Jenni Fields joins the pod to show why workplace effectiveness depends on likability, not on being liked. (Our Gen Z and Boomer discuss the the up and downsides of riz.)

Some years ago, a manager cautioned me about my performance. I took the warning seriously, because I’d made some mistakes that confirmed what I took to be his poor opinion of me. Maybe he gave me the caution because he was genuinely trying to help me out. Maybe I nodded my head because I was trying to be openminded. But it was clear we didn’t like each other very much.

Although we smiled a heckuva lot, the room was thick with mistrust.

The discomfort was so distracting in fact that I didn’t notice the backhanded compliment in his cautionary word:

“You know, well-liked people,” he said, nodding in my direction, “have to be careful.”

I wish now that I’d held up my hand like Diana Ross of The Supremes, “Stop! In the name of like!” I wish I’d said, “Boss, it’s time for a mode/switch!” I wish I’d said that the real question wasn’t, ‘Am I well-liked at work?’ but ‘Am I likable?’” But I couldn’t have said those things back then, because I hadn’t yet read Jenni Field’s excellent new book Nobody Believes You.

This week on the Mode/Switch Pod, it’s time to rewrite work-culture communication! Jenni helps correct the confusion between the Michael Scott Syndrome (I Need to Be Liked) and the quality of credible leadership that Jenni calls likability (I need to be warm and competent). If you’re wondering what the difference is, you’re in good company. Our team—Ken the Boomer, David the Xer, Emily the Xennial, and Madeline the Gen Z—had quite a time “unpicking” (as Jenni would say, in her British idiom) all sorts of complex emotional qualities like charisma and competence and lightheartedness.

Jenni’s great laugh is contagious, and her flexible thinking will help you find flow in the trickiest dynamics of working community.

She's also an authentic work-culture sage. Wait, scratch that! She dislikes the word authentic and prefers the word credible, a term she’s thoroughly discussed in Nobody Believes You, a book that helps you (as her subtitle puts it) “Become a leader people will follow.” (She’s also written the resourceful text Influential Internal Communication: Streamline Your Corporate Communication to Drive Efficiency and Engagement, which is sitting at my elbow as I write this podcast description.)

This is our 93rd episode. I think it may be our very best. The conversation moves fast, but goes deep. It allows for difference but shares good humor and good will. Jenni has a way of pouring wisdom into people around her and then pulling it out of them as well.

So, if you’ve been reading these podcast descriptions over the past few months and thinking that, sometime in here, you really oughta listen. This is your sometime.

What if the best way to improve workplace communication is to do less of it, at least for a while? Ross Chapman joins the pod to explain why new rhythms of rest can do what more messaging never will.

Workplace miscommunication is expensive. According to one Axios report, “Employees lose over a month each year dealing with ineffective internal communication.” Not hard to imagine, right? You know what it’s like trying to find instructions buried in an email—only to realize the instructions actually came through a Teams message. Or a post on Viva Engage. Or, wait, did the boss text us the protocols?

Workplace miscommunication is so expensive, in fact, that it’s tempting to give into the desperate maxim that better communication must mean more communication.

But this week’s guest, Ross Chapman of the Denver Institute, suggests counter-intuitively that some silos in the workplace can’t be dismantled by more and more messaging. Intergenerational silos, in particular.

His organization has, in fact, innovated a provocative practice that improves workplace community by creating new rhythms of rest.

Wait, sabbaticals for every employee, not just the CEO? Whut? How? I know, I know, but Ross shows us how it’s done.

I gotta say, too, that, as a workaholic Gen Xer, I love what happens to my consciousness every time I sit down with my Mode/Switch cohosts: Madeline (Gen Z), Ken (Boomer), Emily (Xennial), and LaShone (Millennial). If you’re asking, “Am I crazy? Is work supposed to be this pressurized?” These amazing coaches validate the widespread sense that workplaces too often feel like stuck places. I’m an infernal optimist. But their realism keeps me grounded—without letting go hope for renewal.

Big shout out, too, to Riley Johnston, our Mode/Switch audio editor, who helps keep our conversations tight and on point.

Falon Peters joins the pod to discuss how organizations not only wreak change but design it for flourishing. Our crew is open to her ideas but skeptical as well (and, ok, fatigued).

Here's a lead-up to the show:

When you jerk people around in a workplace—through layoffs and policy revisions, e.g.—you’re not just reshuffling columns on a spreadsheet. You’re intervening on a biota.

