Kate Billing – Director of Leadership & Community
Kate is a human obsessed, leadership pragmatist with 25+ years’ experience in the people, culture and leadership space.
Kate is New Zealand’s leading voice on human-centred leadership, ageing in the workforce, and the intersection of gender/age equity in our workplaces – things she is personally deeply passionate about, for her own life experience as well as that of the people she works with.
Drawing on both timeless and leading edge thinking from the fields of psychology, social neuroscience, chronobiology, anthropology, and philosophy, combined with a healthy dose of lived experience, this powerful mix delivers the ‘whole person + whole life’ human-centred development experiences Kate is renowned for.
Paul Leacock – Director of Membership & Operations
Paul brings decades of experience in sales, marketing, general management and leadership into his role with katebilling.com.
With a deep focus on relationships, member experience, and value delivery, Paul’s energy and commitment to our organisational partnerships and individual members means everyone is made to feel as special as we believe they are.
Looking back on this life and career, Paul sees a long line of generous, caring, and inspiring women who shaped and supported his path. He’s also frequently found himself working in entirely female teams! These two things, and his genuine love of people, mean he finds huge meaning in his work with our team and community.
Kate and Paul are no strangers to working together. Their first venture, Blacksmith, was founded in 2009 with the purpose of making our world a better workplace by forging better leaders.
Over its 16 years of operation, Blacksmith became the leading human-centred development practice in New Zealand, working with Executive Teams, senior leadership talent, and whole of organisation leadership communities across almost every sector.
Always curious learners, in 2016 Kate and Paul read The 100-Year Life by London Business School Professors Lynda Gratton and Andrew Scott. They were both 47 at the time, and unknowingly entering what they now call The Midlife Turning Point.
That book opened a window. It reframed the future, not as a slow decline into retirement, but as a longer life with space for reinvention, renewed purpose and meaningful work well into the second half.
Kate began to dig deeper into longevity science, the ageing workforce, gendered ageism, and the impacts of peri/menopause on women in leadership.
One insight stood out:
We’re not getting more old age – we’re getting more middle age.
An extra 10–20 years of vitality, agency, and opportunity, if we can harness it.
As COVID bit hard in the early 2020s, Kate and Paul began to talk about a new adventure. Something that would offer them the opportunity to harness their own midlife potential.
They saw a new way to bring their original purpose to life: making the world a better workplace by helping women leaders navigate the midlife turning point.
Midlife women, Kate included, were wrestling with their bodies, minds, relationships, and identities. They were juggling impossible demands while creating immense value for others, often at the expense of themselves. But there was no dedicated leadership support for this life stage.
So Kate and Paul decided to do something about it and in April 2024 katebilling.com was launched!
Turning Point, a 6-month leadership programme, was the first step. A deep, personal reset for executive and senior women leaders to rediscover themselves, reprioritise their wellbeing, and reclaim their leadership. It’s a game changer, but it only reaches 10 women at a time.
Kate found her mind returning to a founding principle from Blacksmith: start a movement.
That spark reignited the vision for something bolder: a leadership movement for midlife women grounded in community, learning, and shared practice. A collective development experience that would help women walk The Power Path, from the chaos at the bottom of the midlife turning point, up into the power and potential of their ‘second life’.
These women would be Pathmakers: pioneers, fearless trailblazers, and too-much-women who cheer each other on and challenge each other to keep showing up, growing up, and creating leadership impact.
Because our best is not behind us. It’s still to come.
“Kate led our group with presence, humanity, guidance, and knowledge. She enabled people to do the hard graft of ‘inner’ development. Every single person left our group taller, more confident, with a higher sense of self-awareness, and completely different to when they started the journey, six months prior.”
Nicola Bruning
People Operations Lead
“Passionate and determined, well informed and experienced. Kate had all the things I needed to help me forge the way, uncovering how I can, not just survive but thrive my way through mid-life, conquer the turning point, and gain clarity, confidence and calm through ‘all the things’ that this part throws at us. It was like Kate was in my head translating the ‘soup’ into not only sense but a reformed and new-found purpose.”
Jacquelyn Wilson
Head of Personal Lines Portfolio
“The journey Kate took us on led to deep changes that were quite incredible and have allowed us to be better leaders whether it be at work, home or in the community. Kate connects with each person, providing a space that is safe, vulnerable and in a way magical. I will forever be grateful to Kate for helping me to be a better leader and a better me.”
Marie Cooper
Director
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Email our Director – Membership & Operations
Paul is our first point of contact for all enquiries.
[email protected]
katebilling.com is a division of Blacksmith Limited.
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