When someone sucks up everybody’s attention in social settings, we say they have Main Character Energy. It’s a species of self-centered or even narcissistic behavior. But let me tell you a story about a time when I literally had Main Character Energy.

When I was twenty-six, I auditioned for as much live theatre as I could. Sometimes I got side roles (Dr. Craven in The Secret Garden). Sometimes I got supporting roles (Matthew Cuthbert in Anne of Green Gables). But I’ll never forget landing a lead role in an unfortunately bad play. The script was so full of stagey lines and two-dimensional characters and syrupy plot points that I’d even hate to name it.

One night in rehearsal, the director called out, “Hey Craig, cross stage right on that line, would you?” (This is a narrative reconstruction, of course. Not a transcript.) For some reason, my mounting frustration with the production provoked a specious question: “What’s my motivation?”

The voice came back: “You don’t need motivation. I just need you out of the way.”

Her words punctured my ego, which was largely a good thing. But looking back through the lens of organizational communication, I think the director was both right and not right enough.

• She was right that I just needed to receive the logistical information. She had a lot of people on stage, and they all needed to be visible in different ways. So “Craig, get your butt from here to there” was a perfectly legitimate message.

• But she would have been even more right if she had said, “Let’s think about why your character might need to cross at that moment.” That might have helped transform my Main Character Energy into Good Character Energy.

Mid-level leaders wishing to engage their teams’ complex feelings will need to conduct some diagnostic conversation, asking questions like: what do you think’s going on? what would need to be true for things to go better? what’s the point of it all?

But this past week, I asked a mid-level leader whether she ever talks about big issues like purpose or meaning with her team.

Nope, she said. There’s just way too much to do. Besides, engaging people’s feelings risks presumptuousness (“I know just how you feel”) or even invasiveness (“Are you getting enough sleep these days?”).

When confronted by workplace theatrics, the wise leader addresses apparent narcissism in a two-step: 1. Interpretive curiosity. 2. Communicative intervention.

The mode/switch this week is to use these two practices, not to match Main Character Energy but to morph it into Good Character Energy.

Practicing Interpretive Curiosity

Mostly, the maestros and divas in your office drama will use what I call the basic modes of internal communication: sending, speaking, signaling, and showing. Their misuse of these modes might take on these theatrical expressions:

The very big pause. You send a question, and now you’re waiting for the message that, for no apparent reason, just keeps right on not arriving. It feels like someone sucking up all of an audience’s attention with a very dramatic silence .

Interpretive curiosity would suggest that a tardy email indicates, not something about the person’s character—they’re lazy!—but something about the conditions they’re working in. Mid-level leaders could engage the Very Long Pause not with more silent treatment but with well-placed questions: You’ve always been great about getting back to me. But your email responses have slowed. What do you think’s going on with that?

The very loud talker. Sometimes when people feel afraid or angry, they start talking at a volume that resembles actors belting out their lines to the nose-bleed seats. They get in your space and talk too loud.

But try this: instead of telling them to quiet down (rarely a good idea), try getting curious about where their surplus energy comes from. Be like a speech therapist, looking for the background conditions that lead to their style of articulation.

The avoidant signaler. Sometimes, in a one-on-one, you’ll get an unspoken indication that a team member is frustrated. They start rattling their stuff or clicking their pen. They might slam their laptop shut, while smiling at you. If it’s a remote call, they might stay partly off-camera. What they have to say might be strictly task-focused, but their unspoken content suggests a lot of feelings going on.

They’re like TV actors trying to act in an old-time theatre. They assume the camera’s always zoomed in for an extreme close up, when really most of their nuance is lost.

But maybe they’re acting like Main Characters, because they feel like the Non-Player Characters in video games. Turning that NPC energy into Good Character Energy mean asking things like, “It looks like you’re discouraged. Can we talk about that?”

The constant joker. Some people add to workplace drama with sarcasm or irony or silliness. They act less like actors in a play and more like comedians hazing their audiences.

But you can convert all that affect into Good Character Energy simply by laughing along. As Bonnie Miller-McLemore writes in her latest book, “It’s a relief to laugh at ourselves. We’re ridiculous sometimes.”

Sometimes the kindest thing we can do for our team is simply to let the absurdity of the situation overtake the conversation. Laughing at the sometimes pointlessness of work is a humble, human thing to do.

Conducting Communicative Interventions

Joseph Campbell told Bill Moyers in a series of public television interviews that, when life gets overwhelming and bewildering, and you’re just not sure what you should do, you should follow your bliss. But soon, the phrase started spreading through mindless slogans fit for nothing but bumper stickers and t-shirts. “Follow your bliss” became a chief ingredient in Main Character Energy.

No wonder Campbell came to dread his own phrase. He eventually wished he’d said, “Follow your blisters.”

I learned that story from my friend Bonnie (referenced above) who notes in her book, Follow Your Bliss and Other Lies about Calling, that corporate internal marketing is all too good at telling their workers to enjoy their tasks more. “Follow your bliss” comes to mean, “Never stop working.”

Here are some communicative interventions I wish my director had taken with me all those years ago. They are simple things you can do as a mid-level leader to effect emotional change in your division.

1. Identify constraints. My director actually did this for me, a day later, when I apologized for being such a jackass. She helped me understand the flow of other actors on the stage. But for you as a mid-level leader, it also helps when you can tell your workers, “Here are the limits we’re working with.”

2. Clarify roles. I thought I understood my role: the leading man, right? But the truth is, roles are never constant, even in a 2-hour production. You can help your team by explaining how their responsibilities shift and interact with others’.

3. Give choices. You can give people a would-you-rather set of options. Would you rather do the investigation or get the software certification? This doesn’t make them maestros or divas. But it does position them as agents with the freedom to act meaningfully.

4. Report results. When people ask for changes, and you listen, you have to not only take action but show that you have taken action. Reporting what difference people’s internal communication has made will help them see themselves not as main characters but as active contributors.

A final word

That’s it for this newsletter about dealing with workplace narcissism—if that’s actually what it is. Obviously, if you’re dealing with employees with clinical narcissism, this wasn’t the newsletter issue for you!

But for many, many cases, I think you can see that I’m pretty optimistic about the possibilities of converting Main Character Energy into Good Character Energy. You may have to do some mode/switching here and there, experimenting with this or that approach.

I’m really, really glad that, in all likelihood, you never got to see the play I starred in so many years ago. But I’m even gladder that you can practice interpretive curiosity and communicative intervention to stage a comeback for you and your team.

Let’s set up this week’s pod with Dr. Irene Kraegel.

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?

Why people feel so tense about wellness speak

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.

Here’s how to run meetings better this week

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. More than any other technology, your internal comms can build trust, transform conflict, deepen collaboration, and get some seriously good sh#t done.

What this looks like on a good day at work

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!

Want to connect with this week’s guest?

You can connect with Dr. Kraegel at her practice at Dwell Psychological Services. Psychology Today also offers information about Irene’s work.

She explains, “I specialize in therapy for chronic pain, anxiety/depression, & Christian faith integration, both in-person in MI & online in 43 states.”

You can also purchase Irene’s books for nuanced perspectives on mindfulness and faith.

I think that’s what mid-level leadership feels like most days. Pumping one pedal, then another, swiveling this way and lurching that, throwing up an arm, tucking the other, seeking momentum within constant instability.

Welcome to the Mode/Switch, a newsletter that helps mid-level leaders and their teams do more than cope when work’s a lot. This week, I’d like to talk about what you might call the left and right pedals of the managerial unicycle: People Smarts and Pattern Smarts.

The other day, I had lunch with a mid-level leader, Jaron, let’s call him, who was clearly good at dealing with unstable conditions. While we talked, he kept screwing and then unscrewing the lid of a Mott’s applesauce pouch for his baby girl in a highchair next to him—all the while, telling me about a workplace impasse.

His company’s growing, which is good news. But that growth shifts him away from what he’s truly good at, which is client-facing work. Now, he’s learning to mentor his team in new tasks that he himself used to do. He doesn’t feel well trained to do this mentoring, though I suspect he’s actually pretty good at it.

But the impasse he’s baffled by is that (a) he needs to delegate more tasks to his team, but (b) the client doesn’t trust the team. They trust Jaron. So, they say things like,

“Hey, can you be on the call this afternoon?”

“No, but my team will be!”

“We’d really like you to be on the call.”

“. . . ”

So that’s the dilemma. Jaron needs his team to do more. His client wants him to do more. It’s an impasse between scaling the company and building client trust. It’s been called the Delegator’s Dilemma (read more here):

If I don’t delegate, I’ll burn out. If I delegate, the client’s gonna go elsewhere.

Jaron’s short-term solution is Do It All. He mentors his team and he shows up on the calls. But it’s like trying to ride a unicycle without pedaling.

People intelligence gets you halfway there

Clearly, if you’re a manager stuck in the Delegator’s Dilemma, you need to know and care for your team’s mentoring needs and you need to know how to talk attentively with your client.

You can build these People Smarts with what Yale researcher Marc Brackett calls a Mood Meter. The instrument asks two questions:

Brackett says people’s feelings are always a blend of both. You can map these feelings (in yourself, your team members, and your client) at the intersection of energy and pleasantness.