Think of a biota as a forest or a piece of farmland, sheltering and relying upon a complex network of interdependent elements. What gives vitality to a biota is the energy that flows from seemingly unimportant parts of the place (like the soil) to more conspicuous elements (like the crops and insects and birds) to the most obvious participants (like hunters and farmers).

In organizations, too, vitality fountains up from nonobvious to more obvious participants. But American workplaces tend to drive organizational change not by attuning to the complexity of their biotas but by the urgencies of monetary efficiency.

Think of Amazon’s plan to eliminate 14,000 middle managers, announced last week.

Heck, I wouldn’t want to be a middle manager at Amazon. Maybe it’s a good thing that machines do all that managerial work, drafting memos, tying down lists, assigning shifts, monitoring production reports. But Amazon’s decision will affect more than middle managers. It will affect the whole ecology of early-to-mid-career professionals, redirecting their career pathways and obstructing the energy flowing upwards that Amazon’s own biota relies on.

Years ago, Elizabeth Kolbert warned of a coming “Sixth Extinction” in the history of our planet. We can’t address such large-scale crises at the Mode/Switch roundtable. But here’s what our intergenerational crew—Emily, LaShone, Ken, and I—can do. We can help prevent the next workplace extinction by sharing the wisdom of people like our guest this week, Falon Peters of the Grand-Rapids-based Crowe X-Design Lab. She’s got ideas (and we have questions) about how organizations can do more than wreak change. They can also design it for everybody’s wellbeing.

You’ll want to stick around for our roundtable wrap-up. Things get dark for us in this conversation. But then, we’re trying to pay attention to death and resurrection in the American workplace.

-craig

P.S. Can you spot my dependence on Aldo Leopold’s work in what I wrote above? See his essay “⁠The Land Ethic⁠“ for more on the mutuality of biotas.

A heckuva lot of Gen Z folks are lying on their resumes these days. But then, 47% of Americans, according to a NORC-AP poll, are “not very” or “not at all” sure they secure a good job.

In a job market like this one, lying’s not just a Gen Z thing. The Mode/Switchers—Ken the Boomer, David & Craig the Xers, Emily the Xennial, and Madeline the Z—agree on this at least: fibbing’s an intergenerational phenomenon. So, we ask…

What is it about work culture today that makes deception feel indispensable?

Our guest, Danielle Droitsch, is an Executive & Professional Growth Coach with a law degree from the University of Tennessee Winston College of Law and a background in environmental consulting. Recently, she’s written “What Sets Apart Great Managers.”

Our takeaway from talking with Danielle? Good managers need to listen better so the rest of us can see and say the truth.

Telling the truth on the job’s not just about speaking what you hate to admit. It’s about seeing and speaking the strengths that too few people, including you, can see.

Karen Swallow Prior helps us Mode/Switchers engage career shock and organizational change with the wisdom of some permanent things.

In the 90s, I thought that a career was a decently stable reality. In the 2020s, I no longer think that way. And I bet you don’t either. That vocational skepticism prompted our intergenerational team to ask Dr. Karen Swallow Prior, author of the new book You Have a Calling, to help us cope with the crazy-fast changeableness of career and life today.

We Mode/Switchers want to know: What if we’re not working at our current job for the next ten years? Heck, what if we’re out of work tomorrow? Our guest speaks to these questions with (to use her own Thomistic term) luminosity.

But I felt a tension in this podcast episode, a tension so great I couldn’t even name it during the conversation. Frankly, we were having too much fun. Professor Prior’s a very funny person, even when she’s talking about seriously unstable ground.

But if our conversation with Prior was enjoyable, the tension I was feeling wasn't.

One pole of the tension is this: we need to be creatively playful with our own lives. Our experience is way too dynamic for us to adopt the dull seriousness of boiled potatoes. Dr. Prior knows this first hand: she has just left a job and changed the career she thought she’d always be in. She’s had to mentor herself into being curious about her calling in an evolving set of work conditions.

Prior’s recommendations remind me of Anne Laure Le Cunff’s excellent new book Tiny Experiments, which says, in effecti: Don’t settle for what’s always been. Don’t listen to what others have always told you. Instead, try short, bold, playful pilots in your life and work—and see what comes! (I’m reading this book after hearing Lee C. Camp interview the author on No Small Endeavors.)

But the tension pulls the other way, too: we have to make very serious choices. When things go dark—when we lose our job, when the boss we loved leaves the org, when we feel bored by what we used to love—we need what the author James Williams calls “starlight,” the values that we navigate by. We need something more than an experimental mindset, in other words.

