The Mode/Switch

What happens before the "change" isn't just a women's issue.

Welcome to an intergenerational roundtable where we help you do more than cope when work’s a lot. If you’d rather not listen to this conversation in your email inbox, no problem: just whip out your phone and hit follow on The Mode/Switch Pod on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. And by “we,” this week I’m introducing….

• Emily Bosscher, our Xennial,

• Ken Heffner, our Boomer,

• Delaney Kemp, our Gen Z co-host,

• David Wilstermann, our Gen Xer.

I’m in the mix, too, so I can tell you that this team asks the questions usually whispered in the break room and skipped over in the HR manuals. This week, we’re talking about perimenopause on the job.

Whether you’re going through this condition right now or working next to someone who is, you’ll find this episode deepens understanding and extends needed support.

Our guest this week, Amita Sharma, is a leader in workforce development and digital transformation. She brings two decades of experience and passion, helping organizations and individuals make workplaces more inclusive for everyone, at every stage of life. (You can access her work here.)

With Amita’s help, we’ll unpack what perimenopause is and how ignoring it can cost your team talent, productivity, and clarity.

When you pull up to our intergenerational roundtable, you’ll hear candid stories, surprising science, and gut-healthy laughter. And we’ll help you see that, when organizations offer zero help for silent suffering, it’s a red flag—not “just another hot flash.”

So glad you’re here!

Geoff & Cyd Holsclaw join our intergenerational roundtable to discuss attachment strategies for your next frigid (or white-hot) workplace meeting.

Lately, Nashville’s been feeling more like January than May. I’m attending a conference here, and the seasonal weirdness has totally messed with the HVAC brain of the meeting space. The result’s been uncomfortable. The thermostat, thinking we were enduring a hot and soggy summer day, has poured down frigid air on our heads.

Some people were sorta okay with the cold. Not me. I zipped up my jacket, pulled my hood, and felt homesick for balmy Grand Rapids.

The longer I thought about it, the more it felt like a parable for how emotions circulate in a workplace. Let’s say a distressing email arrives from the company president. Budget cuts are coming. Layoffs are threatened. The client rejected the bid. Whatever it is, the cold air starts pouring through the ductwork, and everybody’s under stress. So, tell me: what do you do when your coworkers get cranky? How do you engage your team when they go dark and get quiet? What happens in you when your work bestie starts spouting vast opinions?

Here’s a recommendation: listen to this conversation with Geoff and Cyd Holsclaw, who offer good advice for better attachment strategies at work. Geoff’s a theologian and an entrepreneur who runs the Embodied Faith podcast, focused on the intersection of neuroscience and spirituality. Cyd’s a professional coach and a pastor who works with organizational leaders. They’ve co-written the forthcoming book Landscapes of the Soul: How the Science and Spirituality of Attachment Can Move You Into Confident Faith, Courage, and Connection.

These two funny and smart people join this week’s Mode/Switch Pod to discuss how to cope with other people’s feelings at work. As usual, you’ll hear Ken the Boomer, David the Xer, Emily the Xennial, and Haley the Gen Z asking questions and telling stories. (Okay, I’m in the mix, too. Is my reluctance to put myself in the list an avoidant attachment style?)

Do you know the old country song that asks, “Is it cold in here, or is it just you?” It’s a question that comes to mind when the meeting room at work goes frigid. Sometimes your anxious brain—like a seriously confused thermostat—urges you to cope by avoidance or aggression. But this week’s podcast helps you move towards steadier responses and stabler attachments, not just with your coworkers but with your work itself.

In this week’s episode, Susan Hensley, author of Art for Your Sanity invites you out onto the dance floor at work. She joins our intergenerational roundtable to share advice for play, creativity, and even cutting the rug on the job.

That might sound irresponsible. And, yes, our intergenerational co-hosts—David, Josh, Betty, Craig—push back on Susan’s advice here and there. The workplace feels fraught today. Accusations of wokeness. Worries about deported coworkers. Surging tariffs.

So, why creative expression in the workplace?

• Susan’s advice finds career wisdom in listening closely to your emotions. Your feelings, after all, are your brain’s best guess as to what’s going on in your life. Sometimes it’s ambiguous or wrong! But your brain’s also getting intel that’s easy to overlook. Susan’s own story of career shock may help you make room for art at work—not because you’re an aesthetic genius—but because your body’s emotional wisdom has professional implications.

• Susan’s advice also implies a path of political resilience and resistance today. For many working professionals today, it’s a chaotic time. But learning to find peace through artistic expression can help you bear with political uncertainty. I think it can also help you be that paragon of political strength and resistance: doing art can make you laugh. Joy isn’t the only thing our society needs today. But it is one indispensable mode of resistance.

Our podcast conversation doesn’t just offer you advice for how to “shake it off” at work. By making a few simple recommendations, this episode helps you take joy in being a person again.

