The Mulberry Bog

Once upon a time, in the midst of a crowded Washington, DC metro station, while awaiting an overdue train, I sat on a grungy floor and began mapping out the business of my dreams. At the time, I was a consultant for a small but busy firm where I liked the people and the projects but was hungry for the chance to feel real passion for what I was doing.

The business I created on paper was the stuff of my wildest fantasies: led by a trusted partner and me, it would provide meaningful,satisfying projects that allowed room for creativity, financial rewards, professional growth and the flexibility needed to focus on life beyond work.

Flash forward: Today I co-lead Mulberry Tree Consulting, a strategic planning/leadership development facilitation practice with a trusted partner and dear friend. After 7 years of building MTC together, Maggie and I have experienced the ups and downs of leading a business together.What’s remained constant is our friendship and the passion we both feel for the work we get to do together.

Everything in my fantasy job description, created so long ago in a metro station, has come true — now, that’s something to feel passionate (and very grateful)about!

Betsy

From Betsy

Isn’t is funny how you can write something over and over again without really thinking about it until one day you do and realize that the word you’ve been using doesn’t come close to what you really mean?

That’s what happened to Maggie and me. In draft after draft of our proposal for Between us we have it all, “partnership” surfaced again and again. We didn’t give it much thought – after all, on the surface, the word described what we were writing about – a professional relationship between two people or more people equally committed to achieving a shared purpose. But as time went on, as we talked with more partners, as our ideas developed and our writing sharpened, the kind of connection we were writing about grew too big for the little partnership suitcase we were trying to squeeze into.

The more we experienced and heard from others, the foggier the word got as we more clearly recognized that the benefits of working together stretched far beyond the professional realm. Through the meaning, balance and support achieved from productive, constructive collaborations (more about this in a future blog), women weren’t just making work better – they were making life richer and more satisfying. Suddenly, our old stand-by “Partnership” didn’t measure up – too vague, too flat, too loaded with multiple meanings (and baggage). It was sounding more and more like a stop on the road to something grander, but what? Where?

A long search for the just right word ensued. And while we won’t bore you with the details, what emerged from a dream one of us had was a simple term that captured the dynamism of this relationship between women equally committed to putting ego aside, sharing the helm, trusting each other, listening, speaking honestly, providing and accepting support and wading through conflict together in order to achieve a shared dream. The word is Powership. The more we use it, the clearer it gets. We hope it packs the same punch for you.

Powership: a productive, equitable collaboration built on trust, constructive communication and reciprocal support.

From Maggie

It’s everywhere:  reflection on the past 40 years of women in the workforce. Time’s cover story this week – “The State of the American Woman: a new poll shows why they are more powerful, but less happy,” (October 26, 2009) chronicles the changes since women starting hitting the workforce in full and is chock-full of data nuggets that give us the picture of where we’ve come and where we are now. Author Nancy Gibbs writes, “It’s funny how things change slowly, until the day we realize they’ve changed completely. It’s expected that by the end of the year, for the first time in history the majority of workers in the U.S. will be women… More and more women are the primary breadwinner in their household (almost 40%)… Their buying power has never been greater.”

Since we’ve accomplished so much in the past 40 years, why oh why are so many women unhappy?

I’m 42. My life has followed the arc of women coming into our own. Unlike earlier generations, I’ve been able to make my voice heard – at work, as well as at home. As a young adult, I followed my own locus of control and worked in interesting, challenging, fruitful areas. Now as a wife and mother, the locus of control is more complicated and dispersed, but ultimately it’s up to me to make my own happiness by finding work that is meaningful, challenging and complementary to the rest of my life. My current situation as a co-owner of a small business with Betsy lets us be in control of most everything (economy excepted, of course!) and my happiness is high. The Time article hits it home once again: having a partner in work and a powership I can count on allows me to buck the trend of rising power and falling happiness. Through powership both are possible.

From Maggie

Yesterday was not a happy day. I was home with my son who has developed pneumonia after a week of the flu. He was cranky and tired; I was cranky and tired. Neither of us was much fun to be around. Luckily, Stewart Little 3 was on NetFlix and I had a stack of new books about women’s relationships at work. I started with “When Women Work Together” by Carolyn Duff.

According to Duff, there are four areas that bring women the greatest happiness at work — the four C’s, if you will: Connection, Caring, Creating Competence, Cooperation. When women can give and get each of these things at work in a balanced way, life is good! But when things get out of whack, watch out! That propensity to connect and communicate can turn into gossip and rumor mongering if a power balance is shifted. The desire for expressing care can go to a Melrose Place drama of unwarranted “are you okay” and weird gifts. Though we work hard, we can suffer from lack of confidence and sabotage not only ourselves, but our sisters too. The subtle balance of cooperation can be upended if we step out from the team. 

This morning I took my daughter to the doctor and found out she has pneumonia too.   Day 13 of the Swine Flu siege. After the trip to the doctor’s, Betsy and I were talking about women at work and our lives in general.  When we started, it was a grey, rainy kind of day but as we talked the sun came out. Betsy said I laughed 5 times — quite a miracle considering the state I was in. Even on an otherwise unhappy day, partnership brought some sunshine in and the best of the 4 C’s were alive and well.