‘Role of supportive spouse in the lives of high-powered female executives’

Introduction

 

What are the repercussions of woman having a higher powered and higher paying job. Does the spouse display an enlightened perspective or is he gripped by the feelings of jealousy and competition.

At a time when issues like gender inequality in the boardroom and the dearth of women in senior positions continues to make headlines, it is worth asking: How important is the role of a supportive spouse in the lives of high-powered female executives?

As a woman is climbing up the ladder, how does she figure out her role at home?

How does she navigate her marriage?

When the woman’s career starts to take off, how does her husband handle it?

Our mothers in the yesteryears would have easily given up their career and dreams to establish their conjugal life. But would youth of today’s generation be ready to compromise their dreams and aspiration for their partner?

It’s different for everyone.

Hearing it out from women who’ve made it big.

A lot of powerful corporate women admit that they would not have gotten to where they are without their incredibly supportive husband.

When my spouse Anurag was pursuing his PGPX at IIM Ahmedabad and I accompanied him to campus, we came across cases of batch mates where the husband had flown down from the USA and taken a sabbatical/’work from home’ so as to support his wife’s pursuit of her MBA and take care of the kid as she grappled with the challenging course curriculum. This was indeed inspiring.

Sheryl Sandberg – Make Your Partner a Real Partner

 

Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg was speaking about her success mantras at 2011 IGNITION conference in New York. She said “The most important career choice you\’ll make is who you marry. I have an awesome husband, and we\’re 50/50. Having a supportive spouse — a real partner — will play a huge part in your success. I don’t know of a single woman in a leadership position whose life partner is not fully—and I mean fully—supportive of her career. No exceptions,” she writes. Sandberg surprisingly dedicates an entire chapter to this entitled “Make Your Partner a Real Partner.” It’s a call to action for women to choose mates who won’t phone it in—and, even more crucially, to cede a great deal of household control to them. In other words, it’s not just about finding a man who will pitch in at home, or who will support your aspirations in the work place, it’s about redefining traditional feminine and masculine roles

Mrs. Shikha Sharma at IIM Ahmedabad

The CEO and Managing Director, Axis Bank Ltd was the Chief Guest at Ahmedabad’s 52^nd Annual Convocation and spoke about choices to the graduating students. She spoke at length into the choice of a life partner that one needs to make judiciously.  https:/www.youtube.com/watch?v=eny5Z82br7Q

‘It is a cliché to say that the choice of a life partner is the single most important choice you will make in your life. But of course, it is a cliché because it is true! As H. Jackson Brown Jr wrote –“Choose your life’s mate carefully. From this one decision will come 90 percent of all your happiness and misery.” I don’t know about the 90 percent … but the fact is that much of the joy you derive on the journey of life does hark back to who you choose to share this journey with. A lot of what I am today, the achievements that were so kindly mentioned in the introduction, are a function of the partner I was lucky to have alongside my journey.

Sanjaya and I are very different people. He is widely read, divergent thinking and creative, I am a lot more linear thinking and introverted. But on the most important thing, we are not different at all – we have very similar core values. If I were to point out the one thing that has made our partnership successful, it is just that – the alignment on core values.

Indulge me for a minute if I sound like a mom! When you are out there looking for a partner, look beyond their looks, their success, and their style. The durability and strength of your relationship is not going to come from your partner’s personality – it is going to come from their character. So remember to look well beneath the surface.

Mrs. Naina Lal Kidwai

HSBC India chairman and director Naina Lal Kidwai at a FICCI event advised that career women should be careful in choosing their life partners who would share her dreams and accommodate the constraints associated with a working women.

Survey- What kind of spouse elevates your earnings?

 

Brittany Solomon and Joshua Jackson from Washington University found that while our own personalities influence our job performance, our spouses’ personalities also are a determinant of our professional success.

What kind of spouse elevates your earnings? 

Should you seek a sweetheart who is competitive, energetic, or curious?  Someone who is compassionate, sociable, cooperative?

According to Solomon and Jackson, the award for best personality goes to Mr. or Ms. Conscientious.

Based on a study of 4,544 people, with ~ 75% being dual-income households, it emerged that  people with a more conscientious spouse tended to have higher job satisfaction, were promoted more often, and reported higher wages over a four year period.

Why?

Conscientious people are dependable and organized, they provide reliable support, and are skilled at planning and managing their lives.  Conscientious people not only create conditions that foster success, they are also good role models.  As we are likely to emulate some of the behaviors of our spouse, having a conscientious spouse may encourage greater reliability and productivity in the workplace, further enhancing job performance. Finally, people with conscientious spouses tended to report higher relationship satisfaction, and this marital satisfaction may reduce stress and make it easier to channel energies into professional endeavors.

Late-bloomers & Power Couples

 

According to Bentley’s Myers, women who occupy the C-suite today tend to fit into one of this: While there can be a situation where women are the key breadwinners, who often have stay-at-home husbands or spouses with flexible jobs, the two key categories are:

1. The late-bloomers, whose careers hit their stride later in life after they have taken care of children

 

When the kids are small, woman may have stayed home or worked part-time. But when her kids are older or out of the house, her career takes off. The example worth citing here is of Judy Forsley, the mother of two daughters ages 19 and 22, who is CFO of Shipyard Brewing Company, one of the largest craft beer companies in the U.S. When her children were young, she worked in the accounting department at Shipyard.

 

1. Power couples, where both partners are in demanding jobs

 

These include Marissa Mayer, the CEO of Yahoo who recently had a baby, and her husband Zack Bogue, who just launched a new VC fund; and Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s COO, who is married to David Goldberg, CEO of SurveyMonkey.

These partnerships are built on a mutual understanding of the pressures of work and an appreciation for how much the other values his or her career.

In these marriages “there is an ebb and flow of careers. One partner may take a back seat for a while, and then get an appealing opportunity. So they move for that person’s job, and the other partner takes a back seat. In these relationships, we see a lot of outsourcing of childcare to nannies and family members.”

‘Kitchen Calendar Rule’

Gail McGovern, a former Harvard Business School professor who also held top management jobs at Fidelity Investments and her husband implemented what they call as ‘Kitchen Calendar Rule ‘after their daughter Annie was born. McGovern worked for AT&T overseeing 10,000 employees; her husband ran a large unit of Hewlett-Packard. With those having had two monster jobs, they say “In the beginning, we fought about who got to take a [particular work] trip. Then we instituted the kitchen calendar rule: Whoever booked it first got to take the trip.”

In those years, she says that the house was “always a mess” and her cooking as “a lot of take-out”. She left the office at 6:30 p.m. to relieve the nanny and spend evenings with Annie. Once Annie was in bed, McGovern was on conference calls until midnight. Despite their demanding jobs, McGovern and her husband never asked the nanny to work overtime, and they never missed one of Annie’s school assemblies, recitals, sporting events or parent-teacher conferences.

Summing Up

Many people search for romantic partners who are sexually attractive or who have an agreeable personality, but I guess we should search for something more in our mates, as the influence certainly lingers with us in our work day and have long-term effects on our job performance.

If both the partners intend to make it big in their careers, you have to find that rare mate who can treat you as an equal, even when your career needs to come first. These are very tough marriages to hold together because there is a constant, never-ending re-balancing of priorities and power between spouses. Thus it’s very important to have the intent in place in the first place or as Mrs. Shikha Sharma put it ‘alignment of core values’. Only then can we have a situation of “Behind every successful woman there is a man”

Thanks & Regards

Sonia Singal – Founder: cajobportal.com – India\’s first recruitment website exclusively for finance professionals