• Some days, your feelings give high energy, but low pleasantness. Aha, you might say, I feel angry that the client is making way too many demands.

• Other days, you have low energy and low pleasantness. Okay, you think to yourself, maybe I’m sad that my team isn’t growing as I’d hoped they would.

• Some days, your team exhibits low energy and high pleasantness. They feel content about the situation: they like the predictability of their tasks.

• Other days, your client feels high energy and high pleasantness. They love what you’re doing for their last software roll-out. They think you’re great.

Taking your Mode Meter to work will help you to be smarter about how you equip your team with new tasks and how you offer reassurance to your nervous client.

But resolving the Delegation Dilemma requires more than People Smarts. The challenge Jaron faces is more than personal, in other words. The mid-level leader has to figure out what people are feeling, for sure. But he also needs to coordinate the processes and patterns that help create people’s states of mind.

And for that, you don’t just need a Mood Meter. You also need a Mode Meter.

Pattern intelligence gets you the rest of the way

What I’m calling Pattern Smarts, as opposed to People Smarts, draws on a body of theory known as Relational Leadership Theory, which redirects focus from people to processes and then back to people. Think of it this way: People Smarts focus on the state of mind of the person in front of you. But Pattern Smarts focus on the systems all around the person in front of you.

Think about all the background interactions shaping Jaron’s relationships with his team and his client. I tried to sketch these patterns:

It’s giving Mad Scientist vibes, I know. But a company culture involves a constantly shifting, highly complex pattern of interactions, sometimes visible, sometimes not. And it’s almost impossible to comprehensively map, much less to master and control.

Like a unicyclist, the mid-level leader needs to push forward sometimes with People Smarts, caring for the person in the moment. But then, a second later, the same manager needs to swivel. Pulling back from a needy client or an overwhelmed team member is hard in the moment. You really want to offer care and support and reassurance. Those are, after all, the People Smarts that make your job feel human. But the manager also needs the Pattern Smarts to coordinate with networks of interactions happening all around. It’s dizzyingly hard, and you’ll probably keep sending your unicycle skittering.

What you need is a Mode Meter

My organizational research among millennial managers and Gen Z team members has turned up four simple modes that everybody uses when they communicate at work: sending-out, signaling-at, speaking-with, showing-how.

These modes (unlike the map of systemic interactions I sketched above) are quickly graspable. You know how to do them intuitively. For example, you know how…

• to send out a message by email or text or DM

• to wordlessly signal that something might be right or wrong

• to speak with a client or a teammate, offering honest conversation

• to show how to do things

Sending, Signaling, Showing, and Speaking. They’re more than ways to send a message. They are postures that help you link a given conversation with a larger set of background patterns.

Let’s say you sense that a productive pattern in your company is about to be disrupted by an impatient client. In Jaron’s case, for example, his company’s entering a season of growth, which requires a pattern change: they have to redistribute more tasks from mid-level leaders to employees. But the anxious client demands that Jaron show up on each call. For the client, the larger pattern is invisible. So Jaron faces not just an interpersonal challenge, but also a systemic one. He needs to stabilize the company’s essential changes, not just for himself or his team but for the client as well. After all, the client will actually benefit from working with a savvy team.

Should Jaron send, speak, signal, or show? The mode he settles on makes all the difference not just for individual people’s emotional states, but for the ongoing success of an emergent and vital pattern of interactions in the larger company.

Let’s break this down for you into two simple questions.

• First, you want to ask a People Smarts question: What does this relationship, right here, right now, need from me?

• But then, you want to ask a Pattern Smarts question: What does the larger system, the larger pattern, need from us right here, right now?

Using the Mode Meter helps you choose the most responsible mode for coordinating people and patterns in your organization. You’re not just trying to adapt to the emotional states of people near you; you’re trying to alter their attention so they can see the infrastructural, technological, and policy patterns that affect your interactions.

Let’s try out the Mode Meter

For Jaron, the meter proposes asking two questions:

• What does the larger pattern require to keep going? The systems of the company require him to share his work with his team. His people need to step up and develop at the speed of a growing company. And the client needs the expertise that comes not just from Jaron’s expertise but from the collective wisdom of a shrewd and savvy team. That’s a good (if fragile) pattern, worth coordinating with.

• What does this relationship with a nervous client require? My reflex is to say, reassurance. But I don’t trust my reaction on that one, because using modes of communication isn’t just about conveying messages like, “It’s all good” or “You’ll be fine.” Mode-switching is about helping people to coordinate with invisible patterns. Which mode would do the best job at helping the client to see the larger pattern here of the company’s rapid growth, the manager’s need to delegate, the team’s expanding capabilities?

In my judgment, the urgency of stabilizing the company’s patterns of change is very high, given the growth of the company. If Jaron doesn’t resolve the Delegator’s Dilemma, the company’s profits might suffer—and Jaron himself might burn out. That puts him in the top two squares of the matrix: Sending or Showing. Jaron might send a very long email to explain everything about the changes in task assignment to the client. But, given the nervousness of the client, the relationship needs are pretty intense. So I would go with the upper right quadrant of the Mode Meter and use a mode of Showing.

Here’s what I think the Mode Meter suggests: Schedule a meeting with your client and your team (in-person, if possible). Rehearse and prepare thoroughly with your team, so they are ready to shine in the meeting. When you gather with the client, be lightly in charge, barely guiding the agenda. Say as little as possible. Every time the client asks a question of you, receive it, jot a note, nod your head, and look to your team. Defer to their judgment. Your goal is to use a mode of demonstration, to show the client how good your team actually is.

A final word

At first, I thought the hard part about riding a unicycle was not having handlebars. But I’d been riding bikes no-handed for years.

The real trick was the constant decision-making in unstable conditions. No unicycle manual could tell me when to pedal my right foot and when to flail out my left arm.

For mid-level leaders, pumping one pedal, then another, twisting your team’s wheel one way or the other, takes a lot of practice and tacit knowing. But what guides the constantly precarious process is the goal to coordinate people and patterns across your organization. So you pump, you pedal, you flail, you try first this, then that, and most of all you keep getting back on the banana seat.

When I collapse into bed, I like to read David Brooks’s How to Know a Person. A favorite chapter so far: “How Not to See a Person.” I think I’m drawn to this passage because it speaks to a question that’s been driving the Mode/Switch newsletter and podcast lately: how can mid-level leaders be seen, heard, and known by their higher-ups?

The latest Gallup workplace polling suggests to me 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 become Bad and Lazy People in 2026? Nah. I think 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 faith-forward 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 with your team.

Emily & Ken on the right, Craig and LaShone on the left, and our guest, Lyle Wells, in the middle

The managerial question our podcast leaves open

But as you listen to this week’s pod, you’ll notice that our team keeps asking 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 podcast slogan.) But we ask these impossible questions, because we know you, as a mid-level leader, feel these questions urgently. To do your managerial work well, you 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 that’s too noisy to hear what you’re saying?

Here are some of my evolving ideas, as I wrestle with what our podcast guests are saying, as well as listen to the wisdom of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy.

1. Learn to see your higher-ups’ choices as reasonable but ineffective. This is going to be hard, especially if you feel personally stung by their inability to hear you. But stay with me! Lyle urges leaders to be generous and compassionate. For you, as a mid-level leader, 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 reasonable actions. The problem is their reasonable 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. And, in your senior leadership’s case, those actions may look and feel bold and decided. But you know these actions are actually dysfunctional: they’re creating obliviousness and neglect. You know that those actions are the too-confident choices of trapped people.

   Seeing your higher-ups as making logical but dysfunctional moves is the first step in being heard, seen, and known by them.

2. Concede that your feeling of neglect isn’t the core problem. When you feel actively ignored by your senior leadership—when you feel (as one Mode/Switcher put it in this week’s roundtable) non-existent in your organization, you can quite understandably conclude that your neglect is the problem in your working community. It’s not. Treating your own sense of neglect as the problem in your working community throws you in the same quicksand as your self-focused boss. Snatching your CEO’s attention momentarily won’t fix the larger, underlying problems of cognitive fixity and emotional avoidance.

   Learning to name your own feelings of neglect as symptoms of a larger problem is the second step in being heard, seen, and known by your leadership.

3. Make the most of every conversational opportunity. Now that you can reframe your own feelings of being ignored as a signal not the cause, can you begin to make more skillful conversational moves? I know you can! In this week’s podcast, Lyle emphasized just how reluctant some leaders are to being strategic. And as a mid-level leader, you may need to fight your own reluctance to practice internal communication strategically. You might be thinking, “My boss should just know better! He should just know that ignoring mid-level leadership is bad for the rest of us!” And you’re right. Just maybe not right enough.

   To engage this problem smarter, you’ll need to practice internal strategic communication. Here, for example, is what my colleague Mamta Goya, of The Leading Mindset Substack told me when I put this problem to her. Effective internal communication from mid-level leaders, she said, comes down to naming progress, identifying friction, and making clear requests. Just as Lyle named truth-telling as integral to leadership, so Goya says, “The key is to tell the truth in a way that creates action, not helplessness.”

