Jumping back on the ladder- a conversation with Harvard’s Christine Heenan

Cross-posted from the Huffington Post
Brenda Barnes, now CEO of Sara Lee, has gotten a lot of press because she left the corporate workforce for a decade to spend more time with her children, and recently returned to be CEO of a major company. Barnes is indeed a rare person, and women can make themselves feel guilty and bad for making trade offs when they’re raising a family. But there are plenty of women out there who illustrate that scaling back work to spend time with family is not a professional death sentence in the long run.

Christine Heenan, who spent her twenties in the Clinton White House and later, time with little kids running her own small business, notes that even after jumping off the corporate ladder, “You can absolutely come out on top. I had a period of time I thought, I’ll never be back in those circles…” She’s now back in a demanding new leadership role at a global institution, a role that requires the whole family’s cooperation, but “After a decade of really balancing work with my kids, we approach this new challenge as a team. I couldn’t have considered this career move if I hadn’t taken that time to be with my kids more ’til now.”

Heenan got her start on the Clinton White House policy team, and in 1995 became the head of government and community relations at Brown University, where she also taught. When Christine was recovering from delivering her first baby, her boss from Brown called Christine in the maternity ward: there was a crisis at work. After Christine had her second baby, she left Brown to start her own business, the Clarendon Group. The Clarendon Group won a Sloan Foundation Award in 2006, for “business excellence in workplace flexibility.” Obviously Christine made flexible working a priority when she ran the Clarendon Group. Indeed, she told me a fond memory of first starting her company and preparing a presentation with her first employee, also a mother. Christine took all the kids to the local park while her colleague hammered out the pages on the ink jet printer. Heenan noted that she would be curious to measure her employees’ children’s impressions of what work looks like, since the kids spent so much time in the office with their mothers, and felt like they had the run of the place. To them, kids and work were comfortably intermingled.

As I read Christine’s story in the book Womenomics I thought, great, another “success” story about a high-powered woman who jumps off the corporate ladder to start her own business and get a life. But, Christine’s story doesn’t end with Clarendon. She jumped back on the ladder, in a major way.

In July 2008, Christine became Harvard University’s Vice President for Government, Community, and Public Affairs. I was curious, how did her ten years in a flexible work environment–her own–affect her return to a corporate role?

I asked her how she decided to return.

She said,

“My kids are now at an age where we could make the decision as a family.” She said that because so much of her time during the past decade was spent “as a mother and a professional had been considering those needs I thought it was the right time” to take her own career goals into account again.

Still, “It’s been an adjustment of a year- but it’s been more of a team spirited discussion because of how the decision was made.” Christine told me that recently she was walking the dog with her ten year-old son and complained to him, “‘I have 100 emails- I don’t want to work any more today!’ And my son said, “‘Mom, we talked about this.’”

I asked her if she actually worked harder running her own business than for someone else?

She said,

“I restructured my relationship with Brown into a consultant role after her second son was born. Two years into that, I hired my first employee who was actually my neighbor, whose background was banking and non-profits, but was home with her three young children at the time. She and I, and our next employee – also a career professional now home with a new child — and our moved into a sublet office, then gradually grew.

“As your own boss, it’s not so much working harder as much as work always being with you. It’s your name on the door. But for me it was an easy trade off for being able to do what I wanted. No one could tell me I couldn’t.”

“Our flex policy was fairly organic. When it was just me and my neighbor we traded off aspects of work and time with the kids. The way we ended up having so many moms working flexibly was that’s what we became known for. At any given time at the firm, there was at least 50% of the staff working flex schedules. It wasn’t always women- for example we had a male colleague whose new wife was beginning a brutal schedule as a resident in Boston, and he worked two days a week [from his home] in Boston.”

Q: Could you describe a little how you negotiated when considering the Harvard job? Was flex on the table?

A: I did raise it in my first meeting with the search firm. I had nothing to lose; I wasn’t looking for a job. If they had explained that this was where [considering me] would have ended, fine. I was prepared to be out of the running due to my family demands. But it was actually the two women at the search – one pregnant with twins – convinced me to interview for the job. They argued: why not at least have that conversation?. So I did go forward with the search process, and I did raise it in my first meeting with the search committee. The most honest and important piece of advice I got in that first meeting was from a senior level colleague at Harvard who said, “It’s pretty safe to say everyone at this level is 24-7, and no one much cares where you are at 3 in the afternoon….”

Since taking the post, Christine has noted that both men and women model that attitude. Christine noted she has a colleague who is general counsel whose son is a very competitive high school wrestler. “There have been times that Jeff’s wrestling matches meant tied up evenings or weekends, and that is not hidden from view – everyone shares in and endorses those priorities here. It is really nice.”

Click here to finish reading