It looks a very long way from studying history, but looks can be deceptive. Writing essays where you look into the details, then develop an argument to try to persuade others are skills well suited to financial life.
“Despite the fact that my entire career has really been in finance, if you can persuade people of your arguments, and you can distil large amounts of information, that is always helpful.”
At Kiwi Wealth, McKinnon has surrounded herself with strong advisers, who provide the detail she needs to make decisions. She sees herself as part of a team, a leader who delegates rather than peeping into every nook and cranny.
“I delegate a lot, delegate away the roles, but I also delegate away the autonomy. So I run a very high trust model of ‘I've hired you as the expert. This is what I need from you. These are the outcomes that I need, have you got all the resources that you need?’
“I will get out of your way most of the time and check in and see how you're going. But I certainly don't sit on anybody's shoulder.”
After she became CEO, McKinnon spent a lot of time trying to be really clear about a unified company purpose and mission, and how Kiwi Wealth would go about it.
If you can't inspire the people you're leading and managing then it doesn't matter how clever you are, she says.
“The team that I have now, they're still very diverse in terms of personality type, and how they interact, but they all do know that we’re on the same team, and are more collaborative than the average person - or forced to be by me,” she says, laughing loudly.
Then she adds, “I don't really have to do that. But that's one of the tools in the box towards the end.”
Kiwi Wealth uses an array of tools to help customers save and plan for retirement, something that is becoming increasingly tricky as inflation soars, and savings drop.
“Our main business is trying to get people to really think about what their retirement looks like. It is tricky, the average person finds it very difficult until it's almost too close.”
Asked what advice she would give to a school-leaver, she heads for hard work and knowledge territory. Passion is a word both over-used, and too strong, in her view.
“There's this age-old advice, start on things that you find quite interesting and work really hard. There's a little bit of doing, you have to understand that, if you're doing something that is valuable to the person who you are working for, that's probably going to get you ahead.
“If you always put your own agendas first and foremost, to the detriment of others, you limit your ability to advance anywhere in life because if you can't get along with others, and you're always carving a very, very individual path, you're not going to have any people to help you along the way.”
Life is easier when you have others helping and believing in you, she says.
“I don't believe in people being righteous about what they deserve. It's really easy to be righteous about, you should do this, and I did this, I should have that, but if very few people agree with you, where does that get you?”
In 2022, McKinnon says the CE conundrum is whether it is best to have their staff working from home, in the office, or a mix of both. Again it’s about the team, and the way the individual fits in.
“Depending on who I speak to, the views are quite varied and quite strong,” she says.
“It's interesting how you solve it … a lot of companies are saying, you need to come back in for however many days a week.
“What you're actually trying to solve is office culture and connection. I'm not sure the answer is a mandate about how many days a week you have to come in, and that's something that I'm seeing play out at the moment.
“But it's almost turning on its head, and saying how do you create office culture and connection in a hybrid world? I come to the office every day, but when I think about what diversity is about, it's partly about personality type.
“And actually my introverts are quite happy at home, working really effectively and being really productive.
“So, it's an interesting one in terms of how do you create the most ideas? And does the office environment cater well to everybody? It's a really interesting conundrum of our time.”
McKinnon doesn’t see working from home as a way for an employee to evade eyeballs.
“If you want to be successful in your job, you know that you'll be coming into the office because you're like ‘I need to generate good ideas’,” she says.
“And there are people out there who think actually, I'm better off going for a walk by myself in my own suburb, than go in [to the office] and chat.
“If you're a working mum, you know being able to work from home, balance things, and not have to commute and all those sorts of things, is really valuable.
“So what you should be managing on is the output and the outcomes, if they're not creating the outcomes that you want, that's the conversation to be having, rather than ‘can I see you in the office’.”
And now to her name, immortalised in song by Fleetwood Mac four years before she was born. Stevie Nicks said it was about a Welsh witch, and McKinnon is part Welsh, so …?
“I wasn’t named after the song,” the not-a-Welsh-witch CEO says, her parents simply liked the name, which Nicks hauls out to three-times its natural length in song.
“I listened to it a lot as a child on 45. If you're a little girl with an unusual name and there's a song that you can play, that's got your name … I absolutely loved it,” McKinnon says.
“I definitely wanted to play more often than my brothers were interested in listening to it. So, it was rightfully rationed, on my dad's record player.”
Rhiannon rings like a bell through the night, the song goes. But she doesn’t send emails.
“No one wants an email from the CEO at nine o'clock at night, right?”
