It’s wedding season, and brides and grooms are promising to love and cherish until death does them part, but a more appropriate pact for today’s dual-income couples might be to empower and to network through restructuring or transfer.
Can you remember a day when managing your spouse’s career meant negotiating the company social tree and turning out a killer meatloaf? Those corporate wife jobs still exist — just look at some of the high-profile divorce cases recently that ask for multimillion-dollar settlements based on the social contributions the wife made to her husband’s rising career. But as the vast middle ranks of corporations have been whittled, and as more women attained full-time careers of their own, entertaining with spouses and families has waned.
Today, if they are involved at all, spouses are more likely to act as career coaches — or they may find themselves competing against each other for business or even working for the same firm and climbing the same corporate ladder. So, just how involved are you in your spouse’s career?
“My chances of being there should he ever need a corporate wife are non-existent,” quips Marilyn Moats Kennedy of Wilmette, the well-known career strategist who speaks nationwide on such issues. One might think such a professional would take a hands-on role in her husband’s career, but not Kennedy. “He doesn’t need me. In fact, he helped me start my business,” she said of her husband, Daniel J. Kennedy Jr., a computer automation consultant now with his own firm.
When Daniel was in the midst of a 20-year career at the former Continental Bank in Chicago, Marilyn logged plenty of face time as a corporate spouse. Today, she said, she’s more of a sounding board, cheerleader and proofreader for his business.
When Claudia Montgomery throws a company dinner for her husband’s co-workers, it’s not just the wine list that must complement the dinner fare. As human resources manager for advertising agency Foote, Cone & Belding, Montgomery also has to cleverly socialize without spilling gossip because her husband works for industry rival Leo Burnett Co. Even when the couple are alone, she said, each must provide career counsel without revealing too much about what’s going on at the competitor’s firm.
“It’s hard because you always want to tell your spouse everything, but there’s definitely a line we don’t cross. We try to talk about situations and not get hung up on details” such as names of who’s interviewing where or client gossip, she said.
Motherhood thrust Cece Conway into the details of her husband’s job. Nine months ago the senior vice president in client relations at LaSalle Partners in Chicago had her first child, Patrick, and has been learning a new balancing act ever since with husband Greg Browne, who does sales and marketing for a health-care finance company.
“I’d love to say we have all this nailed down, but we don’t,” Conway said. “It’s a constant negotiation for whose job comes first.”
That means knowing when to pitch in and when to ask for more help, she said. One benefit to all the bartering, she said, has been a deeper understanding of each partner’s workplace.
“He tells me I tend to be a hot-headed Irish woman and encourages me to sleep on things before I respond,” which is advice that few co-workers could dispense in today’s politically correct business world, she said.
What about couples who draw paychecks from a single employer? Barbara Sandstrom, a senior project manager for Kraft Foods Inc., said her career is intertwined with husband Derek’s, who is a sales planning manager in the same company sales division.
As one example, Barbara was part of a small team that started a new department two years ago. The project required a lot of cooperation from the sales division, and she said it helped tremendously that as she pitched the new unit, managers found some immediate common ground because she was married to Derek.
“There was an instant bond,” she said. “I would hate to think of one of us leaving the company.”
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E-mail: kiddstew@msn.com
