Women of Meridian - Kimberley Mayhead

These days, the remote Mahia Peninsula on the North Island’s east coast is best known for being the launch site for Kiwi space pioneers Rocket Lab.

But before it re-entered Kiwi consciousness through its links to the space race, the region was mainly associated with an entirely less glamorous industry – meat processing.

Having begun her working life at Wairoa’s AFFCO abattoir during summer breaks from studying human nutrition and marketing at Otago University, Meridian Energy’s quality assurance manager Kimberley Mayhead has also made quite the professional transition.

“If I look back, and you told me that in 20 years’ time I would work in the energy industry managing people and operating wind farms, I’d be like ‘you’re joking’,” laughs Kimberley.

It may have been an unexpected career path, but the renewable energy industry was in fact operating not all that far away from Kimberley’s childhood front doorstep.

“We spent quite a lot of time as kids at Lake Waikaremoana, mainly through my dad, because when he was a kid that's what they did for family holidays,” says Kimberley.

“We would go out there tramping. We even went up there on a couple of school camps and got shown around one of the power stations.

“So, I'd had a little bit of exposure to the industry and I just thought, hey, that's cool.”

Those memories would come flooding back when Kimberley found herself setting out in a new direction post-Covid. As the aviation industry recovered, Kimberley’s pilot husband Rob landed a job with Sounds Air flying out of Wellington.

It was a great opportunity – but one that meant relocating from Auckland, where Kimberley had been happily employed for 15 years, initially as quality systems manager at Auckland Meat Processors and then at the other end of the food supply chain as a quality assurance manager with Restaurant Brands.

“I started my job search in Wellington and put ‘quality assurance manager’ into a search engine to see what would come up. This job came up with Meridian and I was like ‘this is cool’ because I knew what Meridian did and that they were so committed to sustainability.

“And when I read the job advert my brain went ‘so I can actually go back to wearing overalls and steel-capped boots again?!’”

“I thought ‘you know what’? I'm going to give this nudge because my life's moved on now. This is change and change brings opportunity. So that’s what brought me to Meridian and I absolutely love it.” 

Kimberley describes her role as supporting colleagues to drive business improvement through mapping processes, knowledge and ‘know how’.

“The experts do all the work, I connect the dots,” she says.

While the meat processing and fast food industries might not seem aligned with sustainable energy generation and supply, the requirements of large-scale industries with extended supply chains and significant quality assurance needs do have similiarities.

“I learned a lot in the meat industry,” says Kimberley. “When I started, we were going away from the old-school hard and fast ‘we chop meat like this’ to ‘we need to deliver specifications that meet our customers needs’.

“A lot of my job was auditing, and measuring compliance, and regulatory standards, and customer expectations of how we were delivering that product to market. All of that was in order to satisfy their needs and to maximise profitability.

“That then merged into the work I did for Restaurant Brands [operators of KFC, Taco Bell, Carl’s Jr and Pizza Hut] because we did the same thing - making sure that there were standardised processes.

“Now I enjoy working in a team that has lots of different touch points across electricity generation. We're almost a team that gets forgotten about, but that's a good thing, because ultimately, we're just helping everyone else to do what they need to do.

“That's where the satisfaction is - when you're actually helping other people.

“One thing that I've experienced here at Meridian that I haven't experienced in my other jobs is a real sense of family. We're all here to do the greater good and it's just so cool.”

A real highlight of her time at the company has been the ability to combine motherhood with a highly satisfying day job.

“I’m a career girl, always have been and always will be - but now first and foremost I’m a mother to a busy toddler.

“Soon after starting my role, I fell pregnant. It was a pivotal point in my career and I was pretty nervous about how being a working mum in a leadership role would work. But Meridian embraced this and has supported me every step of the way. 

“Family life is an important part of who we are as a business. They say it takes a village, and Meridian has certainly been there to support me and my journey as a full-time working mother.

“They’ve provided the flexibility and support for me to be both a mother and to have a career, and I’m so incredibly grateful to be part of an organisation that supports women.”