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As we look forward to our Annual Faith + Work Conference: Meaningful Work in an Age of Disruption this Saturday, April 2, 2022, the Center for Faith + Work Los Angeles is proud to present Part 2 of the conversation with one of our thoughtful speakers, Michaela O'Donnell. Michaela is Executive Director of the Max De Pree Center for Leadership at Fuller Seminary and will be talking with our own Robert Covolo, Director of Vocational Discipleship at CFWLA.
In this episode, they discuss the way work forms us + seeing the fruit in our work, the importance of relationships and people in all types of work, the problem of "pursuing our passions" and the role ambiguity plays in vocation additional insights from her new book Make Work Matter: Your Guide to Meaningful Work in a Changing World.
QUOTABLE
On why "pursuing your passions" is a problem (Michaela O'Donnell; 7:56)
"It's very us-focused...when we are the center of what's going to make things happy for us, I worry a lot about that it feels dissonant with the Christian story."
On ambiguities at work (Michaela O'Donnell; 11:43)
"Tetherball. You have a tire on the ground, a pole that goes up, and a large string with a ball attached to it. And you try to hit it back and forth and you're trying to get the ball to go all the way around. And when I picture what we're going to need / what it's going to feel like to tolerate ambiguity. I picture it kind of like that, we are going to probably be whipped around by the wind and change. But, we are attached, we are tethered to Jesus Christ, the story of God, what we know to be the arch of God's mission in the world and what God continues to reveal through the Holy Spirit."
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TRANSCRIPT
Transcription for the Faith + Work LA Podcast is done by AI software, which will occasionally include typos and other misspellings.
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Robert Covolo 00:00
So I'm here with Michaela O'Donnell, who is a professor of marketplace leadership, Executive Director of the Max De Pree Center, and we are talking about her book, Make Work Matter: Your Guide to Meaningful Work in a Changing World. And Michaela, I've really enjoyed our conversation. And one of the things that has come up is how work can either kind of cause us to be deformed? Is that the right way of saying it? To be kind of like, take away and impoverish our humanity, or can cause us to flourish? So I want to talk a little bit more about that. And we had mentioned the need to lament when things don't work, right. But maybe there's some other aspects of the way in which our work can either be making us more human or less human. And do you think that's true, Michaela? And can you maybe give us a few more things that you think, yeah, we need to keep an eye out for in terms of how work is going to either make us really feel like we're flourishing or detract from our lives?
Michaela O'Donnell 1:06
Yeah, it's great. I think maybe the phrase I would use is malformed can malform us. And I think for starters, like we have the name, that is a very privileged historically, it's a privileged conversation. And I'm talking about even just the last like decade or two, recent history, in which we get to think about how work forms our humanity, a lot of people around the world and over the course of human history, are not thinking about work as ohh, a means of self-actualization or fulfillment, or, you know, is like our own, like, what it gives to us is just it's like, it is the thing we do in order to meet basic needs. And so that utilitarian aspect of work, I think, I don't think we want to lose that, right. That's like that. I think that's actually part of why the work gets so sticky is because we are in this "what does it owe us" season of humanity.
Robert Covolo 2:11
Particularly even in our, in our, you know, affluent, Western culture, you know, you can get a job driving a bus, and you're in a country where you don't have those kind of, you know, kind of privileges and access, that you might just feel like you just, you know, who cares how it's forming me or not, forming me, I'm putting, you know, bread on the table. So yeah, there is something about this conversation in particular that, so maybe we can pick that up as well. Like, what do we say to those folks that, that don't have that can't like, yeah, I want to find my dream job and be a creative that, you know, pursues my, my passions.
Michaela O'Donnell 2:47
Yeah, I mean, let's start there. And then we'll go back to the forming. So I was in a conversation and I was doing a workshop a few months ago, and a woman was telling me her story and the story was basically her wrestling with her own privilege as the child of immigrant parents. She described her parents' work as you know, picking fruit in the fields, and then she had this like white-collar like she were, you know, in a white-collar job, and that the dissonance she was feeling and the privilege and as a group, we talked through this the complexity there. On the firsthand, she in her job, actually found it harder to see the fruits of her labor than her parents. Like right there. There it is like it's there is literally the fruit right like there are the strawberries. And she's got to like get in touch with the fruits of her labor in a different way with that actually requires a particular kind of work. And now she's got to steward the privilege financially, probably in that in her family system.
There's just all kinds of layers. And so I think that there's even for me, it's like, am I connected to the fruit of my work? Can I name it do can I name the fruit of my labor, I, I'm not driving a bus or I pick up kids and drop them off to school and they're safe arrival is the fruit of my labor. That's a very tactile thing. So I, I don't want to elevate one over the other. Because I think that there's there's just a lot of value in tangible fruit kind of work, where you can see the fruit of your labor. Then I would say for people in any kind of position, whether we can see tangible fruits of our labor, or whether that feels more distant. And we're wrestling with that, we go back to this formation question that you posed, like, what do we look for? How do we look for it?
