The Mode/Switch

This Pod did not end where I thought it would. I thought we would seek an alternative to tunnel vision. I thought we'd mode/switch from tunnel vision to vista vision. “Expand your awareness,” I was thinking. “Take in the context. Read the room, people!”

But because job descriptions keep expanding, because skillsets keep specializing—a weird double movement that yanks and squeezes us at the same time—our vocations don’t allow us to pay out just one kind of attention at work.

So, in the first twenty minutes of your workday, as you’re trying to brace yourself for all the meetings, press “play” on this conversation about the multiple kinds of awareness our work calls us to pay out.

This week, Emily, David, LaShone, and Craig discuss how one role you play (parent or a friend, say) obstructs another role (team lead or clerk, say). You’ll hear us sharing stories and proposing shifts in thinking and habit that will help you do more than cope when work’s a lot.

Let’s say the loud part quietly: everyday life is theatre. We are always playing roles and following scripts and taking cues. At any given moment, e.g., your a partner, parent, manager, team member, instructor, exerciser.

All this role-play means, that in any moment of professional life, you’re playing a part that some other part of you doesn’t feel like doing. And sometimes, you stumble, forget your lines, don the wrong costume, break your poise.

So, how do you deal when life and work collide? Let's talk.

You work with well-intentioned people. You are well-intentioned people. Right?

But if you work on a multiracial team, you know good intentions aren’t enough.

Even if you’re a white coworker who really and truly wants to support your coworkers of color, you might have an uneasy sense that it feels so easy to mess up.

On the other hand, if you’re silent and unsupportive because you’re afraid of messing up—well, that’s just another mode of messing up!

Is there a mode switch here?

Yes! More than one, actually, as you’ll learn in this twenty-minute podcast. The Mode/Switchers, Emily, Craig, LaShone, and Ken are joined this week by Calvin University staff member Satrina Reid for a feisty conversation about what it means to be an accomplice for beautiful community.

Men and women feel different things about their jobs. But they also feel different things during their jobs.

This week’s guest is Andrea Munday, a Chicago-based business owner with a millennial’s deep experience of gendered & generational lines. This week, she schools me on what’s been missing in workplace fairness since Title IX came out in 1972.

One takeaway? Gender equity’s got a lot to do with monthly cycles.

Here’s our central question: how do we create fairness when people feel radically different things at work?So press play while you work, Mode/Switchers.

This one’s for you, if you’re mystified by all the feelings at work.

-craig

Everybody’s got days when they don’t feel like doing their job.

But some days, it flat-out hurts to do your job. Your shoulders stiffen. Your neck tightens. Your head aches. Your back kills.

And that list doesn’t include menstrual pain or chronic fatigue, much less the physical pressures of racial and gender norms.

Even in a knowledge economy that seems to make bodies insignificant (everybody’s just emailin’ and shit, right?), we need to talk about physical pain in the workplace.

In this week’s podcast, LaShone, Emily, David, and Craig discuss the score the working body keeps and the healing that body needs.

A convo about friendship's power to heal workaholism & professional exhaustion...

This week’s conversation centers on two questions:

These don’t seem like related questions. But nothing affects your mental health around your job like your circle of friends.

Lashone, Emily, Ken, and Craig don’t exactly agree about how to answer these two questions. But agreement’s not the point. Sharing the ride is.

So, get on in, and press play while you work. Your Lyft’s arrived.

Can’t wait to get to work today! I’m getting things done, I’m exceeding expectations, I’m at the top of my game—and my managers know it and love it! (Says no one ever, listening to this podcast.)

The reality is, all too often the work you do is looked upon with suspicion. All too often, the management’s posture is, “Prove it. Show me the money!”

This week, Emily, David, LaShone, and Craig discuss how proving the value of your work somehow becomes the imperative to prove the value of yourself. We offer practical advice for times when you find yourself—as one professional report notes, our digitalized workplaces have replaced “cultures of trust” with “cultures of proof.”

So, yeah, here’s the surprise. Your boss might not be the only culprit in a professional culture of proof. This week, the Mode/Switchers ask what digital platforms have to do with digital babysitting in the workplace.

Ultimately, our goal is to help you start building trust in the workplace.

Have you seen that meme, “Get in, losers, we’re going to therapy,” or whatever? That’s what I want to say to you about this episode of the Mode/Switch Pod. Get in losers, we’re going to STOP SAYING SORRY so much at work.

Look, you’re partly right to apologize: you want to say sorry to bother you because everybody’s getting too many emails, too many voicemails, too many Teams messages. But, okay, is everybody really and truly so overwhelmed that the nonstop sorry-train really and truly needs every single stop?

We don’t think so.

This conversation features a not-very-sorry sortie of apologizers, Emily, Hannah, and Craig. And we tell some stories about dealing with communication overwhelm with the misplaced strategy of saying, “Sorry to bother you.”

This is a fantasy edition of the Mode/Switch Pod. We do some utopian dreaming about quite possibly the least dreamy part of American workplace culture: the performance review.

After talking about what’s wrong with the review process, we dream up new ways to give and receive workplace feedback.

And other phrases we NEVER want to hear again in the American hiring process.

Nate Bergatze has admitted he never reads books. “I don’t do it,” he says, “because every book is just the most words.”

That’s how we feel about the American hiring process. Every job interview is Just the Most Words—and so few of those words say anything.

So, this week on the Mode/Switch Pod, Emily, David, LaShone, and Craig give you a twenty minutes of good words about getting hired—or not—when you’re over-qualified, under-qualified, or pert near petrified.