The Secret to Having the Best Relationship With Your Work Wife

Grey's Anatomy's Cristina Yang and Meredith Grey. Younger's Liza Miller and Kelsey Peters. Crazy Ex-Girlfriend's Rebecca Bunch and Paula Proctor. These television power pairs are each other's closest confidantes, allies, and cheerleaders. They're also work wives. But beyond pop culture—across every industry—the work wife relationship is an important dynamic for many women. So much so that Erica Cerulo and Claire Mazur, cofounders of fashion and design website Of a Kind, have written a definitive book on the subject called Work Wife: The Power of Female Friendship to Drive Successful Businesses.

In Work Wife, Cerulo and Mazur explore how female partnerships in the office can lead to a more progressive, productive, and empowering workplace. The biggest takeaway from the book—and their own experience—is the secret to maintaining a solid relationship: You have to put in the work.

One of the ways Cerulo and Mazur do this is by seeing a management coach together. They started going to theirs, Ben Michaelis, Ph.D., six years into working together—right after they sold their company, which they still continue to run. "We realized we wanted to see a coach because we were struggling," Cerulo says. "For the first time ever, we had a boss, and that was the biggest source of tension: how to manage that situation as a single unit and how to deal with authority in this way that we’d never had to do in the course of our working relationship."

They meet with their coach weekly, and the structure of the sessions are similar to couples therapy. They say working with a third party has strengthened their partnership, sharpened their communication skills, and made them more effective leaders. "I don't think it's possible to have the working relationship we have and not wish you could work through certain issues with someone else, or have a forum to deal with the ins and outs of your day-to-day interactions," Cerulo says.

So when Sierra Tishgart and Maddy Moelis started their kitchenware company, Great Jones, together, Cerulo and Mazur recommended seeing their coach. Tishgart and Moelis are childhood friends of 20 years—they first met at sleep-away camp—but when it came time to launch their company, they knew they wanted to consult an expert. "Seeing a coach was one of the first business decisions we made and one of the first investments," Tishgart says. "To run our business, both successfully and long-term, depends on the strength of our relationship. So having a dedicated space to process all of the rapid changes that we’re experiencing in the business—and knowing that we can rely on that—has been invaluable."

Whether you're launching a venture with a partner, or just have an extremely close bond with someone on your team, both pairs of work wives attest that having dedicated time to work on your work relationship can help in the long run. As coach Michaelis puts it, "Erica and Claire, as well as Sierra and Maddy, are so successful because they really love each other. They protect each other like they would a marriage, and they also work on that love. Making time for your counterpart—like you would for a romantic partner—and treating it with that level of significant care is what makes it a success."

So if you're looking to better your work relationships—with a management coach or by carving out some time for one another—here are a few tips to get you started.

Understand Each Other's Quirks

They say that opposites attract, which can also be true with business partners. Tishgart considers this a strength of her relationship with Moelis. "What makes Maddy and my relationship work is that different things stress us out," she says. They take time to understand each other's differences, as well as empathize with the other's stressors. "We try to figure out how to really take care of each other in those instances," Tishgart explains. "It’s natural to have stress and anxiety when you’re building something. So we talk and say, 'Hey, I see this was a stressful week for you. How can we make sure that stress doesn’t spread and dissipate?' This helps us not become a sponge for one another. When you’re working so closely together, it's important to figure out how not to diminish or erase your stress, but to really help to contain and support it."

Quality Time Is Key

You can't work on your relationship if you're not actually spending time together. Michaelis suggests setting aside weekly face-to-face time, no matter what. "That time is sacred, so you can empathize with one another and know what’s going on in each other’s lives," he says. He also warns that you shouldn't make the majority of your communication over the Internet, especially around challenging or sensitive issues. "Slack is fine for purely functional things, but we overuse the tool," he says, "especially when we don’t want to deal with certain things. That’s where the challenge really comes in."

Having built-in time together has been essential for Cerulo and Mazur and helped them work better with their new boss. Before they started seeing a coach, they would go into meetings with their boss without a game plan, which often derailed them. "Now, every week at our check-ins, we talk about our agenda with our boss and what we're trying to achieve in this meeting. It's something we hadn't done and was an easy fix," Cerulo says.

Get Comfortable Compromising

While Tishgart and Moelis are old pals, their work experience is very different. Tishgart cut her teeth food writing; Moelis' background is in start-ups. So when it came time to create a company culture, they had opposing ideas of what that looked like. "We really wanted to set our cultural framework from day one for ourselves and others," Tishgart says. "I come from this very liberal writer life, while Maddy comes from a more structured background. We wanted to leave room for both." To do that they drafted their ideal company culture in a document. "Then we came together to figure out what was most important to each of us. We landed on a shared document, which we still stick to, and has allowed us to have a strong, consistent message."

Finding this balance will help you share the same vision. "Like with a couple, if you aren't aligned with your goals, you've got big problems at the outset," Michaelis says. "In my work, I make sure to have partners articulate their goals in a way that can line up together—so they can work toward the same future."

Not Everything Has to Be Solved in Real Time

In business, problems will arise. It's inevitable. That doesn't mean you need to stop everything to solve them. "There are so many things that come up in the day-to-day of running the business where we would’ve said, 'Oh my God, we need to deal with this right now,'" Mazur says. "Whether it was stopping everything to handle a situation with an employee who just gave notice or deal with this message that came in, we'd want to fix it immediately. Now that’s something we’ll say, 'OK, that’s something we should talk about in our session.' We’ve gotten reasonably good about putting it out of our minds until then and learning to set things aside for those chats." While things can often feel urgent, sometimes tabling the problem and talking it through when you're both ready is the best solution.

Celebrate Your Successes

When you're going through the churn of the workweek, it's sometimes hard to take a step back and celebrate your wins. But you owe it to yourselves to congratulate each other. "That’s something our coach has been really adamant about, to celebrate our success," Tishgart says. "We were fund-raising for months. The second we got a lead investor, I was like, 'We’re onto the next!' But he was like, 'Take a minute, go to dinner, and celebrate the level of accomplishment here.'" She says it's been invaluable for her confidence and emotional state. The next time you get a new project green-lighted, or have a successful meeting, take the time to celebrate—and honor your partnership and all of your accomplishments together.

Samantha Leach is an assistant culture editor at Glamour. Follow her on Twitter @_sleach.