SHIFTing the balance – Kheta Quinn

SHIFTing the balance – Kheta Quinn

Tell me about your career before joining SHIFT. 

I started my legal career in Sydney, originally planning to join the Legal Aid Commission, driven by a strong sense of social justice due to my upbringing. But a mentor nudged me to try the big firms for the training and options it would give me, so I joined one of Australia's top commercial law firms and spent five years as an M&A lawyer.  

After feeling isolated as friends settled down and I hadn't, I decided to seize my own adventure — en route to Amsterdam, I stopped in Hong Kong and didn't leave for a decade. I joined my former firm's Hong Kong office and spent a further five years there.  I married a Kiwi who I had met in Hong Kong and decided I wanted  to spend some of my waking hours not in the office, so made the jump to an in-house role with the regional headquarters of a large multinational. 

I progressed through a range of varied and challenging in-house legal roles with that company before we eventually decided that Auckland was a more rational choice for raising the two small people we had brought into the world in the meantime.   

I was fortunate to be sponsored in my move to Auckland by the company with a Senior in-house counsel role, then being promoted to be their Head of Legal and External Affairs. I held that role for four years, including through significant industry and legislative change and the pandemic.   

How did you end up with us at SHIFT? 

Post-lockdown, I reached a tipping point between the demands of extremely long hours with my paid job as general counsel and the growing needs of children in my other committed full-time job as a parent.  

I decided to explore the 'what next', and while it was a very difficult decision to separate from my valued colleagues, I left my general counsel role and did my Stepping Up.  I also began to explore paid work that aligned more with my social justice values — doing immigration law and helping small businesses. I needed something in addition to give me the flexibility and financial security to keep doing that work and being available to my children as well, which is where SHIFT came in. 

I especially love that SHIFT challenges me to back myself and be my best self.  It can feel hard to take professional risks and try new things. My origins were, more or less, of one big firm as an M&A lawyer and one big multinational spanning my career to date.  With SHIFT I have now stepped into fast moving and flexible legal counselling delivered within a variety of sectors.  It has given me a whole new lease on my professional life and at the same time I have energy left over to help others and spend time with my kids in the way I always hoped I could. 

How did you hear about SHIFT? 

I first came across SHIFT as a client.  I was leading a team in-house and badly needed flexible, skilled legal support without the headcount. We engaged a senior SHIFT lawyer who hit the ground running on day one.  She was hugely capable, dynamic, adaptable, and a great fit with our culture. What really stood out was SHIFT's transparency—they were open about the consultant's unique strengths and working style and direct with me about what they felt I really needed and why. That level of honesty felt both authentic and refreshing. I also really valued SHIFT's ongoing communication throughout the engagement, ensuring that it was working well for us and working for the consultant. 

What I love about SHIFT is that they bring to the fore qualities that aren't always embraced in traditional, male-centric professional environments—like vulnerability, flexibility, and the reality of having responsibilities as well as opportunities outside of paid work. Where those things might make a candidate less appealing to a conventional employer, they can make a consultant a perfect fit for SHIFT and its clients.  

This newsletter's theme is social cohesion, to navigate challenges and different viewpoints without tearing each other down. How do you think business leaders can actively encourage social cohesion, rather than just signalling it? 

Social cohesion is easy to pay lip service to, but it needs senior leaders who are committed to earnestly getting out of their own comfort zone – and make no mistake, it is invariably very uncomfortable – to spearhead tangible shifts in the workplace for social cohesion.   

Without leaders who are willing to seriously question their own generational, cultural, and unconscious biases—and acknowledge both their inherited advantages and where they're falling short—real, measurable change within organisations simply doesn't happen. 

I was raised in a community of social justice activists, and in some ways the world seemed more straightforward back then — injustice was overt and easier to name. My mother would rage at the double standards: her male colleague sycophantically praised for picking up his kids from school once a month, while women juggled everything in silence.  

Now, bias is more hidden — there's a veneer of inclusivity, but often it's symbolic or performative. Cutting a pink cake on International Women's Day with staff doesn't address persistent and real professional inequities. Unconscious bias thrives under the surface not just on gender inequity but on a very broad range of diversity issues, when you can't call out what's no longer openly expressed. 

Still, I have seen environments where diversity and inclusion have begun to work — where difference is not just tolerated, but encouraged, and where uncomfortable conversations at senior levels directed at understanding and change are had.  It's there that genuine cohesion can begin to take root. 

With your SHIFT roles and other engagements as a sole practitioner, you are very busy – what are some of your passions outside of work? 

I have a weakness for interiors and all things decorative, aged and ornate.  I am invariably on a random quest to find treasure hidden in some dusty and forgotten corner or other. It allows me to escape into a different place and time. 

I do try to keep up with the news, despite the temptation to sometimes switch off when much of what we are hearing is so deeply troubling. I highly recommend The Rachel Maddow Show MSNBC podcast. I love her gloves-off take on US politics.   

What does the future hold for Kheta?  

To do more travel. 

But also, my ambition is to stay in the moment with not having the high-powered corporate job anymore.  To keep enjoying my SHIFT journey wherever it may take me, whether to more flexing and adapting on short term secondments or to a more conventional employee role when the time is right. For now, the SHIFT balance is perfect.