Reprint: R0502H
For six years, Cynthia Cunningham and Shelley Murray shared an executive job at Fleet Bank. One desk, one chair, one computer, one telephone, and one voice-mail account. To their clients and colleagues, they were effectively one person, though one person with the strengths and ideas of two, seamlessly handing projects back and forth. Although their department was dissolved after the bank merged with Bank of America, the two continue to consider themselves a package—they have one résumé, and they are seeking their next opportunity together.
Their choice to share a job was not only a quality-of-life decision but one intended to keep their careers on course: “Taking two separate part-time jobs would have thrown us completely off track,” they write in this first-person account. “We’re both ambitious people, and neither of us wanted just a job. We wanted careers.”
In this article, the two highly motivated women reveal their determination to manage the demands of both family and career. Flextime, telecommuting, and compressed workweeks are just some of the options open to executives seeking greater work/life balance, and the job share, as described by Cunningham and Murray, could well be the next solution for those wishing to avoid major trade-offs between their personal and professional lives.
Cunningham and Murray describe in vivid detail how they structured their unusual arrangement, how they sold themselves to management, and the hurdles they faced along the way. Theirs is a win-win story, for the company and for them.
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.