If your higher-ups are stuck in a mindset about you and your work, you can use everyday language to build awareness that they’re being avoidant, name the broken loop of dysfunctional but oh-so-tempting choices, and encourage them to be present to what your team is actually experiencing. (If you know about Relational Frame Theory, as well as Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, you’ll recognize my indebtedness to Steven Hayes here!) This is a newsletter and a podcast that wrestles with questions like this every week in order to offer you equipment for articulate and effective mid-level leadership.

For now, let’s get started by pulling up to the Mode/Switch roundtable, pressing play above—or catching us on Spotify or on Apple Podcasts.

The latest Gallup “State of the Global Workplace” reports that 80% of employees are disengaged today. That disengagement cost the world economy $10 trillion in 2025—more than the combined GDPs of Germany and Japan.

What’s the biggest factor in this decline? Managerial indifference and exhaustion. “Lower engagement among managers,” explains Gallup, “accounts for most of the recent downturn in employee engagement.” In 2025, manager engagement sank five points, from 27% to 22%.

It doesn’t have to be that way. In what Gallup calls “best-practice institutions,” managerial engagement goes in the opposite direction, with 79% of managers feeling engaged at work.

Here’s my question for you this week: what can you, as an exhausted mid-level leader, do in an organization that’s clueless about best practices? If your CEO’s oblivious and your team’s exhausted, what can you do but throw up your hands?

You might be right. But it’s possible that you’re right in the wrong way. In other words, maybe you’re missing the point of your own disengagement. What if your feelings of apathy and exhaustion are actually indispensable and maybe even inventive? I’d like to argue in what follows that your felt disengagement isn’t necessarily you being a bad leader. It might also be you practicing moral clarity within bewildering conditions.

Let’s break this down into two parts. First, we’ll explore one unexpected source of disengagement. Then we’ll find a way from chronic avoidance to creative hopelessness.

Where your disengagement’s coming from

Back in 2022, I interviewed dozens of Millennial managers and Gen Z team members to learn how they were coping with early 2020s intensities at work. Despite all the heat these demographics took for the Great Resignation, their stories were inspiring. But these resilient and resourceful people were facing severe technological tiredness. My book called their condition Digital Overwhelm, or digiwhelm, for short.

In 2022, the digiwhelm was largely cognitive. Too many screens and platforms. Too many emails and DMs. Too many pings and passwords. Nobody’s brain could keep up.

But recently I got curious about how digiwhelm might be changing in a world of AI. So I reached out to highly successful people whom I interviewed for my book and asked what they were seeing and feeling today. What they told me helped me understand a variant on the digiwhelm virus. It didn’t sound like overstimulation. It sounded like a relational shift. These are highly effective people who are doing anything but disengaging. But their stories made me recognize that so many managers might use disengagement as a survival posture.

Rachel Alvarado, Ben Hoekstra, Rachel Hennessy

See if you can spot what these stories have in common, not just in cognitive but in moral load:

• Rachel Alvarado recently left her marketing firm out of frustration with what she described as AI theater. Clients everywhere (she said) feel FOMO: they’re desperate to jump on the latest AI trends. But this desperation makes them prone to lunge for the latest bright, shiny AI products—even when they’re repackaged hype all using the same large language model (often Google’s).

• Ben Hoekstra, who works for a manufacturing company, noted that building AI agents just isn’t that fun. In some ways, it’s like working with entities that have all the worst (but none of the most enjoyable) qualities of human interns. Working with an intern requires patience, for sure. But you also get to see the person learn and grow. Working with an AI agent means detailing tedious requirements for a set of tasks. It’s not mentoring; it’s enumeration.

• Rachel Hennessy is a manager who finds AI obnoxious because of its overconfidence. “I can’t open a single piece of technology without some sparkly icon and pop-up begging for me to use their AI tool. It’s also sort of insulting? Because, without ever even getting to know my writing style or work, I have this tool that is already assuming that I am a dolt and that it knows better.” They’re like douchebags who mansplain, she says. Let my illegally gained and shallowly digested training data gussy up your work!

Can you see a pattern? AI seems to be changing our digiwhelm. We’re still feeling cognitive overload (from too many devices and too much messaging), but now we’re also feeling the moral exhaustion of performative certainty. There’s a new Greatest Commandment in town: “Thou shalt pretend to a certainty you couldn’t possibly have.”

That’s why clients are sure that this product will finally change their world. It’s why chatbots are sure you need help. And it’s why the boss is sure that building AI agents will propel the company into stratospheric profitability.

Everybody’s racing to say, We know what’s coming next, we know how to deal with it, we have the tools to make everything work.

All this certainty theatre is fun for a minute but morally exhausting in the long run. A culture of misplaced confidence pushed Rachel Alvarado to leave a well-paying job to start her own company: she wanted to offer a genuine deliverable. AI’s performative certainty also makes Ben miss working with human assistants, especially for the chance to offer provisional, honest, well-tempered advice rather than tediously literal protocols. And I don’t need to explain why Rachel Hennessy is sick of insinuating bots. You know from your own experience that over-confidence kabuki is a soul suck.

If you’re a disengaged manager, I don’t think you need to stay there. In fact, I believe that your disengagement might be a place of creative hopelessness. For Acceptance and Commitment therapists, this sort of disengagement just might be the exit door out of the theatre of performative certainty.

Where you can go from here

I admit that I’m an outlier when it comes to interpreting managerial disengagement statistics positively. Most people, including the analysts at Gallup, see this disengagement as Very Very Bad. I agree with them that companies and colleges, nonprofits and churches are in trouble when it comes to dispirited mid-level leaders. the question isn’t, are you disengaged? The question is, what kind of disengagement are you feeling?

But if chronic apathy and avoidance are unhelpful, what some thinkers like Jason B. Luoma, Steven C. Hayes, and Robyn D. Walser call “creative hopelessness” can be a valuable signal and starting point.1 That’s the encouragement I find in these downward numbers: they point to an indispensable honesty, an awareness, a contact with reality. And it’s a refreshing counter to an AI-induced communication pattern of over-confident declaration.

But I wouldn’t recommend staying in a place of disengagement. The move towards wise re-engagement will require a perspective shift in how you talk with your higher-ups and with your team about your work.

Let’s call it a mode/switch from performative certainty to committed action.

I borrow the term “committed action” from Acceptance and Commitment Therapy as a descriptor for taking steps towards what you actually care about. It sounds unfair, perhaps, to ask mid-level leaders to practice this committed action (why not tell the vice presidents to do better?), but I do so, in the conviction that mid-level leaders are the hinge points not the pain points of their organizations.

I think your committed action will be most palpable in how you practice internal communication. Just last week, I was on a call with a lot of other practitioners who’d gathered to learn from internal comms expert Jenni Field about how to better tend the information flow and meaning-making of the workplace. Jenni’s “Huddle” reinforced for me that strengthening our practice of internal communication is one good way to cultivate a more trustworthy work culture.

What’s internal communication look like as committed action? What’s it sound like? How’s this for a very early, very revisable script for a manager talking about AI integration?

You guys are smart people. You’re good at what you do. But the challenge of harnessing LLMs brings us very hard questions.

What we’re hearing from higher up is a lot of reassurance meant to cheer us up. It’s well-intentioned. But I think we need less reassurance and more reorientation.

So let’s name an emotional reality: we’re carrying a lot of uncertainty in our bodies right now. The answer to that isn’t fake confidence. The answer for now is, stay open, stay expectant, stay curious.

If you don’t feel a little uncomfortable reading that impromptu script, you’re probably not reading it. (Reminds me of the new variant on TLDR called “AIDR.”) But varying that script for emails, texts, DMs, Zoom calls, and one-on-ones offers an approach to internal communication that treats disengagement as a valuable starting point for wiser re-engagement.

So, go ahead: let your messaging as a manager be creatively hopeless. That means being present to what’s actually going on. Being connected to the values of your organization. Being appropriately detached from guarantees of control. Being capable of perspective switches. Being spiritually and psychologically flexible.

A final word

The Gallup report I started with announces a huge disparity between senior leaders who use AI extensively and everyday workers who use it far less often. I’m not too surprised by this finding. In a cranky mood, I’d probably say it means that the higher-ups have better slush funds for subscription fees.

But this week, my hunch is that digiwhelm manifests itself differently at various levels of the organization. Among top-level leaders, In a it shows up as projected confidence. We’re on the cutting edge, and we are going to make so much money! Among the rank and file, it shows up as apparent apathy. I’m suggesting this week that, especially among mid-level leaders, creatively hopeless disengagement isn’t a problem to be solved but a path towards greater honesty. What do you think? How might you counter my theory? Just hit reply and let’s move together towards greater clarity and candor in work culture.

Do you immediately take all the blame?

This week’s episode of the Mode/Switch Pod offers a big-picture view of trust problems in work culture today. Usually, our podcast works inside-out, asking how organizational leaders can help their teams flourish. This week, we flip the perspective, examining the pressures outside-in.

Those pressures suggest the need for what this week’s guest calls “smells and tells.”

