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As we anticipate our Annual Faith + Work Conference: Meaningful Work in an Age of Disruption on April 2, 2022, the Center for Faith + Work Los Angeles is proud to present this two-part conversation with one of our esteemed 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 road that brought Michaela where she is today—from her inclination to entrepreneurship, to the challenges she's faced in her career. Michaela and Robert will also explore the need for creativity, flexibility and lamentation in all believers' vocations and other insights from her new book Make Work Matter: Your Guide to Meaningful Work in a Changing World.
QUOTABLE
On the winding road that brought her where she is today (Michaela O'Donnell; 2:00)
"The fact that I am somebody who teaches who myself likes to start things, who likes to encourage others to start things and who teaches people who will never be entrepreneurs, more about the root things that they can adopt for their own life. I shouldn't be surprised, but I'm still surprised."
On the importance of lament and the capacity to endure failure (Michaela O'Donnell; 11:25)
"The capacity to deal with failure, I think is strengthened by the practice of lament for Christians. Lament is a biblical framework for being able to go and shake our fist at God, tell God, hey, we're really mad, we're gonna complain about what's happening. And in the same breath, we trust you God, we love you, God. And this thing totally sucks. Right? And, and we trust you, right? It's got this back and forth."
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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 0:01
Welcome to Center for Faith + Work podcast. I'm Robert Covolo, your host today and today we are delighted to have with us Michaela O'Donnell. Michaela O'Donnell is an Assistant Professor of Marketplace Leadership and the Executive Director of the Max De Pree Center for Leadership. Michaela has the heart of both an entrepreneur and a theologian. She has 10 years of experience as a leader in the marketplace. As the Owner, Manager and Director of Long Winter Media and her recent book, Make Work Matter: Your Guide to Meaningful Work in a Changing World provides a path toward more meaningful work that makes an impact. I just want to add that the Center for Faith + Work LA is delighted to have Michaela not only on this podcast, but as one of our speakers for an upcoming Annual Conference. So I'm just really grateful to have Michaela with me today. And this kind of serves as something as a prequel or trailer to the conference. It's all wonderful, Michaela, welcome to Center for Faith + Work LA podcast. Thanks for being here today.
Michaela O'Donnell 1:05
Robert, is very good to be with you. Thanks for having me.
Robert Covolo 1:08
Excellent. Michaela, you have a lot of titles. Professor, author, Director of Max De Pree Center for Leadership. And I've heard it said that people always speak from their own experience, I found that to be true. So behind these titles behind this, the research you do in this book, your different areas of leadership. I know there's a story. And I'd like to start off with a little bit of that story. And I wanted to ask you kind of an open ended question. Did you always know you wanted to have these titles? How did you end up on this path? Where in the world should we begin? And how did you become Michaela O'Donnell, the theologian and entrepreneur? And Professor, etc.
Michaela O'Donnell 2:00
Such a good question, Robert. There's an exercise that I do at the De Pree Center, we have a program called Road Ahead. The exercise came out of that I also do it with students. And honestly, a lot of times I'm in a workshop and the exercise is one called The Road of Calling. It's one in which I have people like draw out different things. And the shape of people's road is always very, very interesting, right? What does, what shape did their road take? And so the question is, what shape did my road take? Has it taken thus far? And honestly, it's been pretty windy. Robert, if you had asked me when I was a kid, do you want to grow up and be the Executive Director of a center? Like that sounds really boring. What? No, I don't want to do that. I wanted to be a lawyer, I wanted to be a lawyer or a CEO that those are like my, my ambitions. And so windy road, I, I do think that we are all products of like place and people and life, right. And so I am that as well. And my family or we've got a ton of teachers and a ton of entrepreneurs in our family. And so the fact that I am somebody who teaches who myself likes to start things, who likes to encourage others to start things and who teaches people who will never be entrepreneurs, more about the root things that they can adopt for their own life. I shouldn't be surprised, but I'm still surprised.
Robert Covolo 3:38
It's an O'Donnell family trait. So and now that I'm thinking I actually knew a friend, a neighbor named O'Donnell and I think that he was a teacher. So there you go. And story. So who knows? Wow, already, the podcast is a next level. That's so we're learning all about the O'Donnell family here. So okay, so but what is that? What is the, you know, the the what is it about the O'Donnell's? Is there a certain kind of take charge if there's not an open door build one kind of? I know, Midwest folks kind of have the, the reputation for you know, you got it, you gotta like, you got to make it work, you know, kind of thing and hard working? Kind of folks. Is there an entrepreneurial kind of personality is what I'm asking.
