Liz Stapleton Zerella & Melissa Nicholson

LIZ STAPLETON ZERELLA: We had had a manager and I had been open to her, and she said, I think you just have to wait out. And Michelle was going out on maternity leave with my second daughter, Michelle, kind of threw out, casual, she’s like, “Yeah, I just, I can’t do this anymore. I need to find a job partner. And I was like, what about me?”

MELISSA NICHOLSON: Yeah.

Introduction

INTRO: Welcome to Job Share Revolution. The show about job sharing—a partnership between two people to bring two minds and skill sets to one full-time position. I’m Melissa Nicholson, former job sharer turned founder of the first U.S. job share company. But it wasn’t long ago that I felt like an utter failure at work and as a new parent. Job sharing was my game-changer. I reclaimed four days a week to fully engage in my life while my capable partner handled everything. Together, we achieved more than I ever could solo. Fast forward to many lessons learned to bring you the training and support I wish I’d had to change lives and the modern-day workplace. Let’s live life and slay work.

Melissa Intro

MELISSA: Hey there, it’s your friend Mel. Welcome back to another episode of Jobshare Revolution. I am really thrilled to share my conversation with job sharer Liz Stapleton Zerella with you today for several reasons. First, you might be wondering if job sharing will negatively impact your career progression. Not only does the research prove it’s in fact the opposite, but Liz Stapleton Zerella and her job share partner, Michelle Shalauta, successfully navigated a nine-year partnership in four roles where they were promoted together. 

Apart from that, they worked in a predominantly male division of Clorox in finance, with few job sharers around them. So friend, take that to heart. Both are possible for you, too. Liz and I had this phone conversation before this podcast was even a thought in my head. And I actually think it’s unique and special.

It’s like being a fly on the wall for two former job sharers who finally connected to share what it was really like. It’s kind of like a secret society, you know? I hope you love it.

Melissa & Liz

MELISSA: Okay. I think it’s working. 

LIZ: Good.

MELISSA: I’m so glad to connect with you.

LIZ: I know. I have not had a whole lot of personal experience in talking to folks who have done it or who’ve done it for a long time. I mean, Michelle and I did it for a very long time at Clorox. And Clorox, it had some job shares, but it was usually for people who maybe did it for two to three years, kind of when they were first having kids, and then, you know, they wouldn’t sustain the partnership.

MELISSA: For women.

LIZ: For women, that’s exactly right.

MELISSA: For women.

LIZ: Absolutely.

MELISSA: I job shared in radio advertising sales. The radio group I worked at in the ’90s was run by a female GM, which was pretty rare back then. And there was a job share team that she instated in Austin that was two working moms. And really, after that point, at every media group, there’s at least one or two job share teams.

LIZ: Oh, wow.

MELISSA: There were a lot of women sales reps. It’s a twenty-four-seven type job with advertising, and when people hit having kids or having to take care of a parent, I think that is what opened up the opportunity to job share within that industry.

LIZ: Okay.

MELISSA: And so I went back into it, thinking maybe I could work myself into a job share. I loved my boss, but he was a middle-aged, very traditional, and all of the top managers’ wives were stay-at-home moms.

LIZ: Yeah.

MELISSA: And you know, and even when I became pregnant, he would constantly say, “Oh, Melissa, you’re going to just leave because they all leave.” And I was like, “No, no, no, no, no, I’m the breadwinner. I’m not leaving.” I even made him sign a contract with me that, like, my clients wouldn’t be siphoned off when I was gone. But when I had my daughter, there was a company buyout. I had a new boss who came from Seattle, whose wife was pregnant with twins, and he had worked with job share teams.

LIZ: Oh, okay. And that’s kind of why I put it out there on my LinkedIn, just kind of like put it out there and say, “Gosh, there are other people out there who are interested in this concept?” Because it was obviously pretty special and critical for my professional career.