Gina Riley joins our intergenerational Mode/Switch team to show you ways to survive career shock, helping you become your next organization's "candidate of choice."

I remember one day being on a treadmill in our university fitness center, squinting and panting towards a sunlit window. My pace felt good. My heart and lungs felt okay. Sure, my legs felt rubbery, but this was a challenge workout—so I hit the speed-up button to a sprinting pace.

Then came a twitch in the tread. A momentary slippage between the rubber track and the machinery beneath. It wasn’t a loss of traction or a stumble on my part. I hadn’t tripped, I was sure of it. But I felt the machine itself, for the briefest second, lose its grip on itself. I stopped looking at the day and started imagining myself shooting backwards off the treadmill and into an emergency room.

That’s how the thought of career transition feels to me—like a slippage in the taken-for-granted reality beneath my feet. And the truth is, as institutions and organizations struggle for footing in a janky and unpredictable economy, career shock is a not-unlikely future.

Here’s the thing about career shock: it compels you to rethink your life and work—and that can be a gift. A difficult gift. But a gift all the same.

This week, the Mode/Switchers do some vocational round-tabling in the company of career-transition expert Gina Riley, author of the forthcoming book Qualified Isn’t Enough. Gina is a career strategist, who draws on a quarter century of business experience and an MA in Whole Systems Designs. You’ll find that her kind manner and frank advice make room for hope.

Join us for an idea-generating intergenerational conversation. As our Gen Z co-host, Jake Aupperlee, notes this week moving between jobs can feel like you’re running through fog. Here’s a conversation to clear the air for you.

This week, the Mode/Switchers discuss conflict resolution in and around the office with the help of Tanner Smith from The Colossian Forum, who urges organizations—and not just individuals—to practice empathy, humility, courage, and hope.

• Do Gen Zs engage an organization’s mission differently from their Gen X managers? (Tanner has a take on zombie institutions that he learned from his younger team members.)

• Why has organized faith so often been, shall we say, unfaithful in organizational life? (Emily swats a bee in her bonnet about the sometimes terrible HR of faith-based institutions.)

• How can you shift the moral life of an organization towards the practice of humility, courage, and hope? (David’s away this week. So we discuss KPIs.)

Guest Bio:
Tanner Smith is chief of staff at The Colossian Forum, a nonprofit focused on conflict resolution through faith-based approaches. His expertise offers a compelling look at how moral and spiritual resources can transform organizational dynamics. With a doctorate in Mission and Leadership from Luther Seminary, Tanner is an ordained minister in The Reformed Church in America. You’ll hear him describe himself as a feral cat, generationally speaking, but he does actually love to be out of doors as much as he can!

• Emily Bosscher (Xennial)

• Ken Heffner (Boomer)

• Haley Kornoelje (Gen Z)

• Craig Mattson (Gen Xer)

Episode Overview: What We Talk about When We Talk about Org Conflict:This Week’s Co-Hosts:To Busy to Listen to Something in Your Inbox?

Worried about occupational burnout or bore-out? Press play on this conversation with Emma Lloyd and start listening to your body, too.

“No matter how or why we get there,” writes Hilary McBride in the The Wisdom of the Body, “no matter how well it may have served us, forgetting the body also costs us something—individually and collectively.”

And there’s no place we feel those collective costs more fully than in the workplace.

This week on the Mode/Switch Pod, Emily, David, LaShone, and Ken talk with Emma Lloyd about the possibilities that open up as we remember the body and its savvy. Emma is the founder of Conscious Success, a coaching company that equips working professionals—especially women—to wake up to what their bodies are telling them about their careers.

Emma’s got a great story to share about achieving conventional success and realizing gradually she needed to redefine success creatively and wisely.

Press play on this pod and learn again that, as McBride notes, “We heal when we can be with what we feel.”

Reach out to Emma Lloyd on Instagram and DM her the word “regulate.” She’ll send you an assessment to gauge how well your body says you’re actually doing at work and in life. She also has 25 practices you can do in a minute or less that will help you regulate more wisely.

You can also reach out to her on her website.

Do you ever weep for boredom in eight-person meetings where only two people talk?

Do you die a little inside when your day is 80% full of committees?

Do you wish your staffers would pay better attention to the agenda and stop emailing?

Do you ever want to throw your laptop against the wall to end a remote meeting?

Meetings are essential for making sense and making decisions and making headway. No organization can thrive without them. So why are meetings so often the saddest, clumsiest, and most irksome hours of our working lives?

If that question’s pestered you, please pull up to the Mode/Switch roundtable and learn from author and organizational designer, Jurriaan Kamer. His book Unblock: Clear the Way for Results and Develop a Thriving Organization offers great sanity on all things organizational. This week, we tap his wisdom on bettering our meetings.

The philosopher Martin Buber once said, “All real living is meetings.” In other words, human life is really living when it occasions authentic encounter. Why can’t meetings be life-giving like that? Good news. They can be, thanks to Jurriaan’s advice.