When you smell mistrust at work, your reflex may be to question yourself: am I the problem here? But for me, Suzanne Rabicoff suggests perspective-shifting questions: What if mistrust doesn’t trace to you exactly? What if starts outside your org?

Suzanne’s analysis will ease the pressure you put on yourself. Pressure to be reliable. Pressure to be credible. Pressure to be, um, odor-free.

This episode will help you spot the pressures external to your organization, especially technological pressures, that make trust hard inside your organization as well.

Suzanne will make you laugh. She’s a witty observer 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 strengthen our grasp on what’s making it so hard to believe in leadership today.

Want to Dive Deeper?

If Suzanne Rabicoff’s outside-in perspective on organizational life and work impressed you, you might enjoy learning how her company, The Pie Grower has drawn wisdom from Alex Edmans’s book Grow the Pie.

You can learn more about Suzanne’s innovative product, Chief of Field, here. A lot of companies know they need a chief of staff, she says, but too few have recognized their need for a chief of field. Someone needs to take responsibility for IRL!

And if you’re wondering if she’s right that in-person events are going to become ever more essential for companies, read here.

If you want to learn how external factors affect internal culture, read this HBR piece, “Can You Know Too Much About Your Organization?”

We had a blast with Suzanne Rabicoff’s hilariously shrewd observations and analysis. Reach out to her to improve your organization’s relationships with external constituents here.

Why follow the M/S Pod in a world FULL of podcasts?

• Because your boss wants you to integrate AI into organizational workflows. Check out Karen Sergeant’s advice.

• Because you want to connect better with your immigrant employees. Check out Lola Adeyemo’s episode.

• Because there’s always someone who triggers you on your team. You might want to listen to Jay Johnson about getting along with the Difficult People.

• Because (admit it or not) work hurts. Learn to find inner healing that’ll heal your team as well by listening to our conversation with Meryl Herr.

This is a podcast that offers you two tools: intergenerational perspective and internal communication. We help mid-level leaders do more than cope when work’s a lot.

You might not be able to listen to this pod right now. But do us a solid: hit this link and give us a follow on Spotify or here on Apple Podcasts. You’ll make a snug place for us in your feed—and you’ll help others find these vital convos as well.

Oh great. Another 3:30-in-the-afternoon “reframe” email from your senior leadership, explaining how everybody can align with an unwanted policy.

Your sphincter tightens. Your shoulders tense. Your jaw starts to hurt.

You’re the Good Manager, though. So you dutifully email the team, translating what alignment means for their everyday operations.

Within seconds, your team begins firing back emails, texts, and DMs, demanding more clarity. Your carefully worded email has somehow eroded your credibility with the very people you’re trying to serve.

Being aboard Artemis II is sounding pretty good right about now.

Good Managers Feeling Like Bad Communicators

In 2024, I published a book about dozens of Millennial managers and Gen Z team members whose stories pointed me to what I have come to call the Good Manager’s Dilemma. One quick story should explain how it works:

Randy Biddle worked for an insurance company as a millennial mid-level leader. He reported that senior leadership gaslighted him, denying their own inconsistencies.1

But when he turned to communication with his team, things didn’t go better. He would craft a careful email, send it, and then encounter flat incomprehension.

What’s wrong here? he kept asking himself. Am I a bad communicator?

From what I’ve seen in my own research about stabilizing teams and translating grandly impractical messaging, I’m inclined to say, “No, you’re probably a very good communicator.” It’s just that you’re also stuck in the Good Manager’s Dilemma:

If you hold back from sending the explanatory email to your team, you appear to be hiding something. If you share the explanatory email with your team, you risk deepening confusion and eroding trust.

Recent research from the good folks at Gallagher offers confirmation of my research. The good news is, you can escape the gravity pull of this dilemma.

What Recent Internal Comms Research Shows

One counter-intuitive finding of the 2026 Gallagher report on internal communication includes this troubling reality: increasing the flow of high-level mission-and-strategy-focused messaging “actually increases the risk of perceived lack of direction.” The very thing you’d think would make people more excited about your company’s purpose actually makes them more uncertain. To paraphrase the Gallagher research: increasing messaging flow doesn’t strengthen employee grasp.

That dynamic explains how you find yourself in the Good Manager’s Dilemma. Derned if you speak, derned if you don’t.

The Good Manager’s Dilemma: Expand the volume of internal communication—risk creating confusion and disengagement. Lessen the volume of internal communication—risk looking negligent or secretive.

The Gallagher report also notes that companies communicate more about mission and purpose than anything else, more than business performance, more than employee wellbeing, more than diversity and inclusion. But the results of all this purpose-driven internal communication are often disappointingly impractical.

No wonder, then, that senior leadership oscillates between two extremes: 1) playing things way too close to the chest and 2) broadcasting way too much about high-level strategy, values, and purpose. In both cases, it’s hard for you to translate unstated assumptions or overstated impracticalities to your team.

So, when another 3:30-in-the-afternoon email arrives from on high, you feel stuck on the other side of the moon.

Eluding the Gravity Pull of “the Good Manager”

If you’re going to improve your internal comms as a mid-level leader, you’re probably going to need to stop saying, “How can I craft another message to my team?” and start asking, “What do I keep doing, every time one of these confusing senior-level communications happen—and is that thing I keep doing working?”

(That’s this week’s mode/switch, btw.)

To figure this out, you’re going to need to be as sharp-eyed as an astronaut making lunar observations. You might need to keep a log about your own habits and reactions.

Once you’ve logged what you keep doing, you need to get real with yourself about whether all these practices are actually working. Are they functional for your team?

For example, all those clarifying messages you put out there might make you feel less anxious. But what discomfort might you be trying to avoid in yourself? What ambiguity are you trying to eliminate? What open-endedness are you averting?

Ask yourself, after I send that 859-word email, does my team have a clear grasp on what they’re supposed to do differently?

There’s a big difference between what makes you feel a little less anxious and what equips your team to align with a new policy direction from on high.

Slipping Out of the Impossible Position

Too often, mid-level leaders sound like the old man in Aesop’s donkey fable. First, the guy puts his grandson on the donkey’s back and walks beside them. But passersby said the boy’s being selfish, making the old man walk. So the old man gets on the donkey with his grandson—and people complain they’re cruel to the donkey. So the old man and the boy carry the donkey between them. People now say they’re both crazy.

You know the usual moral: stop listening to the crowd; do what you think’s best.

But for mid-level managers, the moral’s different. Think of the donkey as the message you get from higher-up. The donkey looks ready to ride. But is it?

Maybe don’t quickly forward the message to your team and let them ride it however they want. Internal comms research suggests they might get confused.

Maybe don’t hop on the message yourself, owning the damn thing as if it’s your own. Again, internal comms research suggests your own credibility will suffer.

Instead, ask a different question. Not, who should ride the donkey? But, should the donkey be ridden at all?

Practicing communicative constraint rather than communicative dutifulness makes discretion the better part of volume. Dutifulness is all about volume and transparency and, in its own way, avoidance. But constraint enables flexibility and discretion and openness for what yet may come.

Safe journey to you! (And, hey, if you’re looking for ways to script some constraint with your team, check out the table below.)

This winter’s brought bad luck for our trees. My family lost a Norway Maple around New Year’s. Then, a few weeks back, a second tree fell, this one a lanky conifer. When Larry the tree guy came to grind the stump, I asked about the other pine tree still standing six yards away. Should we take that one down, too? I expected him to say yes, given that, for him, tree-chopping means income. Instead, he told me how, in a windstorm, these pine trees will pull their roots up out of the ground, like people trying to free themselves from waist-deep mud. He pointed to the base of our still-standing pine and noted that there was no sign of uprooting yet. I’d leave it be, he said.

That still-standing tree came to mind this week, as I finished 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.

Emily Stewart, once at Vox, now senior correspondent at Business Insider’s Discourse team.

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.

The tall pine on the left has now, sadly, fallen. I miss how it once filled & framed the nearby sky.

Have you missed these Mode/Switch episodes?

• Are you wondering about how AI can actually bring clarity to your workplace leadership? Check out Karen Sergeant’s conversation with the team.

• Do you wish to connect better with your immigrant employees? Check out Lola Adeyemo’s episode.

• Is a hard-to-get-along-with coworker getting you down? You need Jay Johnson’s conversation about getting along with the peeps that trigger you.

• Are you suffering work hurt? Probably. And you should do some inner work, says Meryl Herr, so you can help your team heal as well.

Reflexive Responses to Other People’s Feelings

I wish I hadn’t kept my back turned that afternoon when my team member told me he might skip out the next day. Problem was, the next day was big for our division: a job interview for a vital position. We needed everybody there. “I’m just not sure I can make it,” my coworker said. I felt my back go rigid. I kept staring at my screen.

All I could think was, This is your job.

Okay, give me some credit. At least, I didn’t try to scold the poor guy. By my silence wasn’t much better. The way I kept staring at my screen probably signaled that I was a harder, busier, more dedicated worker than he was. And, as the manager, I had a helluva lot more to do than he did.

Turns out, the next day, my coworker showed up after all. Did my shaming signals work? Was it a managerial win? Maybe—not.

