No topic has evoked more F bombs in my research than workplace spirituality. In the late 2010s, I interviewed dozens of organizational leaders about mindfulness in their working communities. I was looking for practical spirituality. I kept finding obscenity.

To be fair, these leaders were mostly dismissing woo-woo stuff. When it came down to it, they were sympathetic with genuine spirituality at work. But still, one business owner, Corey Kohn, heard a recommendation for Hawaiian spiritual retreats and shot back: “Like, f*ck you. I don't want to rage, but don't tell me that that's what I need to do to have a more balanced life.”

Still, all the strong feelings made me curious. Why do people have such strong reactions to something so apparently benevolent as meditation and prayer?

For one thing, cheap notions of mindfulness erode trust in the workplace. If you encourage your team to put their feet on the floor, you might sound like a know-it-all. As in, You’re clearly not in a good head space. Let me help you get where I am. Imposing mindfulness on your team can transform a healthy thing into a device for unhealthy workism.

Mindfulness talk, in other words, isn’t just obnoxious. It can also be an oppressive managerial tool.1

If you’re feeling skeptical about mindfulness at work you have a point. It can indeed evoke trauma or induce uncomfortable feelings. It can be moralistic and invasive and culty. Worse, it can serve as a cover for structural problems in the workplace. Feeling stressed? What you need is more deep breathing! (Actually, they could use more honesty from leadership.)

But mindfulness at work still represents a vital mode/switch for you and your team.

Our guest this week on the Mode/Switch Pod, Irene Kraegel, sees your skepticism and raises you a better definition.

If “becoming more mindful” sounds like, ya know, chilling, this week’s pod helps redefine the practice more resourcefully. Actually, I shouldn’t say practice, singular, because Irene differentiates between formal and informal practices, plural. Some of what she has to say is useful as a formal, collective practice in meetings, in one-on-ones, in conference calls. But some of what she recommends is informally helpful for you in moments of stressed-out lonesomeness.

But the goal of the Mode/Switch is not just to help you feel more serene, more luminous. The goal, instead is to help you be present to what’s actually happening in your organization. If you can be more mindful, you can help your team be more fully human at work. (And maybe help your senior leaders act more human, too.)

Whether you lead from the middle—as project coordinator, middle manager, program director, department chair—or whether you are led from the middle, I encourage you to listen to this roundtable conversation. It offers you two kinds of tools:

1. Intergenerational perspectives: Ken the Boomer, Josh the Millennial, Madeline the Z, and I the Xer discuss how mindfulness gets carried differently, depending on your generational standpoint.

2. Internal communication: Irene’s careful definitions of and recommendations for mindfulness will shape the phrasing you use with your team, the metaphors you select, the stories you tell, the framing you offer.

You’ve experienced, I hope, moments of awareness and flow on your team. You’ve seen your people laugh in tense moments. You’ve heard coworkers de-escalate a tricky 1:1. You’ve witnessed leadership be humbly transparent. You’ve run a meeting or two when things seem paced just right for thoughtful collaboration.

Wouldn’t it be great if these gifts weren’t just random moments of goodness but characteristic parts of your organizational ethos?

To achieve that sort of steady mindfulness, you’ll need a no-nonsense and down-to-earth guide for being there with your people in a world of work.

Irene and the team can help you get there!

Lyle Wells joins the pod to talk about how you, as a mid-level leader, can speak clearly with your team, yes, but also how you can get an actual hearing with your higher-ups.

That's a question that drives the Mode/Switch podcast: how can mid-level leaders be seen, heard, and known by their higher-ups?

The latest Gallup workplace polling suggests that managers aren’t being seen by their higher-ups. Does the fact that 78% of managers are disengaged at work mean that they have suddenly in 2026 become Bad and Lazy People? Nah. It’s more likely they’re feeling indifferent to the work because they feel unheard and unknown.

If this is you, what can you do?

Well, for starters, listen to this week’s episode of The Mode/Switch Pod. Our intergenerational roundtable, Ken (Boomer), Emily (Xennial), Lashone (Millennial), and I (Gen Xer) engage a wise and funny guest, Lyle Wells, author of The Five-Day Leader and (most recently) Easy to Follow. If you spend time on Lyle’s website, you’ll see his laser focus on “healthy leaders and effective teams.” If you listen to this conversation, you’ll hear how much of his advice equips you to be heard by your team. Be curious. Be honest. Be generous. Make friends with “truth-tellers” and “tank-fillers.” Lyle’s advice equips you to speak with grace and truth to your team.