So my background was that I grew up here in the San Francisco Bay area. I went to college on the East Coast. I was in the business school. And, you know, when all the firms that were coming to campus were from New York, big investment banks or Big Five accounting. And I didn’t want to go to New York. I didn’t want to stay in DC.

So randomly, Clorox was recruiting on my campus. So when I got there, at that time, you know, there were some job shares in the marketing function, and this was 2000 to 2005. So it was something that they were doing. And you mentioned something, it was because there were more women in marketing. And so it was something that I think they had to do to hold onto their talent at that time.

And for me, it was intriguing. My husband and I had gotten married, and we’d always said, we want one of us could be home part of the time, once we had kids. And, I had seen like, okay, this might be an option at this company. I didn’t even know that it was something that existed. There had been like a VP of marketing job share team, but they had all kind of broken apart. Some people had left the company, the head of the marketing department had retired, and someone new came in who wasn’t a huge advocate for it. So it kind of fizzled out in marketing, and at the same time, in finance, there ended up being two partnerships that were, you know, a little bit ahead of me in seniority who did it. But like I said, they did it for maybe two to three years in one position. They hadn’t gotten promoted together. The finance leadership team, still to this day, it’s predominantly men. And their perception was this is something you do right when you have kids, and then you’re going to decide, you know, when to come back full-time. You know, they didn’t really have a champion who was disputing that that was what it should be.

I got pregnant with my first child, and again, because I had been pretty self-aware with what I wanted in my life, I said, I think that I can get them to let me work part-time, so I want to ask for that once I tell them I’m pregnant. I just don’t think that I want to do this, you know, forecast closed cycle and have a baby at home, so I may end up with nothing. And my husband’s like, well, just go in there and see what they say. So it was very nerve-wracking to know I’m going to walk out of here either with a part-time job or no job.

MELISSA: It’s very scary.

LIZ: You know, another thing that you said resonated with me was that because I knew this about myself early on, I made a big point to work extremely hard up until that point, to build the goodwill. Because I was like, I want it to be that there’s no question that they want to retain me and have that bargaining power in a way, when I do get to that point, because I basically knew that at some point, I would be asking for a flexible work option.

So that obviously helped a tremendous amount. And so when I went into my VP to say, “I’m pregnant,” he said, “Do you want me to hold your job?” And I said, “No, I don’t want to come back to this job. And by the way, I also want to work part-time.” And he’s like, “Yeah, we’ll create something.”

At that time, it was going to be possible for me to do a project role three days a week, but that wasn’t going to be sustainable long going. That’s not a career path to really progress and to get to the higher levels of finance in Clorox. You know, you want to be supporting a base brand, and you need coverage 100% every single day. It can’t be Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, which is what I always had.

And in my last role as a full-time person, I had worked with Michelle, who ended up being my job partner. We both had different brands, but we were on the same team and really started the relationship in a professional standpoint, but, you know, became friends and respected each other’s work and had a lot in common. In my head, it was if I ever am able to job share, I think she’s the right fit for me. But she didn’t have kids yet.

We had had a manager both when we were working full-time, who was one of the people who ended up job sharing for a brief amount of time and then ended up leaving the company. And I was very open to her about, I don’t see myself working full-time once I have kids, I have other things I want to do outside of work. And she said, “I think you just have to wait out Michelle.” Because there were some other people who were maybe a little bit interested. I wasn’t so keen on pairing up with them, and Tracy said, “I would just wait,” because she knew both of us individually, and she was totally right. Because when I was doing the part-time role, Michelle had gone out on maternity leave, had a daughter, came back full-time, and after a little while, she tried to do a flexible work option and that full-time role. And I mean, that kind of killed her in terms of how much time she was trying to put in Monday through Thursday.

I was going out on maternity leave with my second daughter. Michelle kind of threw out kind of casual, she’s like, “You know, I just, I can’t do this anymore. I need to find a job share partner.” And I was like, “What about me?”