My actions explained away what was making work feel excessive to him. (Whatever’s bothering you doesn’t finally matter; all that matters is that you show up, just like I do every damn day.) What my actions didn’t do was help him engage what felt excessive. So, the next time he felt overwhelmed, we’d be right back in the same place again.

Honestly, though, you’re probably a more decent person than I managed to be. You probably show more heart on most days than I did with my coworker back then.

My reflex was avoidance. Maybe yours is the opposite: you use a Sympathy Script. When someone complains about overwork, you instinctively say something like, “Gosh, that sounds like a lot. I’m really sorry about that.” Those are undeniably kind words. They are emotionally alert and non-retaliatory. But the problem with the Sympathy Script is that it does no better than my silent avoidance to help your team member get unstuck from their overwhelm. It signals that whatever the other person is feeling, however hard it is, we all just need to show up and get the project done. And here’s some sympathy to help you do that, etc.

Which brings us to this week’s mode/switch: from preemptive avoidance to relational wondering. To preemptively sympathize with someone’s report of overwork is to fail to ask a vital question: What do we think is happening here?

I learned this mode/switch while doing research related to my book Digital Overwhelm. Perhaps my biggest takeaway from talking with millennial managers and their Gen Z team members was that people experience stuff before they can explain it.

Take one of my interviewees, Ambrose Hofmeister (not his real name, but, wow, I kinda wish it were).

I didn’t get to observe Ambrose on a job site. But our interview suggested to me that he was probably a fairly conscientious employee. His conscientiousness didn’t, however, eliminate job-related overwhelm. After college, he worked as a union carpenter in Chicago. He quit that job and transferred to a suburban company where he carpentered at a smaller scale. But he didn’t last at that job either.

I think in both cases, his bosses were a little puzzled by Ambrose’s overwhelm. But something was going on, because he subsequently had a mental health crisis that kept him out of the labor force for half a year.

I learned from his story, and from others, that when it comes to workplace overwhelm, people know more than they can say. They’ll tell you things like, “How do you expect me to keep up with my caseload when you keep giving me more?” or “You want me to take PTO? Are you freakin’ kidding me?” They may say these things confidently, but they probably don’t know what to say about the intensities they’re feeling. Most people’s affective experience doesn’t come with tags like, This is resentment, and this is anger, and this is despair.

Instead, people tend to experience overwhelm at work the way they feel a sneeze coming on. It’s just abruptly there, ready to come out. Most people struggle to name the pressure or intensity they feel. So they reach for big descriptors like “I’m stressed” or “I’m overworked” or “I’ve got no work/life balance.”

Social scientists would say these people’s affective experience is overdetermined, which is another way of saying their feelings have a lot of possible causes. Here, for example, are three research-based reasons people say they’re overly busy at work.

• Some people complain about overwork because they need status. Humble-bragging about how busy they are makes them feel important.

• Some people can’t stop being busy because of their company culture. Even when you expressly tell them to slow down, they don’t because they are “emotionally and physically synchronized with their organization’s relentless tempo.”

• Some people say they’re too busy, even though they, objectively, have plenty of time. One researcher notes: “Even if a day were extended by one hour, if the quality and intensity of people’s time use do not change, people’s subjective feeling of time poverty would not improve.”

I’m not saying that any of those is the definite reason why your team reports they’re overworked. I am saying that there are lots of possible conditions for why your team reports they’re overworked. Your vocation as a leader is to help them be present to those conditions, often well below their explicit awareness. The good news is that you can treat their affective announcement as a signal to be interpreted, not a reactant to be contained.

How to Practice Relational Wondering

Ambrose told me, in one of his next jobs, at a shipping company, his fellow workers moved through their third-shift jobs at a glacial pace. One person wasted hours watching Netflix on a smartphone. Another spent the shift cutting pieces of cardboard into one-inch squares. The managers mostly avoided the non-working workers. But what might have happened if those supervisors had, instead of avoiding these affective signals, asked some questions?

1. What usually happens right before you start thinking, ‘I should Netflix’?

2. Are there parts of the shift when things seem doable?

3. You’ve got a huge task list. Is there stuff on it you actually kind of like doing?

These questions don’t avoid the mystery of what a worker is feeling. Nor do they simply offer sympathy. They help the worker pay closer attention to the whole of their own experience. (I’m tempted to say, “the hole” of their experience, because our feelings often feel like a dark abyss of unknowing.) The questions explore an employee’s situation at work, not as a big blob of ick, but as a multilayered context that requires distinction-making. Ultimately, the questions try to help a team member come into closer contact with their own experience, not just to get them working now, but to equip them for next time a project feels excessive.

What I’m calling the Wondering Script opens space between your team and their uncomfortable feelings. It’s a script full of questions like this:

1. What’s one part of this project that you care about the most?

2. Is your experience of overwhelm more like today’s weather or like the climate?

3. What’s a goal I’ve assigned you that keeps getting in the way of work you’re trying to do?

These questions don’t just try to diagnose what’s wrong with your employee. They help them step back from aversive experience and connect to what they care about.

You’re probably thinking about those times when a body just needs to get stuff done no matter how it feels. Emotions can be completely enigmatic, but you gotta keep moving forward somehow. You’re right. But it’s not an all-or-nothing situation. Can you make it a goal to move your team towards what ACT theorists call a flexible contextual awareness? Make small moves to help your team differentiate parts of the job that they care about. Suggest the elemental metaphors (weather/climate, etc.) that reframe affective experience. Locate the values that animate them, even when they don’t achieve a certain outcome. These perspective-shifters can do a lot of work for your team when people feel overworked.

If I squint, I can almost see the 4:00 sunlight coming through my office window a couple decades back. If I turn my head, I can see, in my peripheral vision, the dim outline of my coworker still standing in the office door. I’d like another chance at that moment. I’d like to spin my chair and say, “You got a minute to sit down?”

Helping your team be fully present to their aversive experiences is a gift your leadership can give. But it’s a gift you’ll receive in turn. As they learn to be more mindful about the intensities and pressures of their situations, they’ll cultivate the situational flexibility that will help your working community thrive.

On a dog walk last week, I was ruminating about a perplexing conversation I’d had that day. Nothing my friend and I had talked about seemed to be what we were actually talking about.

As I waited for the dog to do his thing, I blurted a question: “Why am I so flooded about this right now?”

When we got home, Chaucer hit the couch, and I went up to my desk and journaled about my question. Simply asking it had opened up a mode/switch for me.

• instead of focusing on my friend’s strange opinions…

• instead of obsessing on how my friend was misunderstanding everything…

I asked what was hurting in my own inner life. What disappointment, what fear, what dread was I avoiding by quarreling instead?

It took a few rotations before the insight, um, emerged.

This is our dog Chaucer. Photo credit: me. He gave schnuffling consent to post this photo.

That story came to mind as I was finishing up production on a podcast conversation with Meryl Herr for the Mode/Switch Pod. 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 (the 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 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! (Listen here on Spotify and here on Apple.)

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 gave us language for dimensions of work that are all too easy to ignore. For me, though, it came 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. It’s hard to ask what’s beneath your urgency and your irritation. But doing so makes possible a clarifying self-compassion.

You may also find that you have to do like Chaucer and turn in circles till everything comes out properly.

Work with Meryl

If you’re looking for help in developing training or educational programs in your nonprofit or higher-ed institution, connect with Dr. Meryl Herr on her website or on LinkedIn. She’s a good partner especially for faith-based nonprofits who need curriculum development, grant writing, program evaluation, or research. Check out her Substack here.

This morning, I went back to an Annie Dillard essay that evoked a different analogy.

A weasel is wild, Dillard wrote. Who knows what he thinks?

Aha, I thought to myself! That sounds like a chatbot. Maybe a bot’s not a little green man. Maybe it’s more like a beady-eyed stoat popping up all over the place.

In this week’s newsletter, I’d like to equip you for managerial communication in the age of the weasel generative and agentic AI. Bots crowd into the same world that we humans do. But they process the world’s signs in very different ways.

How humans and bots absorb your messaging

Let’s take a look at the different ways that people and AI process information. Say you sit down to write a feedback email to a person on your team:

Hey Sam, hope you’re doing well! Thanks much for finishing that report yesterday. You’re fast! Quick heads-up, though: I did find a few typos. Not a big deal—just trying to make sure the higher-ups see we’ve got things in hand. Why don’t you work with Amelia on the next report? Deadline’s Friday—send a draft to her by Thursday, ok?

If your team member reads your email, he’ll notice…

• the tone (collegial but concerned)

• the unspoken parts (performance matters in a tight budgetary moment)

• your likely feelings (a little jumpy)

If a bot reads the email, it’ll notice…

• that the content is performance-related

• that there’s now a working team (Sam and Amelia)

• that there’s a task due Friday

Two very different ways of processing information! The human’s reading will likely be infused with feeling, mostly because they’re already digitally overwhelmed. The AI’s interpretation will be highly functional. To make things even more complicated, your one email may be read by multiple bots. A scheduler bot will put a deadline on your employee’s calendar and send an invite to Amelia. A Sharepoint bot will open a folder for collaboration. A dashboard bot will flag a performance risk. And the human recipient may not even read your message, relying instead on an AI synopsis. Which brings me to this week’s question:

How do you, as a mid-level leader, talk to humans and bots simultaneously?