But our team kept hammering home another and maybe harder question: How can a mid-level leader get heard by higher-ups?

Lyle teased us for asking impossible questions. (Ken suggested that should be our new slogan.) But we ask impossible questions, because we know you, as a mid-level leader, need to be seen and heard and known.

But what do you do when your senior leadership….

• …is too egocentric to listen to you?

• …has a rigid and wrong notion of who you are?

• …has a brain too noisy to hear what you’re saying?

Lyle urges you in this podcast to be generous and compassionate. For you, that may mean learning to see your senior leaders in a new way. It may mean reframing the actions that keep them deaf to you as rational and reasonable actions. The problem is their actions aren’t working as well as they think they are.

Think of your senior leaders as people caught in quicksand. What’s the first thing people do when they get stuck? They scramble. They struggle. They flail about. Those are reasonable choices. They make sense. And, in your senior leadership’s case, they may look and feel like bold actions. But these actions are actually dysfunctional. They are the confident choices of trapped people.

Learning to see your higher-ups as making logical but dysfunctional moves is an important step in being heard, seen, and known by them.

When you feel (as one Mode/Switcher put it in this week’s roundtable) non-existent in your organization, Lyle Wells will help see the blend of interpersonal and structural problems that keep you there. For now.

This podcast will equip you to make the most of every conversational opportunity, both with your team and with your senior leadership. I

f your higher-ups are stuck in a particular mindset about you and your work, listen to this podcast (and subscribe to the Mode/Switch Newsletter) to begin helping your higher-ups to…

• build awareness (that they’re being avoidant)

• name the broken loop (of dysfunctional but oh-so-tempting choices)

• encourage presence (to what your team is actually experiencing).

Suzanne Rabicoff joins our intergenerational roundtable with two perspective‑switches that ease the pressure mid‑level leaders feel when mistrust becomes their problem to solve.

When Jenni Field’s book argues that Nobody Believes You, how do you respond? Do you, as a mid-level leader, immediately take all the blame?

This week’s episode of the Mode/Switch Pod eases up that self-blame, especially if you’re feeling like a digital conduit for senior leadership’s strategy dumps—or an electronic backsplash for your employees’ complaints.

For me, this week’s guest, Suzanne Rabicoff, suggests a perspective shift:

What if mistrust isn’t being generated where you think it is?

Suzanne’s answer will ease the pressure you put on yourself. Pressure to be reliable. Pressure to be credible. Pressure to be stable.

I mean, you should be those things! But this episode will also help you see the pressures external to your organization, especially the technological pressures that make trust hard these days.

Suzanne will make you laugh. She’s a shrewd observe of human foibles. But she’s also enormously hopeful for human community. Maybe the best thing is, her advice stops you from taking responsibility for the wrong things. So pull up a chair to the Mode/Switch Table. Join Ken, Emily, Lashone, Madeline, and me, and let’s figure what’s making it so hard to believe each other today.

Emily Stewart (of Business Insider) joins our intergenerational roundtable to urge grace towards the Boomers who keep their jobs past what your Gen Zs feel is the expiration date.

I recently had to grind the stump of a fallen tree and wondered about the longevity of a nearby conifer. The arborist said (a little surprisingly) that I should leave it be.

That still-standing tree came to mind this week, while finishing production on the Mode/Switch Pod with Emily Stewart, a senior correspondent at Business Insider. You’ll hear her talk with our team—Alex Johnson and Madeline Witvliet (Gen Zs), LaShone Manuel (our Millennial), me (Gen Xer), and Ken Heffner (Boomer) about her essay “Baby Boomers Are Generation Can’t-Let-Go,” where she discusses the intergenerational impact of the tallest trees still standing in today’s workplace.

The podcast conversation this week took some strange turns: Boomer Ken and Gen Z Alex both wanted the oldsters to step back and give other generations more room.

But Emily urges us to show grace to the elders and the youths alike. “The olds feeling like the youngs don’t know what they’re doing,” she writes, “and the youngs feeling like the olds are out of touch…” But the cultural winds that make the Boomers determined to keep working are hard for everyone in the workforce.

This week’s podcast was mostly about trying to understand what’s making it hard for the oldsters to quit and the youngsters to thrive. But our conversation with Emily suggests some practical advice:

First: Don’t be too eager to fire up your chainsaw when the winds get strong.

Your CEO may be over-eager to fell the oldest trees on your team. They cost the organization the most. But having employees with institutional memory and long-developed skill can be resourceful. Sometimes, indispensably. (Unchoppably?)

