How to share a top job

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Hello, I'm Elash Mahi and welcome to the conversation

from the BBC World Service.

The programme which brings together two women from around the world

who share an experience or expertise today.

How do you use a job share to kick on in your career

and how do two people deliver vision and leadership with one voice?

Erenka Krona Garman co-founded two websites dedicated to job sharing.

Erenka has also written several books about job sharing

and part-time working.

Charlotte Sherry has been job sharing in the UK for years,

working in senior HR roles for companies as diverse as Unilever,

Logan's Bank and Virgin.

Along with her job share partner, Alex Ainsley,

she set up a consultancy daring too.

Advising prospective job shareers and companies.

Ladies, welcome to the conversation.

Thank you.

First, I think I need to know how exactly job sharing actually works.

So, Charlotte, how does your current job share work just on a day today?

For us and has been the case for the coming up for 13 years

that we've actually been job sharing.

On a very practical working pattern,

we both work three days.

I do the front half of the week, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday,

and Alex does Wednesday through Friday

with a really important, certainly,

our experience critical overlap day of a Wednesday

where we can do shared things

or very often divide and conquer the work.

And so, do you do a very particular division of Labour?

Like, is it that she has very specific work that is under her remit

and you have specific work under your remit

or how does that work?

Over the years and in the different organisations we've worked in

and slightly different variations of jobs.

It's different, but I would say in the main,

we both have overall shared responsibility

for the job that we're doing in terms of leading our teams

in terms of the relationships we have with key stakeholders in the business.

But then within that, we have often sort of each taken specific projects

or pieces of work and one or the other of us have run with those.

Working out which skill set is best suited to which piece of work.

And I mean, one of the joys and I'm sure we'll get into the benefits of job sharing,

but that's one of them being able to flex

who is going to be best suited to work on a particular piece of work

or has got a really good relationship with a particular person in the business

that makes sense for you to kind of take the lead on.

So, yeah, it's varied.

Erank, you share more than one role.

So, how do you divide your week?

Yeah, the same like Charlotte just mentioned.

You know, my experience of 18 years with five different job sharing partners.

My first partner was nine years working with her

and like Charlotte just mentioned, you divide your days during the weeks

and regarding the task, you often put the task on the most important competences everybody has.

We just divide certain activities and you have shared activities together,

like for example, strategical questions or the conduction of people.

And with my last colleague, a man, Worcester Alfa,

we were leading our company together as CEOs, co-seos.

So, we shared also, you know, in the week, the days,

but sometimes we also working together,

but compared to my first experience some 18 years ago,

it's not as precise today because everything is so flexible,

work is flexible, often online is flexible.

And Charlotte, you've been in this job share with Alex

for more than a decade.

How did it actually come to start?

We were both colleagues of one another in the organisation that would both

spent quite a few years in prior to forming the job share.

I was actually off on maternity leave with my youngest

and Alex actually came and covered my role while I was out.

Prior to that, I had been working full time, I'd done part time,

I tried compressed workings, I tried various iterations of flexible working,

but new when I was returning from my second maternity leave,

I definitely needed something that gave me the ability to disconnect

and focus and be present with my children.

Alex's children were a little bit older,

but she was grappling with some similar challenges with school

and secondary schools and how to navigate that best.

And so, we sort of found one another,

but within the same organisation and we sort of were peers and colleagues,

but hadn't actually worked together, particularly closely.

And it was a kind of a mutual boss that we both had who sort of joined the dots.

Had that not happened, I think both of us would have become one of the statistics

where sort of mid-career women drop out of the workforce

because they can't juggle and balance the need that they have both personally

and professionally.

And so, it was incredibly forward to thinking,

manager and boss at the time who made the suggestion to us.

And yeah, the rest is history.

Erenka, when did your first job share happen?

My first job share happened 18 years ago.

That was my first partner and we stayed together nine years

and we didn't know each other.

And we were at that time constructing a list of part-time workers.

And I found my colleague at that time through this kind of little platform.

