Beverley Main had 11 years of sleep to catch up on when she started her sabbatical in mid May this year. The Chief Executive of the Human Resources Institute of New Zealand used her newly acquired spare time to talk about her life and career with Katie Foley.

Beverley Main lives, thinks and speaks fast. She is using the abrupt change in pace of her sabbatical to write a book. It is inspired by attending badly organised company conferences, the ones that seem carelessly thrown together without theme or cohesion. Now in the middle of her three months off, she has set up her laptop on a quaint little desk in a room with a view at her Mount Victoria house.

Beverley has an eclectic CV, she has owned and run small businesses from consulting to catering to construction, to being a part owner in a glass manufacturing company.

“I just get bored, but the thing that is consistent about what I have done is that I have worked around employment – unemployment, self employment and now large employment,” she says.

Beverley started a 12-month contract with HRINZ in 1998 and 11 years later, her sabbatical is the first attempt to loosen the apron strings. She hopes her absence will enable her second in charge to begin to take the reins and reduce the organisation’s dependence on her as a source of organisational knowledge. She says frankly that if there comes a time when she is not working full time or spearheading some kind of project, it will be because she is dead.

Those first few days of her three months off left her bored to tears and quietly jealous when her husband answered the question, “How was your day?”

But with the pressure now off she wonders how she ever fitted it all in.

“Doing long hours on a regular basis and running a home and doing everything else that you are supposed to do – it’s actually quite nice not having to be under that pressure,” she says.

A workaholic who was frequently still going at one or two in the morning, she already has her eye on several future projects. Like many of her generation Beverley, now in her 50s, is a graduate of the school of hard knocks. She says few young people these days take the path she did, nor would she recommend it.

“I fell in love with a boy, left school and had a baby very young. Not continuing my education is one of my regrets in life,” she says. She later began an MBA but stopped when it became clear her peers were in the classroom simply because they did not know what else to do.

“It just wasn’t that exciting or that demanding. It wasn’t going to take me to where I wanted to be,” she says.

Beverley was born in Napier, but moved to the Hutt Valley at 10and doesn’t hesitate to call herself a Wellingtonian. She comes from a highly entrepreneurial family on both sides, this has been very influential to the way she does business. Her son Aaron runs a successful IT company with his step father, Beverley’s husband Evan, and the company also employs Aaron’s wife. Beverley’s step son Michael is currently setting up his own business as part of the young enterprise scheme at school.

She says this independent and enterprising spirit meant she was not hindered by not having a university education.

“What I have lacked in education I have made up for in actually having ownership of things.”

Despite being the Chief Executive of the national body, what she enjoys most about her job is not the actual HR, but the bigger picture.

“What I like about working for the institute is that we can influence HR people who influence the workplace to actually do things differently – do it better.”

She is quick to point out that HR is not an easy path.

She says many who take it because of a desire to work with people will only have personal contact when there is a problem.

“You have to be prepared to do a job where you might not always be considered everyone’s friend in an organisation, you are often seen as the bearer of bad news,” she says.

It’s said that everyone has a novel inside them. Beverley has a guide to conference organisation.

It will be a how-to of good conference organisation, stressing the importance of attention to detail, theme, and cohesiveness.

“it’s hugely stressful and incredibly detailed driven, you have got to be a really good finisher.”

She says her conversations with the international speakers she brings in for her conferences have shown her that New Zealand is years ahead of the ball in terms of HR. “I don’t want to be smug and say New Zealand is leading the world because we certainly aren’t doing that. We are certainly about five to ten years ahead of the HR thinking in Australia and always have been.”

She says Kiwis tend to have more of an eye on the bigger picture.

“New Zealanders always have been much more up with the issues and in more of a position to be part of a senior management group of influencers rather than just doing the compliance stuff. I think a lot of Aussies are still stuck in the whole industrial relations model, the doing rather than the thinking”.

Beverley is a big thinker, she speaks fast and with real conviction and this coupled with an engaging manner makes her a champion networker. She says that her networks are probably what got her the job at HRINZ, they are what she will again be focusing upon her return to the office.

“What worries me is that I don’t put enough time into those networks and building new ones as well, when I come back the plan is that that is what I am going to focus on.”