The CEO training CEOs

Rhiannon McKinnon set up her business Cassiobury to fill a gap she perceived in CEO training.

Link to The Post article here

Rhiannon McKinnon is a CEO who trains newly minted CEOs, or C-suiters aspiring to the top job.

She set up her business Cassiobury to fill a gap she felt keenly when she stepped up to become chief executive of the Kiwi Wealth funds management business in 2021, when it was still a sister company to Kiwibank.

It was a nerve-racking, exhilarating step, and she did not feel entirely ready for it, having first filled the hot seat as a temporary ‘acting’ CEO, after the previous chief executive left.

“In the first year I looked for professional development to support the transition, but I could find nothing,” she says.

There was generous, informal help from others in the informal CEO “club”.

“When you become a CEO, suddenly other CEOs will take your call, and have a coffee with you,” she says.

Wonderful as that was, it fell short of what she felt she needed, and so did the Institute of Directors’ courses she did, so she decided to set up Cassiobury, naming it after the leafy suburban area of her hometown of Watford in England.

Rhiannon McKinnon when she was a newly-minted chief executive at fund manager Kiwi Wealth.

Those with a keen sporting eye will notice the Cassiobury website is styled in the colours of Watford football club.

Cassiobury provides the CEO 101 training she would have benefited from when she first became a chief executive.

It’s delivered remotely because, McKinnon says, new CEOs have very little time to head off to multi-day retreats to hone their skills, and to banish the “imposter syndrome” that besets the new chief executive.

One of the most ticklish aspects of becoming a chief executive is learning to work with company boards, something it took her some months to work out.

“My early relationship with the board was something I found really hard,” she says.

She recalls a moment early on in her CEO journey feeling like she back to being a “young grasshopper” standing in front of the board.

“I got told off for not making enough decisions, and saying to the board, ‘What do you think?’ They’re like, ‘You’re the CEO. We’re paying you to make the decisions’.”

“I’d go from, like, you know, ‘Look at me. I'm leading, and I'm empathetic, and I’m this, that and the other’. And I’d be right back to ‘You are the beginner, and what are you doing?’”

McKinnon, who studied at Cambridge University in England, says she’s very open in her CEO 101 course about her own experiences.

Coping with the initial shock of CEO work load, and work patterns - switching between many areas of an organisation’s operations and strategy in a single day - was really tiring, she says.

Some of the work was very analytical. Some of it was “visionary-type stuff”. Some was communicating, including being grilled by journalists.

“In the first two weeks, by three o'clock, I was absolutely spent every single day,” she says.

While McKinnon identified a gap in the New Zealand market for CEO training, overseas it’s a crowded field.

She bridles a little at some of the language used. Talk of “corporate athletes” is not something McKinnon really approves of.

“It makes it sound like you have to be superhuman to do these jobs,” she says. “No-one’s superhuman.”

The art of the chief executive is certainly a learned art.

ASB chief executive Vittoria Shortt spoke to The Post earlier this month on how she forged her own training to prepare herself as she climbed the corporate ladder.

Shortt says she was very influenced by a Harvard University article more than 20 years ago called The Making of a Corporate Athlete.

“It’s a terrible title, but it was really interesting to me.”

It argued that to perform at the highest level in the C-Suite, executives needed to learn from Olympic athletes in getting four areas of their lives into fighting trim: mind, emotions, body, and spirit (which Shortt renamed “purpose”).

She researched the four areas, and worked on achieving fitness in all, including working with physiologists and psychologists, and developing routines for her life.

“I’ve done a lot of work with experts on emotions, and how to replace negative emotions with positive emotions,” she said.

There are lots of ways to be a CEO, McKinnon says.

“It doesn't have to be hero leadership,” she says, with an “everyone follow me” leader.

“You can have a slightly more collaborative style of like, ‘Here's a problem we're trying to solve together,” she says.

“I definitely ran a high trust model,” she says.

Dictatorial CEO-ing is not in fashion, she says.

McKinnon tends not to think in terms of different training for new female and male CEOs.

But she does think there are particular pressures still on working mothers at all levels of the jobs market. Being a good parent and a good CEO at the same time is a challenge.

Chief executives have more resources to deal with that. Getting childcare right, and other household services like house cleaning, are really important, McKinnon says.

“You want childcare that works, and you need to have multiple layers of it as well, because often things go wrong, things go awry, and that's life,” she says.

McKinnon has three children, aged 10, nine and seven.

Rhiannon McKinnon pictured at her Wellington home in 2022.

She rates herself as very efficient at work as a result.

“Mums often discover they can't stay beyond five. You can't go further. Just smash out while you're there,” she says.

“No more chit-chat, no more, no water cooler chat.”

McKinnon’s dad, who died just over a decade ago, was Welsh, and her mother is Chinese. They met a stop in Cricklewood in London.

“I think my Chinese grandparents were just appalled that she ended up with some foreign bloke. She was meant to go back to China, to Hong Kong,” she says.

“Mum married a Welshman and stayed in stayed in Watford.”

She’s back in Hong Kong now.

Both her parents had questing minds. Her father had a particular thirst for education, and changed careers several times.

“He was interesting. He did an electrical engineering degree. He then did a medical physics PHD. Then he did a whole lot of work around broadcasting and high definition digital television, a whole load of advising round that in 1990,” she said.

“Eventually he went back to university again, and studied optometry,” she says.

“I think he graduated at the age of 66.”

“He got really interested in eyesight in Albinism, and decided the only way he could progress that, was to go and get himself an optometry degree,” she says.