When Kristina Marsh returned to work after her son, Ethan, was born five years ago, she knew one thing for sure: She wanted to continue nursing her baby. She'd heard through the grapevine that Dow Corning had breast pumps—somewhere. Lactation support wasn't an official benefit, so it was left to individual building managers to decide whether to buy a pump. Some did, many didn't. "The program, if you can call it that, was to make do with what Dow Corning had, if you could find it," Kristina says. After calls to lots of other moms, Kristina finally found a pump—two buildings away from her office in human resources on the corporate campus in Midland, MI. One round-trip would take at least 45 minutes, too long to be away from her desk. Frustrated, Kristina rented her own pump and bought an attachment kit, for a total cost of about $350.

Kristina, now 31 and a marketing communications and e-business coordinator for core products business, didn't forget that experience, so when Dow Corning announced a new focus on work/life effectiveness and benefits in 2004, she jumped at the chance to push for lactation support. As chair of the company's Working Parents Support Network, she'd heard other moms complain about a lack of pumps, broken equipment and missing attachment kits. Armed with their feedback, she went to Ed Colbert, then manager of Dow Corning's HR policies and new programs, and pitched for a formal program. Colbert wanted hard numbers. "Dow Corning is meticulous about what it's going to spend money on," he explains. "We had to weigh the benefits and the costs." Kristina knew just who to ask for help: the certified lactation consultant she relied on after having Ethan. Together they compiled data showing the nutritional value of breast milk and how healthy babies can reduce the number of employee sick days, cut company health-care costs, even impact turnover. On her own time, Kristina also priced pumps and attachment kits to give Colbert a cost estimate. What sealed the deal for Colbert was a tour of some of the makeshift lactation rooms. They didn't have door locks, resulting in walk-ins while moms were pumping. "The rooms weren't private and certainly not comfortable," he says.

Follow-up and More Follow-up 
Colbert signed off on Kristina's proposal, and about six months after their initial conversation, lactation support became an official benefit for Dow Corning's roughly 4,000 U.S. employees. Kristina secured $5,000 to buy new pumps and an initial supply of attachment kits that the company gives out free to moms. The program also provides complimentary breastfeeding classes, free access to a certified lactation consultant, resources on the company's health benefits website and dedicated private rooms with locks and comfortable chairs. Arranging the rooms was a challenge in some buildings, but Kristina convinced building managers to give up small conference rooms and vacant offices. Calls went out to security to install door locks. Then there were the window treatments, chairs and mini fridges to order. "I did a lot of following up to get the right people together to get it done," she acknowledges.

Eight employees now oversee the program at the company's various sites, and if a mom doesn't have a pump nearby, Kristina gets a call. Although she's no longer in HR, Kristina still makes nearly all requests for new pumps and attachment kits to Dow Corning's benefits manager. "Somehow I've become our unofficial lactation support coordinator!" she says. So far, she's never been turned down. And she got to use the equipment herself when her daughter, Jocelyn, was born two years ago. "Women shouldn't have to choose between breastfeeding or working," she asserts. "Being in a culture that supports both makes me a more balanced and productive employee."

Your First Step
Call the obstetrics unit at your local hospital and ask them to recommend a certified lactation consultant in your area. That's how Kristina found hers. "These people are passionate about this issue," she says. "They can help you piece together the data to make the case for a program."

Two people sharing one job is a concept that still befuddles many employers: According to a recent survey by the Society for Human Resource Management, only 18 percent of companies today let two employees job-share. So it's pretty remarkable that back in 1998, Nancy Schumann and Sandy Sullivan were offered a job-share at General Electric. Granted, they were the perfect candidates: Nancy, who started at GE straight out of college, had been job-sharing since 1993 after the birth of her first child. Sandy had consulted companies about flexible work arrangements before joining GE in 1996. When Nancy's work partner left the company, Nancy and Sandy began thinking about working together. They approached their boss, Marc Chini, who was reorganizing department roles at the time. He had the same idea and offered them a job managing organizational development and training for GE Industrial Systems. "We joined up for the simple fact that we both had young kids at the time," says Nancy, who's now 43 and the mother of four, ages 13, 11, 6 and 2. Sandy, 42, has two kids, ages 13 and 11. Fast-forward to 2006, and the two moms are still joined at the hip, as program manager for diversity and inclusive leadership for all of GE.

The job-share may have landed in their laps, but it's lasted eight years—and counting—because they've shown their bosses and coworkers that it can work. "You need to have courage when people ask, 'Now just what is your schedule again?'" Sandy says. "There's a perception that you can't be as committed as the person working seventy-hour weeks." The two hammered out a schedule with flextime built in?each works three days a week with one day overlapping, although business and personal needs often turn that tidy schedule upside down. When Nancy had her fourth child a couple of years ago, Sandy held down the fort during her four-month maternity leave. "Her husband asked me, 'Are you going to be okay?' " recalls Sandy. "I said, 'Cut off my right arm and that's how well I'm going to do.' "

The pair has made financial sacrifices, too. Each earns 60 percent of a full-time salary, with vacations prorated as well, and they pay extra for the same health-care coverage given to full-timers. As for promotions, well, it took time for the GE culture, one that rewards individual performance, to adapt to their collaborative work arrangement. It finally did in 2002, when Nancy and Sandy beat out two individual candidates and were offered a high-profile job as manager of executive leadership training at GE. Instead of being tucked away in a business division, they—and their unusual work setup—would be in front of the company's top executives, including CEO Jeffrey Immelt.