What your messaging needs in a wild workplace

Just yesterday, Gallagher’s “Employee Communications Report” came out for 2026. They asked communication professionals what factor presented the greatest risk to effective workplace communication. Answer? Managerial ineffectiveness.

But AI integration in the workplace is making managerial effectiveness harder than ever. Sure, some companies still use AI like a genie in a bottle, making the wishes of individual workers come true. But the rise of agentic AI means that bots are increasingly showing up as collaborative partners. And eavesdroppers.

Well, this is a wild weasel of a problem! I’m always telling you that the key to good workplace communication is “mode-switching.” Usually, my advice is, don’t get stuck in just one mode, even if it’s a mode you happen to be good at. You might be good at Sending, but your team might need you to switch to Signaling. You might want to Speak with a worker, but you need to Show how instead. Learning how to shuffle among different modes—Sending, Speaking, Signaling, Showing—is the managerial craft that this newsletter often urges.

But in a world of AI, you need more than mode-switching. You need mode-wilding.

Mode-switching assumes that you’re speaking to a fairly simple audience. Mode-wilding is what happens when your audience emerges from a mixed environment—half human habitat, half digital thicket. You’re an organism (with some special capabilities, admittedly) among other organisms in a technologically and humanly wild place. Like any ecology, it’s not under any one person’s control.

The workplace is no longer tamely manageable. Both people and AI interact with tasks and messages unpredictably.

Two temptations when talking near a weasel

Mode-wilding is hard. It requires extra cognitive labor. Look out for two different temptations:

Avoiding the weasel (Talking past the bots)

Thomas Friedman has said that in ancient times, technology used to be like ice: a solid, blunt, easily locatable presence in human life. A wheel, a spear, a hammer. Not hard to find. Solidly there. But in modern times, tech started to melt and flow into more parts of our lives. Today, tech is like vapor. It’s ambiently everywhere.

But when technology’s everywhere, it’s also easy to pretend that it’s nowhere. Nothing to see here! In other words, one temptation you face as a mid-level leader is to communicate as if the bots weren’t around.

Hi team, I’ve been sitting with the draft. Feels like it’s almost there — but the sludge, my god. Give it a gander, would you? It’ll take a minute, I know. But eyeball the part where we’re trying to name the project. Does it sound like us? Will they pick up what we’re putting down? Timeline’s wonky, too. But, look, this deliverable’s gonna happen. I’m sure of it! We just gotta midwife it along.

You see the problems with this email, from AI’s perspective: too figurative, too indirect, too non-linear, too many hedges, too dependent on what’s not being said.

You can try to talk over the heads of the bots. But they’re going to make something of your communications. And your team needs you to practice a communicational flexibility that’s present to the actual complexity of the workplace. Your team needs you to acknowledge and negotiate this complexity in order to be healthy, fully functioning team members.

Obsessing over the weasel (Talking only to the bots)

As a manager of humans, it’s easy to get digitally overwhelmed by the presence of AI platforms and apps and harnesses all over the workplace. When you sit down to craft an email, all you can think is, “40 different bots are going to read this!” So you make the message so detailed, so explicit, so robotic, that no human would want to read it:

Dear team, this email is to inform you that I am formally requesting the completion of the Draft Project Overview Document (version 2.3) by 4:00 PM ET on Wednesday, March 5. For clarity, “completion” means that all sections labeled “in progress” or “pending” must be revised to reflect final language. Please review Section 1.0 (“Executive Summary”) and confirm that the word count is between 140 and 160 words….

I don’t need to go on; you see what’s missing. There’s no nuance. No emotional tenor. Just tasks and transactions. Your AI will love it. Your people will sag and wilt.

How to message humans and AI at the same time

When I was a kid, my parents read me a book by Jean Conder Soule called Never Tease a Weasel. I remember the refrain of the story was “Never tease a weasel. A weasel will not like it. And teasing isn’t nice.” The moral was about respecting little creatures whose experiences are different from your own. It still feels like a good lesson, in a workplace ecology of AI bots.

So here’s this week’s advice in a single sentence: learn to talk with your people with tonality and to your bots with clarity.

Include enough explicit structure so your AI systems can assist the work.
Infuse enough emotional presence so your people care about the work.

The good news is that this is managerial craft that will make you more fully human.

My favorite running song right now is “Mirror” by Ider. It’s a secular prayer for healing from the endless weirdness of being a person.

Maybe that doesn’t sound like treadmill material to you. But give it a listen, especially for the ecstatic bridge at the two-minute point. Right about there, the lyrics and the beat converge to create a hypnotic psalm to humanity’s doubleness:

People love, people leave, people let down
People show up, roll up, people grow up
People move out, people disappear
People don't change, people rearrange
People miss the game, people lose
People try, people lie, can't look you in the eye….

That’s the song that came to mind as I’ve mulled over our conversation with Jay this week at our intergenerational roundtable. Jay’s used to working with corporate execs who have lost their way. As he puts it, “Corporations hire me to turn overwhelmed leaders into the people we all want to follow.”

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.

Jay Johnson, CEO of Behavior Elements. You can connect with him here.

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.

You won’t find Jay’s answers to these questions here—you’ll have to listen to the podcast!—but I will say that I 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.

Jay likes to use visualization exercises (as you’ll hear in the podcast, he has a great exercise that has to do with horror movies). So here’s a visualization activity for you:

Try this exercise when you’re annoyed at work

Instead of zooming in on the Annoying Person, trying naming your feelings about that person. Seriously, give those emotions a nickname. Call ‘em Brenda or Eustace or whatever.

Okay, got a name for the feelings?

Now, imagine that you’re at a birthday party with your favorite kind of cake. You’re just about to take a slice when you look up and see Eustace on the other side of the table.

What do you do?

Well, you could leave the cake and go and give Eustace a hug. You could spend the whole party clinging to Eustace and introducing folks to Eustace and watching Eustace eat the rest of the cake.

Or in a stroke of genius, you might tell Eustace, “Now’s not a good time. How about if you go upstairs and take a nap?”

What does this exercise do? It doesn’t fix the Annoying Person’s character. They’re still at the work party, and they’re still who they are. But it changes how you relate to you feelings about the Annoying Person. You nickname those feelings, and you detach from them a bit. You refuse to make those feelings you. And doing that helps you reconnect to what really matters.

Which is always chocolate cake, right?

Instead of, “Here comes that mean girl again,” try, “Ooop, here comes Eustace!”1

That’s the kind of mode/switching this podcast and newsletter help you to do, whether you’re dealing with difficult people at the top or hard-to-love people across the desk.

Thanks for joining us Mode/Switchers in the good work of healing workplaces!

Don’t wanna listen in your inbox?

Follow us on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. There, you’ll find more intergenerational conversations addressing topics that help you, as a mid-level leader, do more than cope when work’s a lot.

A 19th-century parable for 21st-century panic

Leo Tolstoy tells a fable of a traveler who meets a grizzly bear on the trail. (Actually, the great novelist says “beast.”) The only escape for the terrified pilgrim is to leap into a nearby well. The good news: the well is dry. The bad news: there’s a dragon at the bottom. So Tolstoy’s traveler clings to a vine in the well, hanging between the grizzly and the dragon. And then, two mice begin to gnaw on the vine.

Than which, nothing could be more exquisitely Tolstoyan, amirite?

That story came to mind as I pondered the virality of Mark Shumer’s scary post on X, “Something big is happening in AI — and most people will be blindsided.” Josh Tyrangiel also published a much better reported Atlantic article warning that “America Isn’t Ready for What AI Will Do to Jobs.”

Like so many discussions of AI and the workforce, these pieces suspend you, like Tolstoy’s traveler, on a thin vine in a dried up well—only the mice gnawing on your vine are policy lag and organizational drift. In response to scary discourse like this, 51% of workers worry they’ll lose their jobs this year. Similarly, CEOs have stopped making pronouncements about AI and have instead fallen into an uncanny silence.

But I think there’s something that these kinds of punditry tend to miss. Shumer’s talking about workers and AI. Tyrangiel’s talking about CEOs and AI. What I think needs discussion is how mid-level leaders can reveal what’s happening on the ground in the American workplace. That’s the data our AI decision-making really needs.

The temptations your senior leaders face

You’re awesome when it comes to internal comms downward to your team. But I have a hunch you struggle when it comes to internal comms upward to senior leadership. (Tell me in the comments if I need to rethink that!) But I think there’s a case to be made that your upward-facing communications may be the most vital response to the AI panics of last week.

To execute those communications, though, you’ll need to know the temptations your (sometimes eerily quiet) leaders are dealing with right now.

Let me share one more element of Tolstoy’s tale. As the pilgrim clings to his vine, swinging slowly in the dark, he notices a bit of honey dribbling down the vine he’s clinging to. He cannot help himself. He sticks out his tongue to capture the sweetness.

It’s darkly funny: this sweaty vine-clinger, suspended between death below and death above, licks a globule of sweetness off the only thing saving his life.