This week’s Mode/Switchers—David Wilstermann, Betty Gronsman, Jake Aupperlee, and I—ask scads of questions of Jurriaan from our different generational experiences. Even better, we share questions from you our listeners as well. And we discuss scenarios you’ll recognize from meetings whose memory you’ve tried to repress.

Biggest takeaway from the Mode/Switch Pod this week? Sometimes you have to put the fish on the table. It’s an indispensable Dutch idiom. And if you want to use it in your next meeting, you’ll need to press play on this pod.

Want to learn more about Jurriaan’s work and hire his team to unblock your company? Check out his website. He’s also very active on LinkedIn.

"We all had go through it." No doubt. But does that mean that, by some workplace statute, the next generation has to as well?

This week, the Mode/Switch team welcomes Gen Z author and TEDx speaker Sophie Riegel to help us map the maze of American working community.

The maze of unspoken but rigid rules. The maze of what it means to be “normal” and “professional.” The maze of unacknowledged organizational trauma and intergenerational contempt.

Our question is, who builds the maze?

Actually, that was Ken’s question. He’s our Boomer at the table, joined by Emily (reppin’ for the Millennials) and me (the Gen Xer). I love how Ken framed his question: Who decides what’s normal in the workplace? Because whoever decides “what’s normal” makes the maze that the rest of us get lost in.

So, hit “play” on the pod while you work today, and you’ll hear us asking each other questions across generational lines. The talk’s encouraging, honestly. Chatting with Sophie made me hope that we don’t have to haze others for the hazing we ourselves have received. The cycle of intergenerational contempt doesn’t have to continue.

We can exit the maze together.

"Quite honestly, corporations aren't fair,"—so says Google chief of staff, Sally Ivester in this week’s episode. Still, here’s the thing. The workplace might not be fair, but Sally quite obviously loves it all the same. 

Sally’s our first guest from Big Tech. Sure, we’re always talking about that sector—but it was good to converse with a Wharton-trained millennial mom who’s, quite literally, Googling her career so the rest of us don’t have to.

The Mode/Switch’s intergenerational conversation plays out interestingly this week. Our Gen Z host (Haley) and our Millennial (LaShone) are enthusiastic about Sally’s insights. You’ll notice that Gen Xer (David) and Boomer (Ken) have some pushback. For my part, this is a conversation I’ve been looking forward to for months! And Sally brought it.

So, pull up a chair to the Mode/Switch roundtable for stories about what even the most thorough classroom and corporate training leave unsaid. 

• How to advocate for yourself when your workload’s unfair.

• How to negotiate your boss’s bad ideas. 

• How to cope with a disappointing performance review.

• How not to assume your work speaks for itself. 

I’m guessing you’ll want to connect with Sally’s work more fully after this conversation. You can do so here.

This week, a new thing. We and our guest respond to Gen Z questions from Illinois, from Michigan, and from D.C. And don’t miss the “Spell It Out” feature, which focuses on the workplace phenomenon of “Rust Out.” 

Last thought: some marketer dude emailed me this past week, congratulating the Mode/Switch for being among the top 10% of podcasts. No idea where he got that stat. Like, did he mean we’re in the top 10% of West-Michigan-nice podcasters? Nah, he just wanted us to subscribe to his platform.

But still. This cross-generational, work-culture conversation does offer what Raymond Carver would call a small, good thing. I hope you share it with a friend.

Do you keep asking questions like, “Is it supposed to be this hard?” I wonder the same thing. I wonder if it was this hard for my parents. I wonder how hard it must be for my kids. What is up with the intensity of work in the mid-2020s?

Here's a podcast to turn job pressure into a sustainable way to be at work. But in order to achieve that, our conversation's a little out of pocket.

Every week, on the Mode/Switch Pod you hear this intergenerational team of career coaches and organizational researchers finding ways to convert workplace stress into something more livable and workable.

But this week is different. This week, we’re not talkingabout stress conversion. We’re actually doing it.

So pop in your earbuds, and hit play, as David, Emily, Ken, Josh, Sheila and I sit down to the mics, a big plate of cookies, a small container of fudge, and a conversation that makes some meaning in all the mayhem. You’ll hear us spinning “The Mode/Switch Wheel of Workplace Woe” and chatting up the things that drive us mad on the job.

Why do this? Well, babies laugh about 400 times a day. Adults? About 15 times a day. But as we do this week’s roundtable on email disfunctionality, corporate buzzwords, unstocked supply closets, cringey team-building exercises, not-to-so happy hours, and meetings about meetings, we get in our 400 laughs. (You might find a few, too.)

Our Gen Z participant, Sheila, tells me to say that the Mode/Switch is definitely out of pocket this week. What does that phrase even mean? At least three different things, as our Boomer-Xer-Millennial-Z conversation discovers. But Sheila means it the way the Zs mean it. As you’ll see.