For six years, we shared a job at Fleet Bank: vice president, global markets foreign exchange. One desk, one chair, one computer, one telephone, and one voice-mail account. We had—still have—one résumé. To our clients and colleagues, we were effectively one person, though one person with the strengths and ideas of two.
We're no longer with Fleet because our department was dissolved last year after Fleet was acquired by Bank of America. But the experience changed the way we think about work, and neither of us intends to work any other way again—not ever. It was a constant challenge to pull off the job share—and a hard sell to management—but we never regretted it. We're taking some time to rejuvenate and to write and speak about our experience, but when we look for a new job, we will look together. If one of us wants to leave our next position, the other will leave as well. The fact is, we've found a working relationship that not only is rewarding and freeing for us but, we are convinced, offers our employers and customers more quality and commitment than a single, full-time manager can muster. For the foreseeable future, we're a package.
When our story began, we were both working fifty- to sixty-hour weeks, each in different parts of the bank (then BankBoston). We were coming up through the ranks, getting promotions and raises, and loving our work. We enjoyed helping the bank turn a profit, and our professional identities were very important to us. But at the same time, we were making great sacrifices in our personal lives—as many managers do. The decision to make a change came to us in different ways. For Cindy, it was the morning her children (then ages one and three) were already bundled up for day care when she learned the school was closed. She had a major budget meeting that day, so she had to first take her children to work and then rush out to drop them [off] with a woman she hardly knew. For Shelley, it was the day she had to decide whether to buy milk on the way to pick up her four-year-old son from school and risk being late or to get her son first and then drag him into the store.
We'd known each other professionally, though not well, and we had a sense we'd work well together based on what we'd seen of each other in meetings. The bank had a reasonably good reputation for flexibility in the workplace. It was open to flextime—allowing people to stagger their hours—and to other alternative arrangements such as telecommuting and compressed workweeks. Very few people took advantage of these arrangements, however, and those who did were primarily lower-level employees. In fact, both of us had tried a four-day workweek and had had to give it up. For Shelley, it was because she was offered a significant promotion contingent upon her being in the office full-time; for Cindy, it was simply because a new boss didn't like the arrangement. In any event, what we wanted now differed from the standard flextime arrangement. We sought a single combined job that would offer us true balance but not derail our careers.
We talked to fifteen executives before we found one willing to take a gamble on us (and even then, we realized he agreed in part because he knew that adding a flexible work arrangement to his division would help him meet his corporate diversity goals). The offer was just the type of thing we were looking for: a move to corporate, a step up the ladder, and double the salary, plus a bonus opportunity, all of which meant that we could each work half the time we used to and yet continue to increase our earning capacity.
The sell
We marketed ourselves as one person. We had separate résumés before then, of course, but we put them together into one package with a cover letter saying we were looking for a single position that would combine our skills. We were managers at that time, at BankBoston. Every year, staff would rate their bosses on their managerial skills. We both had very high ratings, so we included those in the package along with our performance reviews. We met many times to talk about how best to sell ourselves, which key ideas we wanted to get across, how to interview, and who would make which points. Then we networked aggressively at the most senior level we could (primarily with executive vice presidents and division executives), and we persevered. If one executive didn't show any interest, we moved on to the next person, making it clear that while we wanted to stay at the bank and thought we had a lot to offer, we'd look outside if that's what it would take to get a job on our terms. Our immediate bosses didn't know about our plans; we conducted our search as if we were looking outside the bank.
One of the people we contacted was a female division executive whom Cindy had gotten to know at a weeklong diversity-training program, mandatory for managers at the time. She liked our proposal, and after we met with her she e-mailed her colleagues, including the head of foreign exchange, who turned out to be looking for a senior salesperson. We met with him several times, so he had ample opportunity to challenge our proposal—which he did, vigorously.
| We talked to fifteen executives before we found one willing to take a gamble on us. |
We sold ourselves on the basis of our skills, as you would for any job, but we made the argument that we had related but different capabilities and could bring more to the job than one person could alone. We both had a lot of sales and marketing experience, but one of us (Shelley) was more outgoing and comfortable with public speaking, and the other (Cindy) was more analytical. Nonetheless, we knew that we were asking him to go beyond his frame of reference, which was very traditional, and that he'd be taking a risk if he hired us.
We addressed his concerns head-on, one by one. He asked us to describe how we would handle various scenarios—how we would get a project started, whom we'd meet with, whom we'd call. He told us that he'd expect one of us at his daily 7:30 a.m. meeting and wondered how we would work that out. He worried about what would happen if we didn't get along. Would the business suffer? We said that we were professionals, here to meet a business need, and we had no intention of putting our careers on the line. He asked us how we would manage our responsibilities. He wanted to know how we'd get the work done and how we'd communicate. We reiterated that we would work out any bugs ourselves—that it would be our job to structure the work, keep each other in the loop, and resolve any conflicts. Any problems, we said, would be ours, never his or the business's. In the end, our confidence won him over.
The person who had hired us wasn't someone we would have expected to take that risk, and he certainly put us through our paces. Our first week on the job he gave us a little test. We were learning to work together, learning to balance work and home—and learning a brand-new business at the same time. One day, our boss called Shelley into his office saying he had a task for her. He needed a present for his own boss, who was leaving the division, and he needed it that day, engraved, by 4:00 p.m. It was about noon. Shelley got into a cab and headed to Shreve, Crump & Low and bought a frame, but the store couldn't engrave it in time. So she went across town and visited five jewelers, finally persuading one to do the work. She got back in time and presented it to our boss. He was thrilled. Shelley was furious but stayed calm. She asked him why he'd wanted her to do something that bore no relation to her skills and experience, and he told her it was to see how fast she could respond to the task. We never saw him give this type of test to a man or, for that matter, to any of the few other women on the trading floor. We were clearly different, and although we'd made it through the interviewing process, at some level he was perhaps not quite ready to see us in the same light as he did our peers.
We didn't like the impression this assignment might make on our new colleagues. But he never asked us to do anything like that again. Over time, he even became something of a mentor. We knew that he wanted us to succeed, and to this day we appreciate the support he gave us. Hiring us helped him meet his diversity goals, but he cared about us as well; in fact, he became one of our biggest advocates. Nonetheless, while we had his support, we learned soon enough that we would have to sell ourselves to the rest of the division every single day. 