When Janet and I married in 2007, we exchanged vows as professional equals. She led all news coverage for The Tampa Tribune, NBC affiliate WFLA and digital powerhouse TBO.com. I led digital audience and innovation for our parent company, Media General, across a few dozen media properties.
In her previous marriage, Janet had been the breadwinner. Ditto in mine. We’d held the responsibility for making sure the bills got paid. Now we would be on equal footing. (Not in all ways, of course. I am a journalist, and facts matter. To wit: Her IQ is 17 points higher than mine. I cede the floor, your honor.)
Our motto for this equality has been: “You drive, I drive.”
That is, each of us is equally capable of taking the wheel if the other is compromised. By the flu, say. By a mother’s stroke. By a child’s emotional health. By a father’s slow slide into death.
When we started our business 10 years ago, this motto was critical to our success. In consulting, you eat what you kill. And not everyone kills on the same day. Client work can clump into one side of the business, then switch for a stretch, then switch back. It’s allowed us to put four children through college, support two ex-spouses and their households, and smooth paths for aging parents who need the support that even terrific planning can’t foresee.
Success for us has been based on the willingness to step into the spotlight and then step out when the business demands. As a theater brat - I had my Actors’ Equity Card by the time I was 16, so don’t quiz me on Rogers & Hammerstein - this is the equivalent of going from the chorus to the leading role, then back again, depending on what the audience wants.
You drive, I drive.
Of course, it’s more fun to drive than ride shotgun.
Although we’ve worked most projects together, there always were some that required one of us to be the face of the business and the other to toil in the background. And for a long stretch, that was true as one of our clients - the Local Media Consortium - swelled from a 40-hour-per-month engagement in 2011 to a full-time CEO position in 2017.
As the LMC’s leader, I spoke regularly at conferences, attended high-level meetings with Google, Facebook, Apple and others, hit Platinum on Delta (and even had Delta CEO Ed Bastian sit next to me on a flight) and enjoyed the illusion of status. Since the LMC did not want me as a full-time employee until I incorporated it in 2017, I managed full-time employees but remained a contractor and kept a small hand in other consulting projects.
But with one client taking so much bandwidth, other work slowed. Janet’s side of the practice was strong, but mine took up more and more space. And attention.
You drive, I drive.
This works until it doesn’t. After a while, you get tired of singing harmony and want to take center stage again. Not for the attention - although that’s always a factor, and only the Dali Lama may be above such things - but because not flexing those muscles wastes those muscles. And you worry that they will atrophy.
We talked about this often - a marriage of journalists does not lack for communication skills - and Janet would share her frustration over this imbalance. And how little time I spent on our relationship, our children and my health. A calling is consuming, and it will consume everything if you let it.
So I let go of the wheel. Resigned from the LMC in March 2018, saying, You drive.
And she did. And now, she’s about to really hit the gas.
For almost two years, Janet’s work with Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication has grown, much like my work with the LMC. She wrote grant proposals - and in some cases, managed the execution of those grants - for a variety of programs. She toured the U.S. with visiting journalism scholars from around the world. She helped design an editorial leadership program for public media. Sometimes I catch her on the phone with journalism professionals in Macedonia. Wow.
She’s been able to do this remotely, but her work has been so impactful to the school that she’s been, in baseball terms, called up to the majors.
Starting in January, she will be Executive Director for Innovation and Strategy for Cronkite, in charge of the vast adjunct faculty, the school’s international grant programs, accreditation and myriad other duties, including working with the school’s News Co/Lab on its efforts to build media literacy.
This is a huge acknowledgement of her work, her career and her capabilities. It puts her in the company of journalism professionals around the world - her tribe, that Murderer’s Row we all want to join - and will challenge her to flex those muscles.
Last week, we loaded a U-haul and moved her into an apartment close to the ASU campus in Phoenix. I’ll stay in Florida to manage our business and family obligations - they don’t call it “the Sandwich Generation” for no reason - and give her the wheel.
Co-location is no picnic, but we’ve done it before. We’ll both accumulate a lot of Delta miles. We may see Ed again. But this as an important season, and one of personal growth.
For Janet, fully occupying that spotlight and knocking the cover off the ball. For me, helping her be successful and keeping the trains running on time.
This is an essential part of being a leader and certainly of being a partner: Knowing when to lead and when to support, and embracing each with equal gusto. As Type-A people, leaders who lack that balance can come to resemble that guy at the gym who skips leg day. Don’t be that guy.
If life is a highway, the only way to navigate is to embrace the motto: You drive, I drive.