The Mode/Switch

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. -craigP.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.

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.

A 14-minute podcast on what your history gives you (besides trauma!) to survive your work and life. Need some resilience today? Press play soon.

Our pod team picks up what Emily’s putting down in the latest issue of the M/S, discussing the ‘theatre of productivity,’ in which your every movement is surveilled as a measure of your workplace usefulness.

Humans are notoriously bad at predicting their own happiness. But is there such a thing as finding your One True Love in a job? Is there a way to find The One when it comes to your occupation?

Emily Bosscher’s guest post this week calls Gen Z and millennial professionals to “push past the awkwardness” to seek the mentoring they need and to learn the weirdness of a workplace’s culture.

In this episode, LaShone Manuel, Emily Bosscher, and Craig Mattson talk about when playing a role makes you fake at work—and when it makes you exactly what your coworkers need.

This episode responds to an argument in the Mode/Switch newsletter issue, discussing the rich and complex stories of four early-to-mid-career professionals: Andrea Munday, Bre Rodgriguez, Eric Freeman, and Julia Belcher.

When things get hard at work, well-intentioned people will tell you, “You just gotta have faith.” But when you suffer shame or anger professionally, “having faith” doesn’t necessarily mean feeling secure. The podcast features the Mode/Switch newsletter on Kelsey Brooks and Alex D’Agostino's stories.

A podcast version of the newsletter on digital overwhelm. Advice for how to tell your digiwhelm story and cope with all the techno-exhaustion of your life. Listen while you finish out the week’s work…

A episode about getting fired.

And why that's good for you.

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.Emily asks if she has to talk to a Mean Girl at work. Isn’t avoidance the better part of valor in this situation?Madeline’s wondering, as a Gen Z, what you do when the difficult person you have to deal with is your boss.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?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. 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 bysharing brave feedback from other employees on the floor, andconcocting 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 shareBeing 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!