Your too-quiet senior leaders are coping with the threat of the beast above (demanding stakeholders) and the dragon below (the people-replacing chatbots) by looking for something to distract them and give them short-term wins:

• quick productivity gains

• investor excitement

• Wall St. happy-clapping

• trustee compliments

But as a mid-level leader, you can see these short-term honey drips are delusional. Sure, you get the impulse to distract yourself in dangerous times. In fact, everybody at every level of your organization is tempted to hide out in a well right now, clutching a vine that can’t last long, looking for something to distract them.

But we all need to get off the vine and face the bear of short-term profit-addled thinking. And I think it starts with you, the mid-level leader. Look to your left and your right at the wall of the well. Can you see a jutted stone, a potential handhold? Let go of the vine with one hand and put your fingers there. Do you see another edged stone, maybe a foothold? Put a foot there, release the vine, and start climbing.

Mid-level leaders—not pundits, not workers, not CEOs—are positioned to help organizational communities navigate AI uncertainty.

When you’ve clambered up and heaved yourself out of the well, look back into the darkness, meet your senior leadership’s gaze, and start talking.

Talk about the human data you have. Talk about what you know from working closely with your employees. Talk them to them with a candor that cuts through their desperate isolation and gives them the intel they need.

Messaging senior leaders need from the middle

1. Share what you think the company is avoiding. Try saying something like this: “I get that we’re all nervous about getting the AI transition wrong. That nervousness makes us want to pull away, isolate, avoid. We’re scared to have the tough conversations. We’re scared to look clearly at the risks. We want to close our eyes and think things will just get better on their own. But if you as a senior leader could model risk acceptance in this moment and re-articulate our commitments to our core values—I think that would help us all.”

2. Name what your team needs clarity about. Telling your leader what your people are wishing to hear is good data. Senior leaders have to sift through a terrible lot of bullshit. But you can provide them with information that’s better grounded than anything a Business Insider thought piece can afford. You can share strong data points like this:

   • Here’s what my team’s worried about.

   • Here’s what they need to hear you say.

3. Suggest where worker retraining would be most helpful. The Atlantic piece cites Gina Raimondo, who’s served as Rhode Island’s governor and as a national commerce secretary, says CEOs need to retrain and redeploy their workforces. Great idea—unless your fearless leader is clinging to a vine and spinning slowly in the dark. In that case, you need to speak from the middle of things and name realities your boss has a hard time seeing:

   • the job roles AI can assist but not eliminate.

   • the employees who are redeployable instead of fireable

   • the work processes that AI might break

   • the teams flexible enough to include AI and the teams needing training.

Senior-level clarity depends on mid-level courage

You can help your senior leadership let go of the honey-dribbled vine and start climbing up out of the well. If you can name and normalize fears, if you can exemplify relational courage, and if you can provide good data about what’s actually happening on the job, you can provide your higher-ups with better intel than the stockholder grizzlies have.

I know, I know. You already have a lot to take care of, just supporting and guiding your team. But I think this is a needed mode switch. Give your higher-ups brisk summaries not emotional grenades. Give them qualitative data to complement (and sometimes to correct) the quantitative data on their spreadsheets. Give them more pointed questions than you feel you have time for—and then ask a few more. All this will provoke senior leaders’ awareness and curiosity and reflection.

Want to make a start? Promise a fellow manager than in your next one-one-one with a higher-up you’re going to share three human data points from your team.

You’ll find the ascent out of Tolstoy’s well goes a little easier from there.

Share The Mode/Switch with Craig Mattson

This hunch arises from a podcast conversation with Dr. Lola Adeyemo, as well as the Mode/Switchers: Ken the Boomer, Emily the Xennial, LaShone the Millennial and Madeleine the Gen Z. Check it out by hitting the play button above.

This Pod Provoked a Mindset Shift for Me

Over the past few years, I’ve hired a number of international practitioners for positions on the Mode/Switch Team. They helped me run socials, edit podcasts, and produce video stories.

But for all our interactions, I rarely felt like I knew these talented people.

Sometimes, embarrassingly, I couldn’t even pronounce their given names. I relied instead on their Americanized nicknames.

My way of coping with the gaps between us was to rely on Social Penetration Theory. The gist of Altman & Taylor’s theory is that people are like onions. If I peel back layers of my self, maybe you’ll do the same. Eventually, we’ll know each other’s true selves.

Unfortunately, my attempt at, um, workplace onionizing has never fully worked.

This week’s podcast with Dr. Lola Adeyemo showed me the problems with my onion. Her discussion of the complexities immigrant employees carry into the workplace provoked a different metaphor:

My employees and I are more like garlic cloves than onions. That suggestion comes from Internal Family Systems theorist Richard Schwartz, who says people are collections of cloves, clustered around their true selves (No Bad Parts 27).

That’s the mode/switch I’ve been needing:

Stop treating workers like onions. Start connecting to their unseen cloves.

Cloving Your Communication Practices

Most of theories about communicating with someone different from yourself involve respectful and reciprocal self-disclosure. If you candidly share a layer of yourself, the other person will disclose a layer as well. So long as the costs of self-disclosure are manageable, you’ll each gradually reveal yourselves. That’s the hope anyway. And sometimes it actually happens. But not always. Maybe not even often.

After this podcast, I want to try cloving my managerial communication, learning to adapt to clusters of meaning I can’t see right way. That might entail the following:

• Get used to not knowing all that’s going on. The thing you need urgently to tell your team member feels so clear to you. And it is! But it probably isn’t the only thing that needs talking about. There are lots of nearby issues, clustered in all sorts of hidden cloves.

• Expect interaction to radiate rather than reciprocate. You’re used to back-n-forth-ness: I speak, then you speak. I listen, and then you listen. But when you are alert to people’s cloves, your conversation will radiate outwards like wheel spokes. This will connect with that, connecting that to those and those to them.

• Listening well means leaving enough time to speak. Dr. Lola says we often misinterpret employee silence as agreement. But quietness might also mean that your immigrant employee has so much to say that they need to say it slowly and repeatedly. Give the conversation plenty of room to breathe.

Mid-Level Leadership Means Being an Interpreter

Dr. Lola emphasizes that your immigrant employees are never just one thing. They are much, much more than work-related communications might initially suggest.

The same thing’s true for all the people in your organization, of course. We all have cloves of family life, neighborhood life, community sports, churchly engagements, whatever. Each touches on the others, though not all of them are quickly visible.

But when it comes to your immigrant employees, the cloves aren’t just hard to see; they may be, at least at first, incomprehensible. They may require translation.

Fortunately, you have some very human language in common with your immigrant employees: narrative. Humans are storytelling animals, as Alisdair MacIntyr puts it. So translating your workers’ experiences requires listening for what Dr. Lola calls the untold stories.

I hope you’ll give this conversation a half hour of your day. It’ll reward consideration. But if now’s not the right time, would you quickly click this link to the pod on Spotify or to this link on Apple Podcasts? Then give it a listen on your ride home.

You can connect with Lola Adeyemo on LinkedIn or on her website, which notes that she “is a TEDx keynote speaker, author, and workplace inclusion strategist who helps leaders and organizations navigate intersectionality, activate ERGs, and build cultures where people and performance thrive. Her work blends research, lived experience, and practical strategy—making belonging not just something people feel, but something leaders know how to lead.”

Last issue, I argued that you’re not talking to your team; you’re talking to their reactions.

A reader wrote to ask about internal comms the other way: not outward to your team but upward to your sometimes oblivious senior leadership.

What language helps you when your senior leadership’s hurt and doesn’t know it—or can’t face it?

Why I Dislike Movie Scenes w/ Puncture Wounds

When I was fifteen years old, I shot myself in the hand with a wooden arrow. That’s a feat that demands an accounting, but I can hardly say what happened. I suppose I was standing in the X-pose of wannabe archer, skinny legs wide, head canted right, arrow fitted, string taut on two fingers. I imagine I slowly exhaled and then quickly released.

But what happened next was bewildering. My memory isn’t of what I saw or what I felt but what I heard: a deep, dull thud inside my body. I looked down to find my arms tangled in bowstring.

What I didn’t see, at least at first, was the arrow sticking out of my left hand, puncturing the webbing between thumb and forefinger.

Later, we guessed that the arrow had snapped at release. The bowstring had plunged half the wood into my hand and sent the other half to the grass a few feet away.

I love action movies. But to this day I can’t stand scenes with puncture wounds. I can bear watching actors being punched or drowned or shot. But depictions of puncture? They bring back the pain I felt when the medic pried and pulled and finally dragged that piece of wood from of the flesh of my hand.

Or thought he had. A few months later, my cast long gone, I was onstage in the middle of a high school play when I felt a sliver of that arrow still lodged in the pad beneath my index finger.

I’m not telling you this parable to explain why I hate certain scenes in Dances with Wolves or The Revenant. But I am naming ways your higher-ups might be hurt.

Why Your Senior Leaders Keep Aiming & Missing

For you as a program director, team lead, or mid-level manager, senior leadership dysfunction can be as baffling as what happened to me as a fifteen-year-old archer. You and your team will be constantly obstructed by one of three leaderly dysfunctions:

• They can’t find the target: instead they try to please everybody.