I don't know about you, Robert, but one of the things that I hear most from people, both when I'm talking about this book, when we when I talk to people to the De Pree Center, is it the number one factor that had whether I'm going to feel formed in a positive way or malformed in a negative way, in my work, has a lot to do with other people, right has a lot to do with the other people. Like our other people, I'm spending my time with my days with working toward common objectives. Are they like, kind and decent? Do they show gratitude? Is my boss, does she or he care about my humanity? Or am I sort of a cog in the system? That's about kind of the, you know, bottom line at all costs, and where I feel like, I'm not actually valued. Those are very real questions.
And so I think we see some of this coming to the front, the forefront in the Great Resignation. A lot of industries, the way they're set up, we think they won't even go into naming them. But certain industries, the way they're set up, really don't make a ton of space for some of that basic stuff for people. And it's hard, it's driving. And then you got a whole other class of people that like I like the people I work with, they're kind of not great, or they're asking me to work to my bosses or asking me to work too hard. And so that I think people are wrestling with these questions or formation malformation, which connects back to as Christians like, what does it mean to be in touch with the fruit of our labor? Do we get to be in touch with it? Are there longer life cycles of growth in harvests and, you know, planting that come in certain kinds of jobs and industries? Probably. So I think the questions of formation, malformation, and being really honest about the nature of privilege are they're just really important.
Robert Covolo 6:34
Yeah, they are important and they're big subjects. And, and then there's also just, I mean, when I read your book, one of the things that come to my mind is, I did some research, in my doctoral work on ritual in the Middle Ages. And one of the strange things is that when people didn't when they weren't in a meritocracy when you're in a society where it's like, I'm a baker, my father's a baker, grandfather's a baker like you don't have any expectations that you're going to go and just your work is going to like, make you come alive, and you're gonna become self-actualized. And all of your passions are going to be realized. In there in your mind, you're, you're just simply kind of, so you don't. So some societies actually don't carry the same problems that we carry, because of expectations we have one of the things I loved in your book, there's just so many things. I wish we could just spend all day talking. But one thing I loved in your book was when you talked about the importance of debunking passions, as the only way of understanding calling. You said, "There's a dysfunctional belief regarding work. And it's that we need to find we need to pursue the holy grail of our passions." Why is it that pursuing we hear that everywhere? pursuing your passions is so important. Why is that a problem, Michaela?
Michaela O'Donnell 7:56
Well, I, I think it's a problem for a couple of reasons. One, it's very us-focused. It's very, again, like when we are the center of our idealized version of something. It feels very different than the way of Jesus who says like, you know, worship of God with all your heart, mind, soul and strength and treat your neighbor as yourself. It doesn't necessarily say don't care about yourself. You're not, you're a non-factor. I know I'm not saying that. But when we are the center of what's going to make things like happy for us, you know, I just worry a lot about that it feels dissonant with the Christian story.
The second reason why it's problematic is because I don't think it's very practical. I'm a pragmatist. Like I'm a businesswoman. I'm an entrepreneur, so I'm a pragmatist. So we, you know, we send you basically kids, you know, 21, 22, 23-year-olds. So we tell them like, go and find something you're passionate about, you'll never work a day in your life and developmentally speaking, like they're just getting going with knowing who they are. They're just getting going. And the data shows that the only way you can truly know what it is you love to do, what your sense of particular giftedness or flow is, is to actually try things. Yeah. It's like, if I would have asked my 22-year-old self, what is Michaela good at? I might have said some things who knows what I would have said, I probably wouldn't capture what 38-year-old Michaela would have said, say And critically, Robert, like 38-year-old Michaela cannot capture what 60-year-old Michaela, like God willing, will know. Right? Oh, Michaela was actually you know, and maybe. So I just think that we've got to make space in our models of what's ideal for that longevity of development as a human to play out. And focusing on passion, as the rubric of whether a job is worth doing, really negates all that stuff.
Robert Covolo 10:03
I love it. I love it. You know it, Michaela there, I just, I just really, I just love, I love this theme. It fits with so many other things you do in your book that are just really, I don't know, if I was to summarize your book, I'd say I would hand it to somebody and say this is going to cause you to think about just the deeper resources in which, which the deeper world that's going on underneath your work, because underneath your work, there's all kinds of things happening. You know, we have stories, we've been told about what work is going to do for us, we have things that we don't know, we're even bringing to our work, we have ways in which our work is deforming us, we and some of that is shaped through our culture, you know, all these things.
One of my favorite quotes and I like triple underline is you say, "Callings from God are less like treasures waiting to be uncovered in the sand, and more like slabs of marble waiting to be chiseled away over time." I loved that quote, which is pretty much a summary of what you just said, which is that there's a process. And that's one of the things that's beautiful in your book, if you don't mind me kind of just going off on how much I enjoyed your book is just the, just that you really deal with the fact that work was meant to be something meaningful and rich. But that doesn't mean that's always easy, and always make sense. And that and that there's no ambiguities to deal with. And so I just love that. And maybe you could say something a little bit more about ambiguities because I think a lot of our listeners are probably tuning in, and they probably find themselves with ambiguities in and maybe where they're going, where they've come from, or what's going on in their job right now.