MELISSA: Yeah!

LIZ: It’s funny because in the end, we job shared for nine years, and we’re very different in terms of our personalities. And I’m way more out there, and will just say whatever’s on my mind. And she’s much more reserved and quiet, and wouldn’t necessarily be the one who was willing to stick her neck out. And my personality more so, that I would be like, you know what, I don’t care what happens to me. I’m going to be true to myself and just say this. And she was a little bit better about playing the game a little bit and not being so open with what her personal desire might be. That’s when we made the proposal to job share in the position that she had.

MELISSA: You and Michelle created an actual business proposal to pitch?

LIZ: Yes, and we definitely used the woman who had been our manager a few years before. We modeled after what she had done. She was a job share. You know, just laying out here the principles. Here’s how it’s going to work. You know what side of the week, talking about how the transition should be seamless so that no one that we interact with has to repeat themselves. You know, we cover each other off, we transition—just to kind of lay that out for the leadership.

MELISSA: Yes. To let them know we’ve got everything covered. You don’t have to worry.

LIZ: Yeah. The other thing was that we pitched it because it was going to be a promotion for me. At that time, she was one grade level ahead of me, and my manager was very supportive in that, and with our advocate to say, “Yes, Liz is ready for that promotion, I believe that this should be accepted.” We didn’t really receive any resistance to it. And I think that’s because, again, my manager at the time was supportive. Michelle’s manager said, “I’m totally willing to be the manager of this job share,” and Clorox has high retention so we knew leadership personally. It wasn’t like we were trying to prove ourselves. They kind of knew the kind of work we did. They were pretty open to it.

We started out, and through that first year, we kind of figured out, okay, how do we transition to each other? We would have notes that we would each read before we came into the office. So we did that first job for like a year. Then they moved us to the Glad business, essentially the supply chain. And then we added on. Burt’s Bees is another Clorox company. That team there ended up reporting to us, and it was kind of fun for a totally different company who we are acquiring, to learn about this job share, too.

After that, we were promoted into a cleaning business insights role, only for about a year and a half, and then, managing the total company supply chain. So then all the cost managers were reporting to us. That was a pretty big role. We were very fortunate that they would trust a job share with that kind of high-exposure situation.

We had a large team, yet despite our differences in personalities, we both really valued how we coached analysts coming up. And so that was kind of our passion and our niche. And then eventually I decided to leave the company, which was really hard because I did love the job share. But it was as my oldest daughter was going into middle school, and because of the job share, I could see how like the family functioned on days I was home, and I was commuting.

As much as I love Clorox and love the job share, I kind of knew like it was the time to be home full-time. The number one hardest thing was knowing that I was giving up this great partnership, which was very unique.

MELISSA: So how was it like with Michelle when you decided I’m going to leave? Yeah, because one of the things I talk to people about is having those conversations and having them early so that the other person has time to find another job share partner.

LIZ: We did this for, you know, nine years. You become obviously, you know, so close to someone. And through that time too, it’s like Michelle then went on another maternity leave. And so I came back and worked almost full-time so that we could cover the desk and keep the job share. So I think through kind of some of these, you know, life changes.

You know, we just kind of became very open with each other. All of our reviews, all of our bonuses, all the financials were identical. So when you, over time have shared all those things, you were totally open and transparent with the other person. We would talk about our family lives too. And so we kind of would always know kind of the pulse of each other’s families and, you know, what was going on.

And she saw, you know, one accident on the freeway, and it would take me an hour and a half or two hours to drive one way to the office. And I think the other thing, too, was professionally, we were talking about, okay, we don’t want to just stop where we are. But in order to get the next promotion, what is it going to take? And where my kids were in their lives, it’s like, I’m not willing to put in that extra effort just for that promotion at the cost of my family situation.

