Martina Wieckhorst:  No Half Measures

Martina Wieckhorst, Körber site: Hamburg-Bergedorf, Germany

I’ve worked at Körber for 44 years. 
And in all that time, we never did things halfway.  

Except once. 

And even that — we made it work. 

In 1993, when I had my first child, we didn’t have flexible arrangements for parental leave. 
You either worked — or you weren’t there. 

I wanted to stay. 
And I wanted to take responsibility. 
For my child. And for my job. 

So we talked. 
Not about entitlements. 
Not about exceptions. 
But about how it could work. 

What we found didn’t yet have a name. 
Job sharing wasn’t a concept back then. 
We didn’t look for it. 
We didn’t invent it. 

We just did it.

A colleague and I shared one position. 
One of us worked in the morning, and the other in the afternoon. 
Handovers, vacations, responsibility – we managed it together. 

There was only one condition from our manager: 
Everything had to work exactly as before. 

And it did. 

Because we were trusted.
And because we took that trust seriously. 

For me, this wasn’t a special arrangement. 
It was a signal. 

A signal that here, the first question isn’t: 
“Is this allowed?” 
But: 
“What does it take to make it work?” 

I’ve seen many changes at Körber. 
New names. New structures. New times. 
But one thing has remained: 

If something makes sense, 
we don’t spend long explaining why it won’t work. 
We figure out how it will. 

Maybe that’s why I stayed. 
Not because everything was easy. 
But because things became possible 
before they even had a name. 

No half measures. 
Not even when shared.