Michaela O'Donnell 11:43
Yeah, it's great. Thanks for saying that. Robert. That means a lot. Yeah, ambiguity, I think, you know, one of the things I say in the book is that one of the, all the rules of how work have used to happen, have changed for sort of the information based West at least. And at the heart of that is we have to be prepared to be unprepared, the ambiguity and change are just going to be our constant companions. Whether it's a global pandemic or witnessing war on TikTok, I mean, there we are just there's so much happening, right? As we speak, and in so just, and that's not even what's happening in our work, okay, get on, get into new technologies, and learn this new job description. Because we've downsized or now we're gonna go do this thing. And so you got to change it or used to be awesome at this. But everybody thinks differently now. So just plays out on so many levels.
We're doing some current research at the De Pree Center. Now, I'm not allowed to say that this is like formal findings yet. But what I can say is this, we are hearing from a number of people, we did 18 focus groups. And one of the things that we're hearing is that in leadership in the coming age, it's one of the top things in the list is going to require the capacity to tolerate ambiguity. And that I think, kind of makes me want to take a just deep breath, because I'm like, okay, and to your point earlier, that feels like, I don't know, did you ever play that game? Tetherball in elementary school? Okay, so I like tetherball. It's like you got a tire on the ground, it's very unsophisticated tire on the ground, a pole that goes up and a large string with a ball attached to it. And you try to hit it back and forth and you're trying to like get the ball to go all the way around. And when I picture like what we're going to need to what it's gonna need to feel like to tolerate ambiguity. I picture it kind of like that, like we are going to probably be like whipped around by the wind and change. But like, we are attached, we are tethered like we are tethered to Jesus Christ, the story of God, like what we know to be the arch of God's mission in the world and what God continues to reveal through the Holy Spirit.
And that allows us in these moments of feeling so overwhelmed by all that's happening, and the capacity to solve the ambiguity with some sort of known solution, like, Okay, I'll just do this, or this or this right to reach for control. It allows us to like to say, Okay, we're being whipped, or we're being whipped around by the wind right now. And that feels very chaotic. And, like, we're tethered, and to like, stay there and ask, what is this ambiguity? What does this change have to teach us? How can we be people who know how to weather the storm? Right? So I think ambiguity is, is at the heart of the work of humans, and particularly Christians as we go forward.
Robert Covolo 14:45
Michaela, this is this has been rich, and I just wish we could just Well, luckily, we're going to see you at our Annual Conference. And you and I are actually both colleagues at Fuller so hopefully, we'll be rubbing shoulders in the future much more but I'm just so thankful for your time, Michaela, and I'm grateful that you were able to join with us, we're looking forward to hearing more from you at our conference.
And I guess I just want to add, I just want to end with one thing that I just thought was beautiful was you, you go after this, the importance of relationships that if we're going to have deeply, and you kind of mentioned already, but deeply meaningful work, it really is about showing up at the workplace, building into it, this idea that that relationships are, and the quality of our relationships are part and parcel of the success of work. And can you just say a little bit more about that? And in fact, you even said, I thought this was fascinating, you said, "We need to wed together, empathy, imagination and risk", which, you know, I thought, wow, that you don't usually connect those three. There's lots of things you did in the book that I never use, that's really good. But this one was really, it was in the context of relationships, and how we're going to think about our work outside of just simply the tasks at hand and other meanings that are taking place. So can you just share? We’ll let this be the last question.
Michaela O'Donnell 16:13
Yeah, great. So three times in the last month, I've been in a room full of people, and I broke them into small groups. And I said to them, who knows, maybe I'll do this when I'm with you all April. And I said, I want you to reflect back on all your work paid or unpaid. And I want you look at what sticks out as particularly meaningful to you. And every single time, from every single table, there was a common theme. And the theme was that it had something to do with other people. And I am very convinced, Robert, that so much of the work worth doing, comes down to how we're doing it with others, who were doing it on behalf of, who is helping us that people are so so central. And these sort of muscles, practices, modalities, whatever you want to call it, that you named empathy, imagination and risk are ways of engaging in the midst of people, right?
Practicing empathy, letting that giveaway to imagination, letting imagination fuel risk-taking, and like going there, right, like risking it for the sake of those people, empathizing, because the people we're around really matter, imagining because we believe in a good and large God who's doing all kinds of stuff, right? And a story that for all the chaos that's around us, one that is marked by hope and light. And so I just like if you do nothing else, if you take nothing else away from this podcast, is that the people that you work alongside are for—right paid or unpaid—so my work as a mother, my work in my neighborhood, my work as an executive director, as a business owner, all those things, like let people bubble up to the top notice them, spend time with them, empathize with their needs, and that that strengthens your own sense of quality of work.
Robert Covolo 18:06
Right. Yes, thank you. Michaela. I really have enjoyed our discussion today. And thank you for just taking the time out. If you'd like to pick up Michaela his book once again. It's called Make Work Matter: Your Guide to Meaningful Work in a Changing World. Thanks again, Michaela.
Michaela O'Donnell 18:23
Thanks, Robert.