Field notes on the lesser spotted senior job share Shared jobs at a senior corporate level are rare. After all, how do you divide complex responsibilities between two people whilst guaranteeing nothing falls through the cracks? Global strategy directors at Unilever, Clare Dolan and Rosie O'Malley have shared their role for the past two years, and chose to "act as one person and share the whole job," explains Ms O'Malley. We try to be as seamless as possible. They both work three days a week in the same senior marketing job. Ms O'Malley is in the office Monday, Tuesday and Friday; Ms Dolan Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. "On Monday evening, I send Clare a handover note," says Ms O'Malley. Tuesday morning, we sit down together from 8.30am to 9.30am to catch up. The rest of Tuesday, we do things together - strategic decisions, team meetings and personnel stuff. Thursday afternoon at 4.30pm, we have a quick half-hour phone call and follow up by email. To share a job role was their boss's suggestion, and the pair - who had never previously worked together - were intrigued but wary. They paid for a consultant to spend a day with them to analyse their working preferences and grilled other hard-to-find senior job shares before deciding. Aside from constantly handing over, the pair decided to ask colleagues to copy each other in on every email so that neither was left out of any important communication. "On my days off, I will read my emails for my own sanity and Clare does the same," explains Ms O'Malley. They say their system works 98 per cent of the time. "So far, we have not dropped any significant balls," she adds. The pair have come to trust and rely on each other completely. Says Ms Dolan: "We share issues and concerns, and solve a lot of problems between ourselves. It is always about thinking "we" and not "I."" How pessimism bias ruins decisions If you have recently lost some money, and are about to make an important economic decision, you may need to stop and ask yourself whether you have developed a "pessimism bias." According to new research from the University of North Carolina Kenan-Flagler Business School, this is when your thinking about future pay-offs becomes overly pessimistic - and therefore inaccurate. Instead of feeling confident that a risk might be worth taking, you feel apprehensive about it and will shy away from what could end up being a good opportunity. Apparently the brain learns differently from good and bad experiences, making us worse learners from a negative situation than from a positive one. T-shirts and personal productivity Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder, on why he wears the same style of grey T-shirt each day: " I'm not doing my job if I spend any of my energy on things that are silly or frivolous about my life." Boring outfits enable him to dedicate all his juices to "building the best products and services." But would the odd colour change really threaten the functioning of the internet?