The Mode/Switch

This week’s Mode/Switch Pod highlights disagreement on the team: how should managers address mental health troubles. Some of us think direct intervention is the most important approach; others are hoping for indirect intervention. But we all agree that managers can change conditions in the workplace for the better mental health of their team. Emily, LaShone, Craig, and David are joined by Gen Z rising professional Kennidie Streed to better integrate therapeutic care and managerial responsibility. It’s a painful topic, but we found room for laughter, too.

Are you a millennial manager? Then, you probably deal with a confusingly moveable boundary. At one and the same time, your Gen Z employees tend to sharpen the line between work and personal life while at the same time blurring the line between work and politics. Each week, the Mode/Switch Team gathers around a table of mics to talk in deeply personal terms about work and culture. This week, Emily, Craig, LaShone, David, and Andrea are joined by Malena, a rising professional who helps the rest of us touch grass about politics in the workplace.

Hey, managers! What do your workers want more—thanks or a raise? Probably a raise, right? Right. But even so, that question’s more complicated than it sounds.This week’s Mode/Switch Pod takes that question in multiple directions with deeply personal stories and researched insights. Emily, Annee, Andrea, and Craig discuss how money and power, as well as thanks and respect, make managing a team a tricky business.Hope you’ll listen to this pod while you drive to work!

For good and ill—but mostly for good—salary transparency is a rising trend in corporate culture across the U.S. But is it possible that “making things transparent” is actually obscuring elements of your work that make your work worth doing? What do you do when your work remains hidden even in the midst of corporate transparency? LaShone Manuel, David Wilstermann, and I discuss.

What's it cost you to try to match the gender expectations for your body in professional spaces? This week's Mode/Switch Pod involves a small nation-state of participants. I mean, there's the usuals: Emily, David, Craig. But then, there's also Bethany Keeley-Jonker, Jennifer VanAntwerp, and Nicole St. Victor, each bring researched and lived experience to bear on the questions of the "economics of thinness."

This week’s pod takes on hustle culture and “the lazy girl job” phenomenon. This trend traces to social media influencer Gabrielle Judge, the designer of the Anti Work GirlBoss brand. The trend encourages Gen Zs to seek a job that makes $60k-80k and makes space for nice things like, you know, personal sanity. Ms. Judges has achieved a kind of omnipresence on the internet; and everywhere she arrives, she’s saying a firm no to corporate hustle culture. The four of us--Emily, LaShone, David, and Craig--take four positions on this trend. What's yours?

Last Saturday morning, a newsletter flitted into your mailbox about the Great Resignation. Here’s a quarter-hour podcast about being Gen Zs and quitting work.

A follow-up podcast, in which LaShone, Emily, David, and Craig all converse with Ben about the insight behind his last two pieces for the Mode/Switch: "How Long Do I Have to Pay My Dues?" and "No One Is Coming to Save Us"

It turns out not obsessing on your flaws can also be—a flaw. Or that’s one conclusion we come to about the mode switch recommended in the newsletter. Re-describing your flaws as capabilities can be a valuable corrective. But org culture needs other correctives, too! So, LaShone, Emily, and Craig untangle some of the issues in how to do the work our flaws present us with in the workplace.

Rising professionals need digital presence. But connecting that virtual presence with in-person interaction can be tricky. This week, the Mode/Switch podcasters—Emily, LaShone, David, & Craig—engage Min Ki Kim’s story about digital overwhelm from the November 12, 2022 issue.