day. On weekends I got extra practice on decimals, percentages, and fractions as she had me calculate coupons and sale items when we went grocery shopping at the local Publix. It blew my fuses to learn that you could take 70% off of an item that was already 50% off. We rarely bought anything “full price.”
At 17 years old, I went to Harvard, where I studied sociology and worked as everything from an aerobics instructor to a librarian shelving books. Later, my mother and I would laugh about the fact that I was the girl from Fort Lauderdale who showed up freshman year prepared for Boston's subzero winters with three cotton sweaters, a fashionable fedora-style hat, and cotton socks. I didn't understand that I had just entered a world where I would be surrounded by an easy privilege that I lacked, as obviously as I lacked wool, cashmere, and fleece. I was almost daily reminded that I did not quite fit in, and I clung to my unworthiness like a familiar well-worn blanket that reminded me of home.
Upon graduation, I enrolled in a master's of theology program at Weston Jesuit School of Theology, across the common from Harvard in Cambridge. While my friends got “real jobs” in management consulting and investment banking, I had the idea that I might somehow bring sociology and theology together towards a PhD in social theory and theology. I was searching but didn't know yet what it was I was searching for.
One year into graduate school, I found that I needed to earn more to support myself than what I could earn working part time in Widener Library on campus. I put my resume together and landed a well-paid summer internship at the Monitor Group, a management consulting firm in Cambridge. The firm caught my eye because it was the only one that used the words “moral purpose” in its brochure to describe its work. As a theology student I was intrigued about what moral purpose could possibly mean in the world of business. And so I became a management consultant in the summer of 1998, a job that is a mystery to most people. I often describe the work of management consulting as the work of problem solving. If there were no hard problems, there would be no need for consultation. There I learned what it meant to have my first mentor, Enshalla Anderson, a Black woman with degrees from the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard Business School, sit me down late at night and patiently teach this theology student how to calculate the net present value of a potential investment. I made dear lifelong friends. And I learned what it felt like to have bosses who were both allies and benefactors, able to see in me a worth that I could not yet see in myself. At 23, I graduated with a master's degree in theology and accepted the full-time offer from Monitor. I don't remember exactly how much I earned in my first year of employment as a theologian-turned-management-consultant. I do remember, however, that it was more than my mother had made in her last year of teaching in an almost 20-year career.
I have worked as a management consultant now for 23 years. I made partner at age 35, the same day my third child was born in the front seat of our family car. Each of my children is a lifetime of meaning to me. I returned to work six months after each child was born, knowing that I was forever changed. My colleagues still saw me as Amelia, the project leader, the senior manager, and eventually the partner, but inside I was this new person I needed to get to know: I was my children's mother. I struggled to know how to integrate the dichotomies of this newly found self. At work I was ordered, efficient, and hard driving. At home I was messy with breast milk, chronically sleep deprived, and doing my best to love and nourish my children. I was always either a management consultant or Mama. I was never just a woman named Amelia, worthy of love whether at home or at work. Moreover, I felt like the things that made me, including my womanhood and motherhood, were not worthy of the predominantly male culture I found in my industry. And my work self was irrelevant at home with my children. I checked personal Amelia at the door going into work. And I checked professional Amelia at the door when I came home.
I had three degrees, three beautiful children, a loving husband, a fulfilling career, and yet at times I still did not feel worthy of love. External gold stars no longer shined long enough to make me feel worthy. And the more time I spent at work, the more time I felt as though my loving, worthy, female self was not fully welcome. Too often, I was the “only” woman in the room, in the meeting, or at the table, which I could take at first as a sign of my success, but over time it only reminded me of what was missing. As a former boss, Sandi Pocharski, shared with me, “Being the ‘only’ feels like a prize, until it doesn't.” She is the only female boss I have ever had.
I am not a professor of sociology, theology, or psychology. I am not a leadership coach. I do not work in the field of human resources or organizational psychology. I am by no means a scholar in the fields of gender equity or anti-racism. There are many whose teachings in these fields I admire and refer to throughout this book. I am, however, a devoted wife, a mother of three, and a White woman who runs a multi-hundred-million-dollar national business focused on strategy and human-centered design. And I love my work. I have the enormous privilege of working with bright, motivated, and articulate colleagues, some older than I am, but most now younger in a field where we are well paid for our hard work, opinions, and judgment. We are lucky, perhaps at times too lucky, even to see the privilege we now share. It is an economic privilege first and foremost, but it is also the privilege to be in the type of work that can provide us not just with a paycheck to cover our family's needs, but with the possibility of love and worth.
I am aware that much of work is the drudgery of punching a time clock, as I know from personal experience working jobs that required my physical labor as much as my time. Work is also the paycheck-to-paycheck livelihood of supporting a family on minimum wage. Even more of work is the unacknowledged and unpaid labor of caring for our children, our sick, and our elderly. And work itself is changing. How we organize the tasks of work, how the workplace is configured, and who we consider to be a worker are all in flux.
When I sometimes catch myself thinking, “Work is just work,” I recall John F. Kennedy's first visit to NASA in 1961. While on a tour of the facility, he was introduced to a janitor mopping the floor. Kennedy asked him what he did at NASA, to which the janitor famously replied, “I am putting a man on the moon!” This man understood that his job, his role, mattered in the grand aspiration of space travel. I think of him whenever I catch myself thinking that the aspiration to elevate the human experience is too lofty. The janitor had enough self-love to recognize his own worth. Kennedy mirrored back his worth. And together they were part of the larger enterprise in NASA and in the United States to work together towards something that elevated the human experience beyond the known boundaries of earth. If Kennedy and that janitor from NASA can aspire to put a human on the moon, I believe we can aspire to make the experience of being right here on earth at work just a little bit better, a little bit more human.
The Beginnings of Work
Work is foundational to our being: it is in the doing of daily tasks that we create ourselves and the world around us. We create the safety and security that we need to thrive. We are like the Greek god Eros, who is depicted as one of the primordial gods in charge of creating the cosmos. As soon as we can pinch forefinger and thumb together as babies, we are placing blocks into buildings, stirring wooden vegetables with wooden spoons in pots and pans. We build, we make, we sing, we dance. All of this is work—exertion or effort directed to produce or accomplish something. We grow and our work evolves from play to productivity and profit. We push stones and bricks instead of blocks together. We care. We count. We heal. We tap plastic keys to form words to express ideas. All work. The Protestant work ethic created the connection between how hard we work and how well we live out our values. Descartes at the end of his extended exploration for something that could not be doubted concluded, “I think, therefore I am.” At its most basic level, thinking that cannot be doubted is work.
Since Adam and Eve were tossed out of the Garden of Eden, work has been central to the human experience. In Elizabeth Lesser's Cassandra Speaks, she retells the story of Adam and Eve as a journey of self-actualization, self-knowledge, and wisdom, not the “fall from grace” it is often depicted as. Our biblical ancestors went from a childlike state, Lesser argues, where all was provided for them, to one in which they provided for themselves through the fruits of their own labor. Work, it seems, is inevitable and unavoidable,