And I asked her if she was interested and that was the way we started our job sharing.

Why were you looking to go part-time?

What was the motivation for you?

I have three children. My youngest was two years old.

And when she was a bit younger, six months old, I started a PhD on part-time employment in Switzerland

because I saw that it was such a big issue regarding work-life balance and the situation of women.

In Switzerland, we have the highest rate of part-timers in Europe.

We have one-third of the entire population working part-time.

And the problem is we have a gender difference.

We have 60% of women working part-time versus only 18% of men.

So you can see here the gap regarding careers and the gender gap too.

This is what happens most often to women when they have families,

children, the staying with a part-time job.

They cannot have any kind of career.

So I was very interested to explore much more the situation of part-timers in our country.

And I did this PhD and the most important recommendations in my work were

at the end just to change the situation to create much more working models,

which are helping also women and men.

Because now we see that many men are going into job sharing too,

to allow to have a work-life balance, which helps also to make a career.

And that was my situation.

If I look back 18 years ago, the reasons why I chose this model was

my job was in the international cooperation sector.

I had to travel a lot.

Having three kids was pretty complicated to organize everything.

So having this job share helped me and my colleague who also had two children in the same age,

just to share our jobs and to be able to travel a lot for our company.

You have clearly both of you developed these long-term relationships

with a job share partner, which clearly means on some level

that this must be working quite well for both of you.

But I imagine that there are a lot of people that have a lot of questions

about this way of working.

Have you ever been questioned about the possibility of sharing these kind of executive roles?

Yeah, we get asked that an awful lot and actually probably in the course of our day job,

which is to lead people functions and work with business leaders on the shape of their

organisations. We are definitely agitating more than they would probably appreciate

around sort of why they're not considering this way of working more often,

knowing both the business benefits and individual benefits,

and where organisations are trying to grapple with and solve for retaining talent,

progressing, particularly diverse groups of people.

Women roles are getting more and more complex.

They're requiring more and more from individuals at a senior level.

And so it still staggers me even today why more people aren't considering it as a method of

working. Charlotte, what are their concerns?

You get the typical who do I go to? How do I know who's doing what?

Particularly in kind of high performance driven sort of individual meritocracy-based organisations,

where the sense and need to be able to pinpoint one person for delivery often causes people

concern around, well, how do I do that when there's two of you? I think there's often concern

around what if one person decides they don't want to do it anymore. I'm left with half a person.

What does that then mean? And in my experience, both personally as well as having higher job

shares into different organisations I've worked in, all of those things are kind of overcomable,

then that none of them are enough to get in the way.

Eureka, are you getting the same kind of questions or have you been getting the same kind of questions?

Yes, many, many questions. There are two different types of questions. The questions coming from

the employee years, and those are about productivity questions, questions on information cost,

on general cost, when you're just hiring a dual, and questions also of compatibility,

of competences, of personalities. So employers are often a bit kind of sceptical. They don't know

how it will work, and often they have not so much experiences. Then from employees, there are other

questions coming up. For example, what happens if my partners leaves me suddenly now after two years?

What is my legal situation, my contractual situations? Will I find another person? Will it be difficult?

How should I work to organise myself that it's not too much compared to my colleague, to my job

partner. So there are different kinds of questions. Certainly in my experience,

sort of back to the skeptics, all the people that are sort of questioning how it works.

All I would say is every organisation I have been in and managed to demonstrate that it works.

As I have left those organisations, they've been significantly more job shareers there than when

I first arrived. So I think just starting to see an experience and feel the benefit is almost all

it takes in many organisations because they can go, oh, okay, it's not confusing. Oh great,

I get loads of value because I'm getting diversity of thought. I'm getting two brains for one.

All of these benefits, and it sort of tends to take a life of its own when organisations and

businesses see it in action. One of the criticisms that Arenca mentioned was this concern that

people would have to repeat themselves or that information wouldn't be passed across.