Michaela O'Donnell 4:29
Is there an entrepreneurial personality? I certainly think that there is a making it work, right. And for better or worse, like the American narrative of pulling it up by your bootstraps. My family's story, like we can trace back four or five generations now. My family came over from Ireland, basically as refugees. So though I'm a white lady from the Midwest who benefits from from all the the white privilege and you know sort of systems have been built, like we I can go back in my family and see like wounds are pretty different. And so my family, the story goes that when they came over to Ellis Island, let's call it my great great grandmother removed, was pregnant. And they said, "Sorry, we're not accepting any more Irish pregnant women, like you have to go back to Ireland." And so my family snuck in to the United States. And so I am the—you and I are looking at each other all this as a podcast, we're looking at each other and here I am, and I am the descendant of, you know, people who snuck into this country illegally, which, as you can imagine, gives me a particular window of compassion for a large swath of issues.
But you asked about like work and work ethic and entrepreneurial, and I'm like that, like having to make it work is like, absolutely in my family line. Like we're gonna make it work, right. And over time, that morphed from survival to something different, but those kind of the generational stuff, six, so do I think there's an entrepreneurial way, or a personality? Probably a spectrum, there's probably lots of people, there's, there's lots of people who go into starting things and doing things and forging their own paths, because they have to. And so is that personality driven or circumstance driven? I'm not sure. For me, it's probably it's not circumstance driven. By and large, though, I could trace even in my adult life, some circumstances that drove me into starting my own business. So let's call it both nature and nurture for me, and I think that that would likely be true for others.
Robert Covolo 6:43
Yeah. Okay. All right. So let's, let's peel back the layers here. And let's talk a little bit about some of those challenges that you've experienced, you know, I guess one of the things that in reading your book, I sense was that you, you were writing out a lot of kind of situations where you didn't sense what you didn't, it wasn't clear you what you were going to do, and kind of found yourself in a place that was difficult. And and one of the things you mentioned is that there's something that is kind of birthed, in those moments of difficulty. And, and so what were those challenges? Michaela, I want to hear a little bit more about, because you, you were involved in a business, right, is that right?
Michaela O'Donnell 7:31
Yeah. So I mean, the book I wrote is about work. So in terms of challenges, I'll stick to the work lane, though, you know, we all have a variety of challenges that shape our personality, and that we bring into work, but I'll stick to the work lane. You know, in the book, I write a lot about being stuck, feeling stuck, right kind of just feeling like you don't you're spinning your wheels, you don't really know where to go. Next things haven't really worked out the way you hoped or thought they would or been or had been told they would if you did X, Y and Z. And for me, one of the most like moments where this came into focus was actually right after grad school, I had just finished getting a degree and got a Master's of Divinity. And then my husband and I, we graduated, we both graduated, got married, and it was the middle of a recession. And so it was just like not not at all a good market for somebody with a theology degree, we had a hiring freeze. This was a really, it wasn't really a thing. And so we like we took these kind of odd jobs in which we were very, very grateful for these odd jobs. But they were very far from what we had imagined ourselves doing while we were preparing in school. And because the recession was happening, and many people who had much more experience were getting laid off, they knew they were they were gonna be first in line when jobs actually came back to sort of the surface.
So that's when I fell back on some of the family muscles. And I said to my husband, who is an artist through and through, like, what if we started a business right, just to sort of get us financially by we could pay our rent doing that. Would you be up for that? He's really good sport, Robert, husband, Dan's a good sport. So he said, Okay, sounds good. And so we started the business called Long Winter and that business is still in operation. It's been over a decade now. Kind of a small family boutique creative agency started with sending email to family and friends "Hey, file us under your mental Rolodex for video and branding and websites." We no longer do websites, we learned that we were not great at those. That was an important learning lesson along the way. But yeah, so we started a business. I never expected that to be what I did full time for many years. But talk about work being an agent of formation, right? I didn't even know if I liked the work until several years into it. Questions of "Do I like this?", "Is it a good fit?" We're not at the forefront of my mind. It was "Will this help us pay our bills in the middle of a recession?" So yes, I have started and a business that is still functioning.