Second: Watch for indicators of uprooting, not just aging.

I’m glad that Larry was enough of an arborist to look for signs of actual weakening at the base of our still-standing pine. He wasn’t just looking for excuses to chop and fell. But keep an eye when the wind blows and the roots start to pull up from the soil.

Third: Don’t shame those who still need to keep standing in your workplace.

The younger members of our podcast worry they’ll never be able to buy a house or get Social Security. But it’s easy to jump from those reasonable assumptions to the unreasonable conclusion that all Boomers should step back and get out. Maybe some should. But today’s podcast cautions against clearcutting and prompts you to practice generosity towards demographics on both sides of the oldster/youngster divide.

Usually, I think the Mode/Switch has a bias towards the new and the untried. Every episode offers a pivot you can make so you and your team can thrive. But this week, at least part of the wisdom is, be open to the strength and gift not just of the new, but of what remains.

Dr. Meryl Herr joins the Mode/Switch roundtable to look beneath worker disengagement to uncover the reality of "work hurt." Her advice to managers? Work has probably hurt your team. But it's hurt you, too. Deal with that first.

Meryl is an organizational researcher and nonprofit consultant who’s skilled at locating the hidden disappointments, buried devastations, and quiet disillusionments of doing a job.

Her book When Work Hurts: Building Resilience When You’re Beat Up or Burnt Out isn’t primarily addressed to mid-level leaders. But there was a moment at our roundtable with Madeline (the Gen Z), LaShone (the millennial), Emily (the xennial) and David (who, along with me, is an Xer) where she brought things home for managers.

She helped us see that when you’re baffled and disappointed by your team, when it seems to you that they are stuck in a cycle of disengagement, you might want to ask if they’re experiencing work hurt. Not that you can automatically fix their injury. But you can work on your own work hurt. Believe it or not, you’ve got it. Everybody does.

What struck me is just how easy it is to get on somebody’s else’s case in order to avoid your own devastation and disillusionment.

Needing help dealing with that work hurt? Press play on the pod and pull up to the roundtable with Meryl and our team!

This week, the Mode/Switcher team probes work hurt from all directions:

• Madeline asks, how do you know when pain means you should quit your job? When is it just a rough season—and when is it a definitive red flag?

• Emily asks, is it safe for women to express work hurt on the job? Or will they be labeled as too emotional? (She uses a stronger word than that.)

• David wonders how admitting work hurt might victimize you—how can you be more than your work hurt?

• LaShone tells a story about her work hurt as a Black woman professional in predominantly white organizations.

• Craig wonders if hidden hurt ever brings hidden gift with it.

We learned a lot from talking with Meryl. She gives language for dimensions of work that are all too easy to ignore. For me, though, it comes down to this:

If you’re disappointed by your team’s disengagement, it may be time to ask what else is going on inside you. Try asking what’s beneath your urgency and your irritation. You may find reasons to show yourself a clarifying compassion.

Jay Johnson joins the roundtable to help you cope with difficult people on the job.

He's used to working with corporate execs who have lost their way. (You can connect with him here, btw.)

But in our conversation, he’s talking to people in the middle of organizations, people triggered by their higher-ups as well as by their direct reports. Here are some of the things the team asked him about.

1. Emily asks if she has to talk to a Mean Girl at work. Isn’t avoidance the better part of valor in this situation?

2. Madeline’s wondering, as a Gen Z, what you do when the difficult person you have to deal with is your boss.

3. David worries that, as a skeptical Xer, he’s got a reputation as the curmudgeon in the office. What do you do when you’re the difficult person?

4. Ken guesses he needs therapy for times when he’s obnoxious to others who hate it when he keeps bring up the organizational mission all the time.

5. Craig’s got a coworker who tends to say, “Not to be cynical, but”—and then proceeds to be very cynical.

We came away from the conversation impressed by the power of everyday language for helping mid-level leaders survive people difficulties.

Difficult people can make you feel closed off to the world. Difficult people can make you feel myopic and compulsive. Difficult people make you feel disconnected from what you actually care about.

But healing comes, often enough, by changing the language you use to frame things. It helps to use words simply to name that such and such a person triggers you. It helps to notice that these feelings of annoyance are happening to you—and then simply to state what’s happening in order to deprive of it some of its power in your head. It helps to recommit to what matters to you.

Dr. Lola Adeyemo joins the pod to help you, as a mid-level leader, re‑engage employees whose life experience beyond the workplace is radically different from your own.