You've been doing this for so long. I'm assuming you've got some really, really good tactics to

just deal with that. Yeah, I mean, it very much has been from day one when we set about doing our job

share. It was a really important foundation for us that is we don't want the business, we don't

want our team, we don't want any sort of stakeholders that we work with to feel like they're having

to repeat themselves. In the early days, as we were establishing our relationship and our sort of

communication style and getting to know one another, we had to work really hard behind the scenes

in terms of making sure the conversations that I had Alex was aware enough of to be able to pick

up the thread and continue that work or that conversation. I think as time has gone on and as we've

got to know each other much, much more, I can second guess what Alex has said or even what she's

thinking before she's actually said it out loud, just given the kind of fluidity of the way that

we've worked and got to know each other over over the years. And actually, it's been an interesting

point over the years where we were asked if we wanted a combined email address and in our day

job said no actually because we are two individuals. We do want to retain some kind of personal identity

just because we share a job and we do that very successfully doesn't mean we're not individuals

who bring strengths that are different to each other. You're listening to the conversation from

the BBC World Service. The best B2B marketing gets wasted on the wrong people. So when you

want to reach the right professionals use LinkedIn ads. LinkedIn has grown to a network of over

one billion professionals including 130 million decision makers and that's where it stands apart from

other ad buys. You can target your buyers by job title industry company role, seniority skills,

company revenue so you can stop wasting budget on the wrong audience. It's why LinkedIn ads

generates the highest B2B return on ad spend of major ad networks. Spend $250 on your first

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broadcast that's LinkedIn.com slash broadcast terms and conditions apply. It's 2009 and we're in

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This week on Good Bad Billionaire, how Total Wolf made his billions. Listen wherever you get your BBC podcasts.

I'm Ella Alshamahi and on today's program we're discussing how to share a top job with

Arenca Krona German from Switzerland and Charlotte Cherry in the UK. It's interesting that you're

saying that the data suggests that part-time work holds people back from promotion. If you're

kind of wanting to stay on and push your career and kind of gain promotion in a job share,

does that mean that it's always kind of as a pair? So you're kind of going for these promotions

together. You're looking for new jobs together. Is that how you've played it, Charlotte?

Yeah, it absolutely has been and I think I would say 13 years ago I don't think either of us

could have foreseen that job sharing would actually be a career accelerator in the way that it has

been. Just because we both want to have some balance doesn't mean we don't have ambition and I think

that's part of the challenge from a kind of pure part-time point of view. Jobs are big, they

require full-time organisations, customers, they don't switch off at four o'clock in the Wednesday

afternoon. They have a need to be kind of served across the organisations working week, which is

why for me part-time working was always going to be a limiting factor in progressing into bigger

jobs because the needs and wants of those span more than a three-day week that I might have been

wanting to work at that point and so job sharing has definitely been a way for Alex and I to both

fulfill a job that we both enjoy but also to be able to accelerate and grow our careers

through promotion and progression and so the way that we've done that is very open and honest

communication with one another around where we are looking to go, how ambitious we are, what are

our motivations to progress to the next job and so at various different junctions over the 13 years

we've had those conversations to say okay I think I'm ready for more, I think we should be pushing

ourselves how do you feel? Okay good we're both in the same place let's go for it and I think the

the reason why it's sort of taken us both a bit by surprise in terms of it being career

accelerant is in part because there has been something incredibly reassuring to you know that

you've got somebody else by your side to make those big big moves and when jobs are more demanding

they're sort of bigger scary a hairier jobs actually been able to sort of we often say we held

hands and we jumped and did it anyway you know together and that confidence that you get from the

other person particularly for women who may be in some instances lack the confidence to really

sort of push themselves forward that's been huge for us to be able to go and do that together