Robert Covolo 10:02
Mm hmm. Yeah. So you have that experience. And, and so when it came to writing this book, and by the way, I just really enjoyed the book. I want to thank you for how personal the book is. And it really opens up just a lot of kind of the deeper issues that take place in our lives when we're working. I mean, there's a lot of things that you bring up, you bring up the need for us, for everyone to embrace the fact that we have to have a creative element in our work that is part of being an image bearer, you bring up this need for flexibility, you know, and, and then you talk about, like you just talked about just right there that we are going to find ourselves stuck at time. And I really appreciated that. And then one of the things that I really wanted to go in a little bit more about is you talk about that part of work, is the need to just embrace that there's going to be things we have to lament, which I actually I don't think I've ever heard anybody put the expression entrepreneur and lament in the same sentence. And I thought that's profound that being an entrepreneur means that there's actually going to be times things that you lament, can you tell me a little bit more about how those two connecting your mind? And yeah, any of your own experiences that kind of also resonate with that?
Michaela O'Donnell 11:25
Yeah. So I did some research for my doctoral project that then led into this book then led into lots of conversations I've had with people since and one of the two of the questions I asked people were, you know, how have you learned to define success? And how have you learned to define failure. And everyone's definition of success was really contextual, like that a lot of not a lot of commonality on how people define success, though, people would kind of come to the top. But there was, there was something that was really interesting that happened. And that was people's comfort, in talking about failure, over and above success. So these are people who were all objectively successful, had charted their own paths were entrepreneurial, in some way, shape, or form. And they had just like this up close, proximate comfort with failure. And it's that that is just like, there's going to be a lot of things that don't work out, we're going to try things, we're going to do our best we're going to have to revise, we're going to have to hit start and stop and just things we thought were gonna go one way really aren't going to go that way. And if we want to ever move toward all that we think God might be inviting us to, we're gonna have to get real comfortable with learning, we're gonna have to get real comfortable with failure along the way.
And that's certainly been true my own life, right, like getting, getting being able to talk out loud about times where, you know, clients cancelled our projects, or where we just like, did not deliver in the way that I wish we had. And that and I'm also an academic, that doesn't exist as naturally in academic circles. It's kind of like, you gotta like, prove yourself, and you gotta, like, you know, be able to be I wouldn't say perfect, but, you know, we're going for really hitting the mark and the academic world. And so that capacity to deal with failure, I think is strengthened by the practice of lament for Christians. Lament is a biblical framework for being able to go and shake our fist at God, tell God, hey, we're really mad, we're gonna complain about what's happening. And in the same breath, we trust you God, right, we love you, God. And this thing totally sucks. Right? And, and we trust you, right? It's got this back and forth.
And Robert, I mean, you could you and I, we could Google how many people don't like their job today, right today, in 2022. Here in America, at least, and the number would be high. And so tools that help us say this sucks. And yet we trust that God is God. Like, we need those tools. We need to be able to be honest about how we feel and why we think things are so awful, and our you know, our expectations off, are we in a bad place? Or are people toxic, and we really need to spend more time on like emotional intelligence, who knows. But just all of that, I think all the growth that we crave as individuals and as a culture, cultures and systems of work, even economic systems, has a lot to do with our being able to grieve and name and lament. So I'm also an Enneagram 7, so if you know anything about the Enneagram numbers. Enneagram 7s are people who don't like pain, we don't like to deal with pain. Okay? So part of my pursuit of a healthy practice of lament is part of just helping myself deal with stuff I don't want to deal with. And I think a lot of us a lot of us have that. So I'm pro lament, pro Psalms of lament if you're looking for a place to start,
Robert Covolo 14:55
Yeah, that's great. Well, and that's what I loved about you know, just the fact that I love about the book is fact that you, you, you just basically said it's part of making work. meaningful and satisfying, is we can't lose our humanity. And the fact that there will be times in which as you said, and I'm going to quote you, you said, "Let's face it, work sometimes sucks." Very academic.
Michaela O'Donnell 15:25
Apparently, I really like that word.
Robert Covolo 15:28
One of your more academic moments in the book, and I just thought, like, yeah, thank you for that. And what and this kind of points to a whole another beauty to the book is that I think what you're going for, and if I was to kind of categorize this book for somebody is, Michaela is going for how do you retain your humanity and actually grow into a flourishing person in in the job that you're doing, so that your life, you know, so that your work isn't just, you know, it's meaningful work. It's rich work, and you're becoming somebody that you'd like to be in your work. And I thought that was just a beautiful, beautiful theme.