And here’s where Karen Swallow Prior offers light. She offers the wisdom of permanent (and she would say, universal) values: truth, goodness, beauty. Do you find yourself hesitating at that word “permanent”? Does anything hold still in a world whose changeableness accelerates every few weeks?

Good question. Let’s let it hang with it, while you press play on the pod.

But wait, let me say one more thing. The question, What if I lose my job next month? is a very focused question. But it also invites creative and far-ranging exploration about the biggest questions that come with being a person. That’s our Mode/Switch sweet spot. We look for tight practical pivots that orient us within bigger questions.

This is our 89th episode of making that move—from tight pivot to big questions. And it’s starting to feel like, well, a calling. I’m so grateful for how this podcast’s explorations of workplace culture. I’m just as grateful to be listening for callings in company with you.

-craig

Angela Gorrell addresses decision fatigue on the pod this week. Listen to this episode to find your way back to gumption.

You don’t have time for this podcast. You have 105 other emails just this morning, and you have 44 minutes till your next thing. (Make that 43 minutes.) But maybe you should skim it? Or maybe you should finalize this afternoon’s agenda? (Why did you schedule that meeting for 3:30?) Or maybe you should just delete a bunch of emails?

If you have too many tasks to do before mid-afternoon, you’re eventually going to suffer decision fatigue—aka, ego depletion, brain degradation, cognitive overload.

Sometimes the choices are big.

I wake up every morning with a weight in my chest—so, yeah, I kind of hate this job. But that other position I’ve been looking at has sucky health insurance. Maybe we could go on my partner’s plan, tho’. But I care about the mission here. Also, my hair’s falling out in the shower.

Other times, the choices are micro.

Should I hit the bathroom now? If I take my laptop with me, is that gross? Should I update my operating system like tech support’s been telling me to? Should I make a third cup of coffee?

But the scale of the choices matters less than the sheer fact of how many you have to make. And the longer the day, the less you can decide.

This week, the Mode/Switch’s intergenerational team—Emily, David, LaShone, Madeline, and I—talk with Dr. Angela Gorrell about her latest book, Braving Difficult Decisions: What to Do When You Don’t Know What to Do. We’re stans for the book, mostly because Angela redirects attention to what lies beneath decision fatigue.

What’s the deep difficulty in your life that’s making these decisions difficult?

Angela says that that when you look beneath the surface, you find cor, which is Latin for heart and, if you follow the etymology long enough, you get to courage.

If it feels like you don’t have time for this Mode/Switch, let our team make just one decision for you today: put in your AirPods and let the Mode/Switch Pod take you towards courage, even in the teeth of too many choices.

Connect and consult with Dr. Angela Gorrell. She’s responsive to DMs on Instagram. She welcomes you to her website. And, yeah, you should buy her books.

Hey there, and welcome to the Mode/Switch! This week, we make sense of Gallup’s ⁠shockingly low job disengagement numbers⁠. It's tempting to ask, "Are people just lazy?" or "Are jobs just pointless?"

But to improve worker engagement, we need better questions.

Lee C. Camp of the celebrated ⁠No Small Endeavor⁠ podcast joins our roundtable this week to transform how we investigate pointlessness and purpose on the job.

I learned a lot from Lee’s questions about virtue in the workplace. But I also came away convinced that you can’t understand worker disengagement today without intergenerational exchange. Senior leaders, listen up! You need…

• Gen Xer David Wilstermann’s skepticism about corporate “purpose,” and…

• Xennial Emily Bosscher’s quest for meaning through brain fog, and…

• Millennial LaShone Manuel’s critique of exploding task lists, and…

• Gen Z Sheila Aupperlee’s stories about going to grad school while working three jobs—and still looking for some meaning in work.

My cohosts raise the question: Is it possible, in today’s economy, for a job to be anything more than just a job? A lot of people are asking the same thing:

Brene Brown’s turning from the self-help space to⁠ focus on the workplace⁠. Karen Sergeant’s asking about how AI enables us to ⁠rethink the workplace⁠. Meryl Herr’s asking about what to do ⁠When Work Hurts⁠. Anne Helen Peterson’s ⁠recent Substack⁠ engages “The Futile Search for the Bullsh*t-Less Job.”

Look, if you're asking if you should quit your pointless job--or stick it out for the sake of your amazing coworkers, you’re not alone. But I don’t think you can answer those questions till you’ve addressed the one Lee C. Camp raises in this week’s Mode/Switch.

Here’s my professional recommendation. Find a part of your job today that requires only 7% of your brain power, and then do that while hitting up this podcast.