I don't care how about you how is it pushed you in your career? The most important point for me was

being able to work in a position where I could still work and travel a lot and so that was my

first job showing at the State Secretary for Economic Affairs of Switzerland and then my next

position in a job together with a different partner and he was the first position where we

conducted different you know employees so it was a medium kind of position and then later on my

last one was being the CEO of this little organization several but with a man and you know how it is

what it's leading an organization it's sometimes very complex so we were both very happy to be

together on that it's also sharing you know reflections it's sharing so it's going very far

from the situation where you're by yourself so it's like you said Charlotte it's something

fascinating to work together and to share ideas and creativity Charlotte I wonder when you've

approached other companies you've worked both you and Alex and in these very very different

companies got quite different industries what's the reaction like when you approach them as a pair

like how does that even work with the with a CV or resume here's the both of us like it's

it's intriguing yeah and and I would say the reaction has been variable over over the years

when we were reaching a point in the organization where our job chef forms so GE general electric

big North American company as we were starting to consider maybe the time was right to go and

experience a different organizational culture because we'd both sort of spent quite a long time

at GE at that point we sort of approached it almost like as a project and said right which

organizations do we both have an ascendancy to and think that we could work well in but also

which organizations do we think have kind of the right culture that would be receptive to two

people organizations that had really clear inclusion policies and practices and were sort of

looking to try and champion and support all the elements of diversity in their in their workforce

but certainly from a gender point of view but equally at the same time we were approaching

search firms headhunters who candidly just were like you're you're just in the two difficult

box like you are for us to go and represent you and go and take you as a package to an organization

like two difficult and and I suppose then over the years we have tended to leverage our networks

when you've worked with people in organizations and they see the value they see it working in

practice that has been an incredibly helpful vehicle when we've then been looking at our next move

is leveraging our network to be able to go and explore the next opportunity in different organizations

but I think kind of the headline is there has definitely been some organizations that it just

blows their mind to the extent that the door is firmly shut and actually I'm okay with that

because if they're not if it takes me to convince them then it's probably going to be too hard or

you're not going to be enabled and set up for success and therefore it's maybe not the right

organization to go and work in. Now Rinky you mentioned that you've shared roles with both men

and women. Have you found a difference? It's a question which is very often and I can tell you

now there is no differences between the genders regarding your partner the most important

difference are the profile themselves what type of personality your partner has you know the

competences the person has the soft skills for example we are coaching you know with our organization

also many duels job sharing partners and we're doing psychometric tests because here you can see

exactly what makes it so important and what kind of characteristics are important to work

in the job share but regarding your question there is no gender differences in my situation it was

there were different differences among the persons I shared a job with but nothing to do with

their gender it's more to their own personality and profiles. Okay so it's personality traits

that are more important so what traits make it easier or harder are the other certain personality

types that should not be job sharing. Yes you need to be very flexible in a way you thinking

critical thinkers are very welcome for that model you have to be also flexible in the way you give

things you know sometimes in a job sharing you work a bit more than you partner and then he or

she works more than you so it's a it's a question of giving and taking all the time and being very

open to that and what is also very important is the way you are dealing with differences in opinions

you know not conflicts but different in opinions how you how you manage such situations when you

have not the same opinion on a certain topic how you deal with that how you respect the other

persons and how you position yourself if you are very egocentric person you know and you need to

be always the first comma the first person positions in the room it won't be the best model for you.

Charlotte you you are not doing ahead quite a bit yeah it's fascinating and really reassuring

to hear Rorenker talk about those qualities because I was just sort of reflecting on how we

describe what we sometimes call the magic ingredients for job share and things like really low ego

because it's not about what I bring to the party and there'll be moments in time where Alex is

a bit more center stage on a piece of work and so she gets the attention and the only reason Alex

can go and focus on those things is because I may be peddling behind the scenes sort of keeping

the rest of the job running and so really low ego I think is a really important one and I think

the sort of other other point is and something that Alex and I did a lot of at the very beginning

was really sort of understanding what our values were and what drove us both individually and whether

there was a degree of alignment there because over the years you know I'm sure Rorenker you get

asked the question have you ever had a major disagreement and honestly the answer is no because

even though I might have come at a particular problem in a slightly different way to Alex

