Zara Pain and Dawn Jennings, joint HR Directors at Christies Hospital NHS Trust talked to Annie Hayes about the ins and outs of job-sharing; explaining their pet names ‘Zawn’ and ‘Dara’ and why Myers Briggs is to be thanked in matching Ms ‘gobby’ with Ms ‘quiet’.

Maverick and Goose, the two Ronnies, Ant and Dec, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers – the list of famous duos goes on. So what is it that makes a partnership a winning formula?

The job-sharing scenario at Christies came about from a mixture of circumstance, opportunity and foresight.

“I was working on a full-time secondment outside the Trust while Dawn was working part-time within it. I wanted to return to the Trust and continue my secondment part-time. Dawn was successful in being offered the role of Deputy Head of Personnel but only wanted to do it on a part-time basis and asked if anyone would be willing to do it with her. That’s when I put my hand up,” explains Zara.

Fortunate in having a supportive and open-minded Head of Personnel and Chief Executive the pair did not expend too much energy utilising their powers of persuasion.

From this initial job-share the duo were steadily promoted up the HR tree, first to Head of Personnel in June 2003 and then to Director of HR in August 2004.

As the joint HR Directors of the Trust they are responsible for four areas: Learning and Development, HR Support, the staff day nursery which has 73 places and the Occupational Health Service. The HR service is responsible for looking after the welfare of the Trust’s 1800 strong team.

They are also members of the Hospital Directors’ team which meets on a weekly basis as well as being members of the Trust Board which meets monthly.

“The role of HR within the Trust has changed considerably over the last few years. We’re now involved in strategic planning and have been rolling out the Agenda for Change project over the last 12 months which has been a massive project,” comments Zara.

I asked her how the partnership works in practice.

“We split our areas of responsibility. Dawn sets the objectives and does the PDP’s for the Head of HR Support while I do the same for the Head of Learning and Development for example.

“We divide the week between ourselves too. Dawn currently works Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday morning and I take over for the rest of the week. But we rotate our days regularly because there are some things that happen on certain days of the week that we both need exposure to.”

Getting the logistics right, however, hasn’t always been plain-sailing and when they first ventured into the world of job-sharing they used to operate a ‘handover book’.

“We literally kept a diary of what happened each day which meant that we could swap notes when we did the handover. But we’ve since dispensed with that and all we need now is about an hour to swap the key issues on a Wednesday together with an e-mail handover.”

In addition to the practicalities is managing others expectations of it.
“We basically told our boss who’d had no experience of a senior job-share before how to manage it. We are appraised separately and when we did the interview we did a joint presentation followed by individual interviews,” explains Zara.

Portraying themselves as one force has also eased the path to job-sharing success.

“When we first started we expected that it would be the staff that might play us off against each other but we were surprised that it was actually other mangers. We managed to nip that in the bud fairly quickly and from then on decided that the key was positioning ourselves as one. Having one desk and one shared calendar helps. If we could have one email address we’d do that too but we can’t,” says Zara.

For many working mums a job-share is the perfect solution to finding a balance between family and work commitments. This duo is no exception. Dawn has three children and Zara has two. But the pair have also been pleasantly surprised to find additional benefits:

“When you become a senior manager it can be lonely and you can feel isolated. Doing a job share at this level is fantastic for alleviating some of those problems. We have each other as a sounding board; we share the burden of our work. At this level it’s also more about thought-processes than tasks and having two brains instead of one is a definite advantage,” admits Zara.

And having two different approaches and indeed personality types helps strike a balance. Dawn the self-confessed ‘gobby’ one is the more vocal of the two while Zara is more of the quiet and confident type.

A Myers-Briggs test evaluated their personalities as:

• Dawn: ENTP – enjoys change, challenge and variety. Is extroverted and whose basic driving force is the search for competence and excellence.




• Zara: INTP – dominant function is thinking. Likes making decisions on the basis of logic. Tendency to be inwardly decisive, but not communicate those decisions to others.

I asked Dawn how the personality types work in practice: “We both do everything at the last minute which is really important. If we didn’t share this as a trait we wouldn’t get along because we’d irritate each other, so that is important. We also use our different characteristics to our advantage. We know which one of us will be more suited to approaching a person for example. I’ll say to Zara for example it’s better for me to talk to them then you or the other way round.”

As the partnership has matured so have the feelings towards it, explains Dawn:

“Our job-share is the most senior in the Trust. Just three months ago a new CEO was put in place and you could tell she was thinking, ‘oh my god!’ But just last week she said ours was the best job-share she’d ever come across. Some of the managers now even call us ‘Dara’ and ‘Zawn’ because they get confused as to who is who!”

But the best part, say the pair, is that they’ve gained much more than a job-share and a convenient work-life balance:

“We’re really good friends. We know when each other is up or down. It does help that we are a similar age and we both have kids so we have a lot in common. When Zara comes in and says she’s had a terrible time with the children I know exactly what she is talking about. It has to be like a marriage if you are going to make it work and I would advise anyone who is thinking about doing it to take a Myers-Briggs personality test!”

For the Trust, Zara and Dawn’s success has proved that job-sharing is not only something that can work at a junior level and while the two plan to move into full time Director positions of their own you get the feeling that their seamless operation will extend into their new roles as will their bond.