New Challenges, Tough Decisions
The promotion was a no-brainer, right? Not quite. The job involved 65 percent travel, a deal-breaker for Sandy, a single mom who shares custody of her kids with her ex. She told Nancy to take the job without her. "It was an emotional time for us," says Nancy. After lots of soul-searching, and with support from the manager who recruited them for the job, Nancy and Sandy figured out how to redesign the position and slice the travel in half. When they ran a three-week leadership conference in Japan, for instance, Sandy went for the first half and Nancy attended the second.

In fact, unlike other job-sharers who split their duties down the middle, Nancy and Sandy work on everything in tandem—a style that makes managing them a breeze, says their current boss, GE vice president and chief diversity officer Deborah Elam. "I don't ever have to deal with who covers what," she says. "I joke that the hardest thing is remembering to type both of their names in an email." At this point, Nancy and Sandy can finish each other's sentences. "The life support I get from Sandy is the icing on the cake," Nancy says. "I don't know what comes first?our personal friendship or our professional work."

Your First Step
Ask yourself if you can really work with someone who's not your carbon copy. Sandy, for instance, is a swing-for-the-fences kind of gal, while Nancy likes to think things through before acting. It took time to get used to each other's style, but now each respects the other's unique traits and sees their differences as a secret of their success.

Power in Numbers
Mothers Network at Ernst & Young

Beth Schiavo knows just about every mom in Ernst & Young's southeast area. She can tell you who has twins, who's on a flexible work arrangement and who brings her toddler to child care every morning. No, she's not a busybody. She's a leader of the Working Moms Network, a group she cofounded last year to connect moms at the accounting firm.

It all started for Beth, 35, on her first day back from maternity leave early last year. That's when she met with Tom Hough, the firm's southeast managing partner, and Joe Cegala, then area manager for its assurance and advisory business services. Hough asked Beth, a first-time mom, how the firm could better help her navigate her new life as a working parent. Beth, thinking about the moms in her office who had guided and mentored her during her pregnancy, and knowing that her bosses were considering some type of forum for working moms, made an off-the-cuff proposal: How about a formal network where moms can lean on one another for advice? Her bosses told her to do some research and come back with a plan.

Beth spent the next month brainstorming the idea with other moms in the firm's Atlanta office, including one of her mentors, Kelly Noland, a senior manager and mother of two who became her cofounder. Together they came up with a network made up of intimate circles of seven to ten moms in the area's 16 offices. The entire network connects on quarterly conference calls to discuss parenting and work issues, but each circle arranges its own get-togethers so moms can bond and form friendships. When a woman announces she's pregnant, the circle in her office mobilizes and assigns her a mentor—an idea patterned after Beth's own experience—who counsels her through her pregnancy, maternity leave and return to work, a period Beth calls "eighteen months of vulnerability." No question is off-limits, from child care and postbaby work schedules to how to stay alert in a meeting when you've been up all night with a colicky infant. "The goal is to make sure these women understand that, yes, it can be an intimidating time, but all the aspects of a career at Ernst & Young are still there for you," says Beth. She knows this firsthand: Two months after returning from maternity leave, she was promoted to partner, a process that began during her leave.

Lunch and Learn
Beth and Kelly presented their plan to Hough and others, who approved but had one big concern: Could they really do all of this? Schedules were rearranged to let Beth and Kelly hold lunch-and-learn sessions about the network at area offices. Beth spent 40 percent of her time building up the network, working all of her connections. "I called everyone I knew in our offices and said, 'Give me a list of all the women who have kids or are pregnant.' " The feedback was instantaneous. In fact, the hardest part was keeping up with the momentum she had created. In six months, the network went from 30 moms to nearly 100, and today it's nearly 200 strong—and still growing.

Evidence of the group's power: When word got out that parents were paying for child care to work weekends during busy seasons, Kelly, Beth and their team successfully lobbied managers to reimburse their expenses. The Working Moms Network also caught the attention of company leadership. It went national last May, just a year after Beth's group got under way, with networks sprouting across the country. Branches run independently, but all meet up remotely through conference calls. As for Beth, she's always looking for new moms to recruit in her area—and she's got a circle of friends waiting to meet them.

Your First Step
Find another mom with circumstances different from your own to help you launch a network. If you're a single mom, for instance, join forces with a married one. Got teens? Reel in a mom of a toddler. Beth and Kelly have different types of child-care arrangements and are at different points in their careers. Their unique perspectives helped them create a network that appeals to a range of moms at the firm.