A tough fact of organizational leadership. You’re a caring mid-level leader, but your immigrant employees might still feel uneasy about you.

If that suggestion pokes you a little bit, I invite you to be curious about the irritation for a moment. Ask your soul what might be going on.

And then hit play on this roundtable conversation with Dr. Lola Adeyemo and Ken the Boomer, Craig the Xer, Emily the Xennial, LaShone the Millennial and Madeleine the Gen Z.

Karen Sergeant joins the pod to discuss misplaced fears about AI. These new tools can be scary, sure. But they can also make leadership miscommunication utterly visible and surprisingly reparable.

A tree falls at work…does it make a sound?

The question is partially inspired by a personal story. My family’s front yard Norway Maple fell in a winter storm just before New Year’s. Thankfully, nobody was in the yard when it fell, but we definitely heard the whoooooooouuuumph the tree made as it hit the ground.As we chainsawed it into firewood, piled up the brambles, and ground the stump, I kept wondering:

Was there anything we could have done to keep this tree from falling?

This sad tree story is also a parable for struggling workplace leadership.

The winds at work today are gale-force. We’re enduring political storms (who can stop thinking about Alex Pretti and Renee Good?). We’re blown about by digital overwhelm: so many shiny new tools, so few trust-building encounters. And to make things gustier, there’s Hurricane AI.

These storms are real. But today’s Mode/Switch guest, Karen Sergeant, redirects focus from external forces to root problems. Last summer, I started reading her Substack Human in the Loop to benefit from her indispensably fresh takes on AI and work culture. Now, I’m so pleased to have her join the Mode/Switch to show how the windstorm of generative AI could transform the workplace for the better if it’s a “forcing function for better leadership.”

But (you ask), how could all those sycophantic chatbots force leaders to recognize patterns of mis-communication? Our 30-minutes podcast will show you how. So, pull up to the roundtable!

I confess my opening question above was a little misleading. I’m not suggesting that you’re about to fall like that tree in my front yard. I’m more worried that, if you don’t communicate clearly, your team will.But improve your internal comms, and you’ll improve the whole ecology.

How do you equip workplace "follower-ship" without turning it into an excuse for toxic leadership?

That question gets teased our in this episode's intergenerational conversation on the Mode/Switch with Rabbi Elan Babchuck. He helps you see that, if you’re frustrated with your workplace leaders, you may need to strengthen your follower-ship by

• sharing brave feedback from other employees on the floor, and

• concocting new ideas for needed change (in a process Elan calls Plus-Delta)

• communicating the org vision in a way that other followers can hear and share

Being a good follower’s a discerning art. And a risky one. Your leader may be plunging forward toward places you don’t think the org should go! But in any case, there’s a close, close relation between a leader’s ability to forge footsteps and a follower’s ability to speak up and name reality.

Riley Johnston, our Mode/Switch audio and video editor, helps make this podcast a tight half-hour convo. But this week, she had her work cut out for her, because our recording session with Elan was nearly an hour long. Here’s a story he told that, unfortunately, fell to the editing floor.

The morning of our recording session, Elan had been trying to get his three kids out the door for school. His plan for an on-time arrival was working until his daughter sat down on the floor and announced she was going to tie her own shoes. Elan’s fingers were twitching to do it for her. All he could think was, Must. Get. Child. To. School.

But instead of snatching the laces from his daughter, Elan pulled himself up short and asked which was better: being on-time to school or empowering his daughter. He went with option B.

That’s just one of the stories he tells to show how good leadership (what he was trying to do as a dad) and active follower-ship (what his self-directed daughter sought to be) are integrally bound up in each other.

And as a social entrepreneur, innovator, nonprofit leader, and CEO (not to mention a rabbi), Elan’s done a lot of leading, as you can see here. He’s also been widely published in The Atlantic, The Guardian, Washington Post, and Religion News Service. He’s spoken here at Calvin at the Festival of Faith & Writing about insights from his co-authored book Picking Up the Pieces: Leadership After Empire (2023, Fortress Press).

This week’s team includes Ken the Boomer, David the Xer, Emily the Xennial, and LaShone the millennial. We were delighted to speak with Elan, who’s our first return guest. Check out his earlier appearance ⁠here⁠.

The Mode/Switch Team’s on vacation till mid-January. If you celebrate this holiday, we wish you a Merry Christmas. And given that this week’s guest was a rabbi, I’d be especially remiss if I failed to say Happy Hanukkah!

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.