And when you had that career conversation, she kind of understood where I was coming from. And I said that I don’t have to walk away today. We can plan how this is going to go. Let’s talk about what you want to do. And her decision was, I’m just going to, in a short time, go back full-time. And Joanne asked, you know, Michelle, are you going to look for another partner? And Michelle at this point is saying she’s like, right now, I can’t even fathom partnering with someone different than Liz because we worked together…

MELISSA: For decades.

LIZ: Yeah, I mean, that’s it’s a long time. And it was so positive that you’re a little bit nervous about not-so-successful job shares.

MELISSA: But I think once you go through job sharing over those years of working together, like, you really learned what is key, what were…You have so many of the traits that very successful job share teams have. They are not identical. They are complementary in their personalities.

LIZ: Well, that’s what I love because I am the person who will say something or act without fully thinking it through. And Michelle was so thoughtful, and she would pause before taking the action. And over nine years, that helped my development professionally tremendously to say, let me just wait and think about how Michelle would approach this sometimes contentious situation? I’m not going to say the first thing that pops into my mouth.

MELISSA: Absolutely.

LIZ: And then we also laughed, too, because our spouses were very much like the opposite partner, which is hilarious because again, I’m the excitable one, and my husband is so levelheaded and balanced and calm. And that’s how Michelle was. I joked, I have someone who balances me both at home and at work.

Her husband is definitely much more excitable and kind of outgoing. We laugh. We’re like maybe that is why we were all so successful, because we know how to operate with someone you know who is very different than we are.

MELISSA: You brought up such a great point, which I think is so common to most job share teams. You’re basically psychically going, what would Michelle do? And she’s going, what would Liz do in these different situations where she may not speak up about something. Like, she’s not here, and this is a time to advocate on behalf of this or whatever it is. You mentioned that your managers were very open to it. You basically got almost no resistance to since y’all moved through several positions and promotions.

What do you think it was about those managers that had them open up about the idea, especially since it’s so rare and they truly knew nothing about it.

LIZ: I think that early on it was the fact that they did know us, they knew us as individuals. So I think at first, it was, we trust them individually. Then I think over time, as we grew more confident in the job share, I think the job share itself gained momentum, and they were amazed at how seamless it was.

And, you know, we could, you know, finish each other’s sentences and things didn’t fall through the cracks. I think that they just ended up trusting that this was kind of a unique situation. We weren’t necessarily promoted faster than our peers, but I think that we kind of became the best-in-class people managers. Sometimes we were unhappy if someone maybe got promoted ahead of us for having a different skill set, but we always did know that we were valued for our skills.

So, do I think that maybe we would have promoted faster if we were individuals? Maybe. But I never felt like they thought that we couldn’t do the job either.

MELISSA: What would be your best piece of advice for people and being promoted once they’re in a job share? I mean, the research shows that over 70% of job teams are promoted together, but only 56% have job share team go for promotion.

LIZ: It really is that confidence because I feel like early on, when we started it we were just so appreciative that they gave us that opportunity, that we felt a little bit like indebted, so we should be just happy with whatever we were getting. And then you kind of build momentum, and you can see this can be sustainable. Some of those earlier job shares really only did it for two or three years.

So at first, the leader thought that we were going to do that because I was more outspoken. I said like, “No, I’m not coming back full-time.” And I could see it kind of under the guise of, okay, I had this long commute, if I’m going to work full-time, I’m going to go literally, Facebook is down the street. So I think that that was a safer way to kind of say it like, “No, as long as I’m at Clorox, I intend to job share.” But in reality, what I was saying is that this should be a career option for anyone. And to your point, it’s not just women.

MELISSA: Right.

LIZ: And I kind of sense that that’s changing a little bit. When I was leaving Clorox, our leaders still were, predominantly in finance, you know, middle-aged men. They had stay-at-home wives. They tried very hard to kind of, you know, understand this, but they’re not totally there yet. Men who are my peers get it more because they are more often coming from two-career households and have some of the childcare responsibilities.