In the surging currents of generative AI, our work-culture team talks with Olajumoke Fatoki. She says the future of work is human. We have much questions.

The world’s most powerful companies are pouring oceans of dollars into large language models and their data centers—and the rest of us tread water and hope for toeholds.

I feel giddy, and I’m not alone. A recent BCG report notes that worker’s moods about AI swing wildly: “The share of employees who feel positive about GenAI rises from 15% to 55% with strong leadership support.” Whoa. If the boss feels hopeful about AI, workers are more likely “to use it regularly, enjoy their jobs, and feel good about their careers.” (But 75% of workers aren’t getting this sort of senior leadership.)

I feel dread and anger and a lot of other unmanageable feelings, and I’m not alone in any of that either. When ChatGPT-5 dropped last week, users had a friggin’ melt down. Open AI had dialed back the model’s sycophancy—its tendency to suck up to users—with the result that some people missed GPT-4, yearning for its sweet-talking ways, like a football player missing a cheerleader girlfriend.

Sure, some soberminded users disliked GPT-5 for legitimate reasons: they had to revise their office workflows—again. That’s obnoxious.

But others seem to be asking, Why the heck isn’t ChatGPT5 calling me Man of the Year any more? (Read more here, especially about Kevin Roose’s idea for a Black Mirror episode about super intelligent suck-ups.)

I’m not sure if AI is a manageably rising tide or a friggin’ tsunami. And I’m wondering, what do managers and their teams need in this AI moment?

Here’s a start. We need courage. We need discernment. We need some humor. And we need a lot of stories about staying human when the current is strong and your toes just barely touch the sand.

We need an intergenerational Mode/Switch conversation.

This episode discusses art in the intergenerational workplace. Our team found the topic extra interesting, because three of the four of us had just moved into blank new offices.

Our big finding was that the art you hang on your walls can cost your workers cognitive wellbeing, especially if it's visually gaslighting.

We learned that term from our guest Dr. Vasu Tolia, a former pediatric gastroenterologist now turned visual artist. Her paintings build resilience, strength, and vibrant organizational community.

Ken Heffner, our Boomer, Emily Bosscher, our Xennial, LaShone Manuel, our Millennial, and Madeline Witvliet, our Gen Z discuss the surprising business outcomes of workplace art.

You can see Dr. Tolia's art at her website: www.vasutolia.art. She also has an active presence on LinkedIn.

If not, you need more psych safety. Tom Geraghty joins our roundtable to show you how to create workplace conditions where interpersonal risk, bold laughter, and a good cry are all fully possible.

Tom Geraghty spent the first four years of his life in silence. That experience of speaking disability led him to his now international work helping companies cultivate psychological safety, which is, as PsychSafety.com explains, “the belief, in a group, that we are safe to take interpersonal risks.”

Our intergenerational crew—Sheila the Gen Z, LaShone the Millennial, Emily the Xennial, and I the Xer—had plenty of questions about what makes interpersonal risk possible in the workplace. But we also have questions from you! Thanks to our listeners who shared psych-safety questions such as…

1. What do I do when my coworkers stop helping me on a project I love?

2. How do I talk about workflow with a colleague who does things really slowly?

3. What do I do when I can’t stop crying in a meeting?

4. Is psychological safety as important as physical safety?

5. What should you do when men assume women will take notes, bring snacks, and do other logistical tasks?

My big takeaway from our conversation with Tom is that psychological safety is not a merely negative value. It’s not just about avoiding harm or hurt. It’s about creating workplaces capable of sorrow and joy.

The crisis of employee disengagement today responds to workplace conditions in which people feel mute and work feels dead. Tom’s discussion of psychological safety helps us begin to restore the soundscape of a good working community. He’s a big idea guy, but he’s also like an at-your-elbow guide—as you’ll see from all the resources on his astonishingly well-resourced website.

You will love Tom’s ticklish sense of humor (and our roundtable is, as you know, prone to bust into laughter). But you will appreciate even more that Tom’s a good listener. He hears the questions behind the questions, which makes him a good work culture sherpa.

These are intense days we’re living through. Last night, my dreams were full, full of children in peril. And everybody’s days are full of news stories that are hard even to skim. We humans keep generating problems that, most days, it looks like we simply won’t ever solve. But here’s a thing you and I can do. We can turn our workplaces into what my colleague Debra Rienstra calls refugia, or hidden shelters for good life and work.

So, press play on this conversation and let Tom’s insights and our intergenerational exchange help you create a shelter for fully human tears, fully human joy.

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