I really know fundamentally that the base on which her decisions have been made are aligned in

terms of our values it's so great to hear Charlotte mentioning that values and when we start

coachings the first part are about values because that brings you always to the same question what

is the most important aspect for you in sharing tasks and everything the common values things

probably make sense to a lot of people because I know some people listening to this we'll be thinking

well that sounds great except what if the other person isn't pulling their weight as much would

that reflect badly on me and how do I deal with that I just wonder what you would say to anybody

kind of nervous about that side of things Rorenker yes during crisis this could occur you know that

could destabilize the job showing itself it's definitely something that Alex and I kind of

fronted at the very beginning of the job share and I would say sort of one of those other magic

ingredients is you've just got to have really open and honest communications and be able to

say if something isn't working whether that be in terms of the contribution that each other

are putting into the work and me being able to say to Alex god you I think you really overstepped

in that in that conversation or here's how that landed and being able to really talk about that

very openly you're both in contact with a wide network of job shareers Rorenker how common is

job sharing in Switzerland we did our last statistics last year on five thousand companies in

our country public organizations non-benefit and the private sector and today there are

28% of this organization which have job or top sharing in their companies by top sharing

a Rorenker do you mean senior roles a leading position yeah yeah and that's an increase compared

to last ten years and what is very interesting is that they increase or encourage in the top

sharing sector more than in the job sharing when we started to create our organization I don't know

how it is in your organization shallot but I remember 15 years ago people were laughing at us

and we're saying that we would like to push on top sharing then we said to us it's a nice model

that's okay for job sharing at a lower level but not at a top level and today we could since

Switzerland man like women they're much more interested in doing a top sharing Rorenker do you

have any tips for anyone who wants to potentially consider top sharing yes yes those are many people

individuals they come to see us and they say wow I've heard about this model I would like to try

to just help us help me we try to show them in which sector it's more common to find job

sharing positions then we show them how to apply we help them also to prepare themselves for the

first interview because being interviewed as a do is different than when you are interviewed by

yourself you have to have a really common position in all questions you are answering you have to

be very well prepared you have to be prepared also on the potential questions which could be raised

not on your job but on the do itself the job sharing model itself and I will also then try to show

to that person that the road is not complicated it's just to know and to be aware about the different

steps Charlotte what tips would you have for people thinking about job sharing I would say ask

often people are fearful of asking the question is it possible is that something that you would be

open to considering as an organisation so I would say sort of have the courage to go and ask the

question and sort of put it out there to their organisation I found this really really fascinating

and very very insightful I wonder as people have been doing this for such a long time as experts

what would you be saying to each other about what you wish employers would understand about job

sharing to employers what I always wish to tell them is before they're judging to try it

because there's still companies who are averse who have negative opinions without having tried it

when I saw the companies who were so negative many years ago and who now have different

cases of job sharing that makes me very happy I mean I would say don't overthink it like sometimes

people can get in their head then the kind of the need for it to be very kind of formulaic and

very structured and I just would say trust the two that are doing the job trust trust them to give

it a go work that out I think that is the greatest space you can give to a job share pair to go and

be successful ladies thank you for coming on the conversation thank you thank you for having us

thank you so much and you know what is so great in this world is our community of

those people convinced by the model and just at this stage they're such a positive drive

my guest today have been a Renca Corona German who set up the online platforms we job share

and go for job sharing in Switzerland and Charlotte Sherry who set up the consultancy

daring too the conversation from the BBC World Service will be back next week I'm Ella Alshamahi

thanks for listening it's 2009 and we're in the German mountains a man straps himself into a car

on the world's most dangerous racetrack he whispers to himself it's time to put my balls on the

dashboard if he starts the engine in 15 minutes he's in an ambulance unconscious in 15 years he's

a billionaire this is total wolf formula one's most powerful team boss and the breakout star of

drive to survive this week on good bad billionaire how total wolf made his billions

listen wherever you get your BBC podcasts