So I feel like maybe it’s slowly changing. But Michelle and I had to say like, “No, this is not just a two-to-three-year experiment. We want to make this work. We want to move together, we want to be promoted together.” But we almost had to really come out and say it and have that confidence to say it and say, like, we believe that that’s possible.

MELISSA: You raised a really good point of people of different generations. WorkMuse featured a cross gender job share. They literally finish one another sentences. They are definitely the yin and the yang. One is the calmer, more easygoing one. Women themselves are more like high energy, right? They want to job share forever together. And now that he’s done it so long, he’s like, I coached both of my kids’ soccer team.

Yeah, I have Mondays and Tuesdays home with them. I have this incredible relationship that I don’t feel I ever would have had, and I feel like people get into it thinking, oh, the flexibility, and I have the time and I can be there with my kids and then they don’t really think about hidden benefit. You mentioned one of those. One of those is that if something happens, their parent is sick or they go on maternity leave, the other person can come in and fill in for them.

Another one is that they have that relationship that is unlike any other relationship. It’s not quite like your relationship with your spouse. It’s like what you talked about, having that person who’s just going to take care of you in the work sense, and then first, like, mom, it was like this co-parenting thing. It’s not even co-parenting. I heard a podcast years ago, and it was Anne-Marie Slaughter who wrote this very controversial article in The Atlantic saying women can’t have it all years ago.

LIZ: Yeah. I read that. Yeah.

MELISSA: And it was her husband. And he was talking about lead parenting, different points in their career. He’s a professor, so it has a lot more flexibility built in. But then he was like writing a book. And they had this concept of passing the hat. Like, you get to basically excel in your career, and I’m going to take a little bit more of a backseat so I can pay attention and be really on hand for what’s going on with the kids to make sure everybody’s on the right path and happy and doing well. And then they would switch the baton.

And I have an AHA moment myself where I was like, we were the lead parent half the week and half the week for my kids entire lives. So it led to this thing where my husband was a true co-parent in every sense of the word, and I had to train other people to put us both on the list because I was like, no, no, he’s the lead here, or I’m not the lead here. I don’t organize the birthday party.

LIZ: That’s definitely something that I was hearing all the time from my male peers at Clorox who were saying, things are changing, like, I want, you know, I want to be there. And we had some senior-level men who were like, “Oh, I was back at work the day after my wife had the baby,” and I was hearing from my male peers like, “That’s not okay. Like, I want to be there. I want to take the time.”

MELISSA: There is a big stigma against men taking their parental leave and against men taking flexible work. I mean, I really think that remote work is so universal now to help people, but I think for men who want to work in a part-time capacity or a job share, there’s a stigma and a worry that they have, you know.

LIZ: Yeah, I would totally agree.

MELISSA: So that’s interesting. The other thing I wanted to ask you about that you touched on too, you mentioned something that I feel is critical, and the research also supports this: That your job share was completely equivalent in every area. It was equal in the fact that you both had the same benefits, same pay, same percentage, the same accountability. Your reviews were done together. You were seen as two people holding the one position.

And I think where it can get really tricky for people, and what is so interesting in my own personal case, was that ours was very much that way. And then when the recession hit, and the company changed the policy, but one person was grandfathered in one way and the other person wasn’t. It was just sitting there on the shoulder like, oh, this isn’t making me feel so great. This isn’t really great that my partner is not getting benefits. She was fine, her husband had benefits. But I always feel like you never know.

LIZ: You’re exactly right.

MELISSA: You’re doing this so that your partner in life also has the flexibility to switch roles or start a business. Job sharing works really well with people who manage teams, but the kind of 1970s misconception around job sharing is that it’s clerical.

Can you just speak a little bit as to how a job team manages a large team, and how you kind of took care of your team together?

LIZ: What we would do is for direct reports, you know, we would always have one-on-ones set-up every week. We basically split the team in half so that for, say, maybe every three months, I would meet with half the team in the front half of the week and then the other 101 for the other half of the team would be in the back half of the week. So Michelle would meet with them. Now we had a pretty open-door policy, so if there was an issue, they could come to us.

