Vocational Calling in a Pressurized World
An interview with Dean Wooten
By Seth Bollinger
Warren Hall, the home base for Cornell’s top-rated Charles H. Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management, hums with energy as students bustle to class and meetings. Since July of 2017, the Dyson School has been under the leadership of Dean Lynn Perry Wooten. Dean Wooten brings to Cornell expertise from her leadership at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business, as well as her expansive research in crisis leadership, strategic human resource management, workplace diversity, and competitive advantage.
To discover more about her work at Cornell and pick her brain about vocational calling, I sat down with Dean Wooten and learned about all things Dyson.
Although Dean Wooten studied and worked for over 20 years at Michigan, she says that she was excited to join the staff at Cornell due to Dyson’s unique, outward-looking approach to business.
“There was something energizing about the Dyson School motto ‘Our Business is a Better World,’” says Dean Wooten, reflecting on her decision to move to Ithaca. “Poverty, food insecurity, inequitable employment practices, and lack of quality education are all opportunities for business to contribute its resources, human capital, and financial capital to solving problems and making the world a better place.” Now, her mission at the Dyson School is to develop leaders who will go out into the world and serve others—just as the motto suggests.
Though I can see the potential in our motto as a Dyson student, I do find that other forces often prevent students from answering this call. The outside pressures and internal desires to become a well-paid employee often overwhelm students pursuing business degrees, pulling them away from non-traditional careers and towards “normal” areas such as finance and investment banking.
In the face of these pressures, Dean Wooten encourages students to have an “explorer orientation” as they think about their future careers, even planning for what they may want their second and third careers to be. Above all, she believes that a helpful mantra to live by is one of “life-long and life-wide learning.”
“Life-long means that you’re going to learn from age 0 to 101, just as Katherine Johnson from Hidden Figures did,” Dean Wooten elucidates [1]. “Life-wide learning is the concept that you can learn through your roommates, through student clubs, internships, and business treks… it’s a set of comprehensive experiences.”
Adopting this attitude can also help students reduce the workplace pressures that emphasize perfection and having everything figured out. Dean Wooten wholeheartedly believes that “students need to acknowledge that they’re going to experience pressure and make time for self-care.”
Encompassing Dean Wooten’s approach to her job and outlook on life is her Christian faith, which influences the way she views the role of business and student leadership in higher education.
“I see work as a vocational calling and purpose,” says Dean Wooten. “One way I feel that my vocational calling has manifested is in my ability to educate the next generation of business leaders. I’ve also thought about how higher education can be a voice for business to be a greater force for good.”
She also finds her research areas of crisis leadership, health disparities, diversity, equity, and inclusion to be influential in her vocational calling as a Christian. “Every day, I feel work helps me grow as a Christian. It helps me think about if I’m living up to what I’m supposed to do on this earth and if I’m living life with grace and integrity,” she says.
Vocational calling is an important area for Christians to consider. Just as business schools can pressure students into career areas they aren’t fit for, today’s Christian culture has a reputation for pressuring young people into areas of ministry or missionary work that may not be their true calling. In many ways, the workplace offers opportunities for Christians to pursue redemptive work that changes the world. My own personal journey has navigated the pressures of the business world as well as the church, and hearing Dean Wooten’s perspective reminds me that business can be a worthy calling in order to make a difference in the world. Ultimately, we must remember that everything we do is a witness to the work of Jesus.
Dean Wooten humbly understands this, taking the posture of servant leadership to affect the next generation of business leaders. “People talk about parables being an earthly story with a heavenly meaning. I, too, get inspiration from those everyday people who are simply walking the talk of their Christianity and deeply influencing lives,” she says as we end our interview. As I leave her office, I think about how she has not only been influential in my life but in the lives of many others as well.
SOURCES
[1]: Katherine Johnson was a NASA mathematician who was depicted in the novel and feature film Hidden Figures. On the day of my interview with Dean Wooten, it was reported that Katherine Johnson had passed away at the age of 101. She was a truly inspirational woman, and you can read her story in the article I’ve linked here. I encourage you to watch or read about her life to understand what true courage and determination in a pressurized environment looks like.