

#CITY GIRL LIFE CAREERS PROFESSIONAL#
When the author, a professional recruiter with Korn Ferry, speaks with candidates about potential job opportunities, one of the first questions she asks is whether there’s anything in their family situation that she should know about-meaning, Will the family make a candidate reluctant to relocate for a new job? Here she describes how candidates’ spouses who have their own demanding careers can be a factor in job searches, how she approaches this challenge, and how she has managed the trade-offs in her own dual-career marriage. Tamar Dane Dor-Ner, a managing partner at Bain, and her husband, Dan Krockmalnic, general counsel for the Boston Globe, talk in a Q&A with HBR editors about how they support each other, how they divide child care and other domestic responsibilities, the benefits each realizes from the other’s job, and what challenges the future might hold. Those who communicate at each transition about deeper work and personal issues such as values, boundaries, and fears have a better chance of emerging stronger from each one, fulfilled both in their relationships and in their careers.

In her study of more than 100 couples around the globe, the author found that dual-career couples tend to go through three transitions when they are particularly vulnerable: when they first learn to work together as a couple when they go through a midcareer or a midlife reinvention and as they reach the final stages of their careers.