But those were standing times, and we really tried not to ever cancel them because we want our folks to have the ability to just have that devoted time to bring anything they want to us. Maybe it’s their own development. Some of them were new people managers, and so they needed some coaching in how to deal with some of their staff. Maybe it was a technical issue where they wanted us to help them actually look at the income statement or the forecast or whatever, and we could help them through that.

And then after three months, we would switch which side of the week they would meet with, so that throughout the year they were going to have that devoted one on one with both of us to make sure that we both had a pretty fair assessment when we were obviously going to do like their performance reviews, but also so that they could get the benefit of both of our expertise because we did have different styles.

They said, you know, we kind of benefit from being able to see how both Michelle and Liz would maybe approach situations differently, especially when it is related to personnel. And so I think that that’s what they really appreciated, that we would give them time, because that’s the other thing that I hear from a lot of, you know, young analysts, it’s like, “Oh, my managers have all this work to do themselves, so I have my one-on-ones canceled all the time,” or “I can never see my manager.”

And that was the thing that Michelle and I, because we did like managing people, we wanted to be accessible to them. So we made that a point to say, no matter how busy we are with the other work that we have to do, we want to make sure that we’re accessible and that we are developing the talent for the, you know, the next generation of finance leaders, really.

MELISSA: How many direct reports did you guys have?

LIZ: The total size of our team was about 30 to 35 people, and the directs, probably around eight. That was not just here. Some of them were also remote too. So we had this niche as being people managers, but we also had this niche as coming up through the Costa County area.

I think that that’s ultimately to why leadership trusted us, because they said they both understand the technical aspect of it and they can teach it. That was something that actually Michelle and I brought up to Joanne too that was huge in that, our last role was highly visible with the leaders of our manufacturing function. And it was really because even when we were lower level, we had worked with some of the people who ended up being VP in the product supply group, and they became advocates of us as well.

You know, it’s like we came into the role and someone who had been the VP when we were in Glad kind of said to the VP of Total Product Supply, is like, “I don’t know how they do it, but they are like one person.” And he really became kind of the champion, too. So that’s another thing that I would say is…

MELISSA: Key.

LIZ: Yeah. Key to get people who believe in the job share and not just in your function, not just your managers, but customers that you work with.

MELISSA: Absolutely. You have to find job share champions to embrace the practice. You’re opening the door for anyone who comes behind you.

LIZ: Exactly.

MELISSA: It’s such a really intriguing, fascinating story because you were the only job share team there. Have there been any jobs or teams at Clorox after you left?

LIZ: As far as I know, there is not, unfortunately. Like I said, some of it also, I think, is that the San Francisco Bay area is very expensive to live in, and then in finance, at least, you know, there are more men than women. And to your point, I think that there still is kind of that stigma where the men aren’t necessarily interested in doing that yet.

I don’t know that they can. That’s exactly right. I know there is one other woman who I worked with for a long time at Clorox. She’s been part-time for over ten years. She would say, “Yeah, I’ve kind of been the same grade level because there’s not as much upward mobility.” And that was not something that I was ever going to be okay with professionally.

MELISSA: I think that’s a key point also. Another thing that’s very common to people who want to job share. They really aren’t people who are satisfied with just being in a job to check in and check out. There’s something about their job that really feeds them and that they feel they can really contribute. And so, it speaks so much to why so many gender teams really want to be promoted, really want to grow together, and you’re able to work in such a high-impact way when you have that second brain, and you have that position to synergize with, that you just become better in your job. That only makes sense that you want to keep challenging yourself.

LIZ: Right. For sure.

MELISSA: For sure. In my personal experience, we didn’t have managers who job shared, but we had two director of sales who basically functioned as a job share. They were five days a week each. They shared the title, they were co-directors of sales. They were responsible for the entire team. But the great thing about being managers is that you can go, who do I kind of really connect with and sit with, and who I feel like I can support and help the most. And then together you make decisions for that team.

One of them was the big idea person. She was a big-picture person. The other one was in strategy and the math side of things. And so when you needed to go to someone for the big out-of-the-box ideas and promotional ideas and very creative things, you went to this one manager, and when you really needed to get strategic on an agency by or something like that, you went to this other manager to like tighten down your strategy.

Did you find that you had two areas where you leaned into for your team?

LIZ: I think so, I think it probably followed a little bit more in line with what I was saying about our personalities. Michelle was better at like, really digging into the financials and like looking at a situation, analyzing it. And if it was something more in terms of a presentation or you know, how to structure something to get buy-in, I was kind of more the outward, you know, how would you approach it that way?

I think I was kind of more of a touchy-feely kind of person in the interpersonal relationship standpoint, versus I think Michelle was more skilled, technically speaking, and part of that was her degree was accounting, and she had done accounting before Clorox. You know, I was certainly capable of doing the technical aspect of it, but that would probably wasn’t my passion.

MELISSA: Yeah. I mean, you said it yourself, you’re a people person. You really enjoyed coaching those analysts.

LIZ: Right.

MELISSA: So, if you were going to give like one piece of advice to someone who’s thinking about job sharing, specifically somebody who’s in a more managerial role, what would your advice be?

LIZ: I think it all stems from you got to pick the right partner. You’re giving, you know, some things up for yourself personally, but the payoff can be huge as long as you find the right person who you know, you have the same kind of motivations, same goal in mind. You can complement each other. You can be honest with each other. You know, I think that that’s, you know, where it could break down is if you’re not honest with each other or you have conflicting priorities, you know, jealousy could arise.

Like, you really have to kind of put your individual needs aside for the good of the team. And that’s probably hard to find. But when you find that right person, it’s fantastic.

MELISSA: I think it’s just knowing what to look for, and it’s really that personality. As somebody who is trusting and open and transparent, but also has a really high bar for themselves at work, but doesn’t necessarily have to be patted on the back themselves all the time.

People get really hung up and they think that they can’t find that perfect person and that perfect partner. And sometimes it’s even hard for teams who’ve been together for, you know, a decade or a long period of time to imagine doing it with someone else. But as long as those people share those traits, and as long as they are compatible and have that complementary skill set, you don’t have to be a carbon copy of one another. It’s can we do this together?

Because I think that’s hard for people to really being brave enough to get out there. It’s like looking for a Volkswagen bug. 

LIZ: Right. Right! (Both laugh).

MELISSA: Thank you so much for talking to me today. And I really appreciate you sharing you and Michelle’s personal experience as a job share together.

You worked in four different roles over nine years, and that’s just a wealth of expertise that we can share what the WorkMuse community needs, and I just really appreciate it.

LIZ: Well, thank you. It was my pleasure. I really enjoyed hearing about your experience as well and knowing that this whole community is out there now.

MELISSA: Absolutely.

Melissa’s Final Thoughts

I absolutely loved meeting Liz and I found so many great takeaways from our chat. I think one thing that really stood out to me was that Liz was crystal clear on how she wanted to parent and who she wanted to be as a professional.

She wasn’t willing to stall her career, but she had the tenacity that put herself out there and go for her job. Share. And you can too. There’s also a great Fast Company article on job sharing by Danna Lorch, featuring Liz that I’ll put in the show notes for you. Just go to workmuse.com forward slash eleven.

Can you do me a favor? I’d be so grateful if you could share this episode with a friend who could use a better work-life balance. Maybe a friend who’s got a pretty high-impact career, who really doesn’t think that there is another way to do this whole thing. It’s really, really hard navigating these careers and our crazy, crazy lives.

Until next week, I’ll be thinking about you, my friend.

Bye for now.