• They can’t find their own wounds: instead they avoid pain.

• They can’t get the arrow out: instead they try to prove they’re always right.

If your senior leader can’t find the target, they’re likably out of touch with themselves. They’re also out of touch with your organization’s values. Pleasers smile a lot and meet your gaze and touch your arm and reply quickly to your emails. But they’re not much help in a complex decision-making process, because they keep forgetting the big values that show a trustworthy path forward.

If your senior leader can’t find their own wound, they’ll also be disconnected from the organizational present. They’re not here, they’re oblivious to the now. Avoiders can’t read the room. They fidget. They ignore email, but weirdly they always have their phone out and their laptop open, checking things even while you’re talking to them.

Your senior leader’s still carrying their own history under their skin, so watch the heck out. What’s hurting them will baffle you. You ask about a decision, and they go on the attack. Why? Because provers’ troubles are lodged beneath the surface, they need to show you that they’re just fine. And they need you to know they’re right.

Three Temptations You’ll Need to Resist

When you and your senior leadership are dealing with the facts of their hurt, their own avoidance, or the problem that’s lodged beneath their skin, you will feel several temptations. First, you’ll be inclined to manage up. That is, you’ll either want to reassure and placate your boss—or you’ll just attack them, returning aggression for aggression. Second, you’ll be tempted to fix everything by fixing yourself. Let’s call this managing in: you use mindfulness, yoga, exercise, or prayer to achieve a centered inner state. This is pretty great for you, but it’s not (by a long shot) sufficient for your organizational community, much less your senior leadership. They might learn something indirectly from how spiritually centered you are. But they also need more direct action from you as a leader-from-the-middle. And finally, you’ll be tempted to manage out—that is, you’ll look for ways to stabilize the system, fill in the gaps, cover for the boss’s insufficiencies, smooth things over. My friend and fellow Substacker Rebecca Johnson calls this “borrowed stability.” And it’s a problem in a lot of organizations who rely on leaders-from-the-middle to glue everything together.

This week’s mode/switch is from managing up/in/out to managing through. The “throughness” I’m talking about entails the patient and experimental use of everyday language to gradually help your senior leaders be present to themselves and to the organization in good and healing ways.

How to Speak to Different Kinds of Dysfunction

This year, I’m exploring with you the resources of internal communication for healing work culture. That sounds like I’m talking about top-down communication. The CEO’s blog, the Veep’s newsletter. But internal communication also happens bottom-up and side-to-side. But nothing takes more wisdom than internal communication moving from the middle up, especially when your senior leader’s dysfunctional.

I’ve already identified three likely dysfunctions. Let’s set goals and strategize comms.

If your higher-up’s a pleaser…

Your goal: To reconnect them with their values. You want to help them recall what really matters to them (apart from making people like them). You also want them to feel all over again what matters to them and what matters to the company. Right now, they’re hung up on a short-term goal. They need to choose again what’s truly vital.

Your communication: Try giving them a hypothetical. “If this project were defunded right now, what would it be like in this company?” Or, “If you had a Harry Potter wand right now, and could make this client accept our bid, would that be good for us?”

If your higher-up’s an avoider…

Your goal: To reconnect them with the organizational present. You want them to come awake to the fullness of the present. Your senior leader’s likely to deal in generalities. They talk about what “always happens.” Or they catastrophize about the future. What you hope for them is that they’ll wake up to the now.

Your communication: Try a perspective-switching question. “If your self 5-years-from-now could give advice to your current self, what do you think that you would say?” You might try role-play: “Help me understand what’s going on in this dispute right now. You be Sarah; I’ll be you. What keeps happening?” These moves take courage, but they might also help your leader find the here and now.

If your higher-up’s a prover…

Your goal: To distinguish between their feelings and their identity. You want them to see the daylight between their emotions and their core selves. Your senior leader is prone to attack you or others, because she or he cannot distinguish between what’s happening to them emotionally and who they actually are.

Your communication. Try dropping a few metaphors. If a pattern of aggression keeps happening—and if you feel safe enough to speak—you might suggest, “It feels in this company like we’re in quicksand, and the more we struggle the more we sink. Maybe we need to try something else.” Your metaphor, and others like it, can gradually help your leader see not only that they’re stuck in quicksand but that they’re current methods of getting out aren’t working.

Caveat: You’re Not Your Senior Leader’s ER Medic

When I ran into my house with an arrow sticking out of my hand, my mom thought it was a gruesome joke. But my uncle (who was a trained biologist and a steady hand in a crisis) took a pair of pliers and snapped off the arrow six inches above my hand. After trying gently to remove the arrow, he said we needed a surgeon.

My uncle did the sort of good for me that you can do for your boss: he had made the wound more visible and, in doing so, he made it more manageable. At least, I could cradle it without terror on my way to the ER. The medic saw the hand, quickly grasped what had happened, and removed the arrow.

The language moves I’ve suggested above—hypotheticals, perspective-switchers, metaphors—are not equipping you to be your boss’s medic. But you are trying to find the mark. You are trying to aim your communication to help your leader recognize their wounds, find the offending arrow, and rediscover their organizational goals.

I guess I’m guilty of giving myself job security here, when I say that this week’s conversational strategies are not one-offs. You’ll want to check back in with the Mode/Switch in a week or two to find more everyday language choices to equip you for the long game of gradual intervention. But as a leader in the middle of your organization, seeking to help those around you be well and do good work, you can speak in ways that enable others find their bearings and their healing.

Find Your Mode/Switch with our Podcast Guests

Listen on Spotify on Apple Podcasts or right here on Substack for an intergenerational roundtable—Ken, David, Emily, LaShone, and Madeline—to equip your working community for better work culture.

We help you do more than cope when work’s a lot!

If, as a team leader, you catch yourself wondering…

• Why’s everything simpler and faster if I DO IT MYSELF?

• How come my team stops working at 5, and I’M STILL WORKING AT MIDNIGHT?

• Why do my people keep DISRUPTING MY WORKFLOW?

• How come we have so many AI options but NOT A ONE MAKES THIS JOB EASIER?

… you need this week’s Mode/Switch w/ Karen Sergeant!

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

My 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?

My 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.

Does your work culture need a Mode/Switch?

I’m so glad you’ve subscribed to the Mode/Switch where, every Tuesday, you get a newsletter about improving internal comms to improve working community.

But sometimes making a mode/switch takes a longer conversation.

I am convinced that the best changes in your workplace won’t come from a smarter chatbot but from improved patterns of internal communication.

So, if you’re wishing to build trust, transform conflict, deepen collaboration, and get some seriously good sh#t done, let’s talk!

Here’s what you’ve got here in your inbox right about now: a work-culture newsletter whose goal is to help you find language to help your team do what’s in front of them with practicality, shrewdness, and wit.

As a program director, as a team lead, as a manager squeezed from above and below, you have more work than you have time for. But what you also have is the extraordinary leverage of everyday language.

You chat. You convey. You narrate. You suggest. You contrast. You frame. And if you do it well, your language choices create mental freedomfor your team, connecting them to org goals, and activating their best work.

On the other hand, your language just might create a heffalump.

What in the heff is a hellalump?

I’m borrowing this word from an A. A. Milne story, which opens with Christopher Robin remarking casually that he’d just seen a heffalump the other day. Having no clue as to what such a creature might be, Winnie the Pooh and Piglet nonetheless resolve to capture one. They concoct a plan: they’ll put an alluring pot of honey at the bottom of a pit. But the plan is foiled when, in the night, Pooh gets hungry, clambers down into the trap, and gets his head stuck in the honeypot. Arriving at dawn, Piglet is terrified by the hubbub at the bottom of the pit as Pooh struggles to free himself. “Help, help, a Herrible Hoffalump!” he yells, “Hoff, Hoff, a Hellible Horralump!” He then runs off to Christopher Robin, who eventually figures out what has happened and has the heartiest laugh imaginable.

Is there a managerial takeaway from this story?

My first thought: Don’t be Christopher Robin. That is, don’t use language casually, confusingly, or recklessly in ways that deactivate or dis-activate your team.

But on further thought, I think the better advice is, remember you’re not talking to your people; you’re talking to their heffalumps.

Let’s say you need to communicate a new Workday process. I mean, lucky you, right? Nothing’s better than making a non-intuitive platform even more complexified. But, look, the accountants are asking employees to change how they handle expense receipts, so how are you going to let your team know about it?

Wrong question. The better question is, How are you going to let their heffalumps know about it? Think of a “heffalump” as how people respond to a new and unknown thing at work. You can expect to deal with at least four kinds of emotional responses.

Naming the heffalumps in the room

Part of the charm of A. A. Milne’s made-up word heffalump is that it sounds like elephant. (When Piglet dreams about a heffalump, Milne’s illustrations show an elephant jumping on his bed.) Naming at least four species of heffalump in advance of a tricky bit of internal communication can help you craft your message better:

The Piglets on your team will not be able to hear your instructions, because this new information provokes them to run away. More precisely, their feelings are so intense that they’ll do anything else but engage the information. Their emotional posture in the face of what you have to say is avoidance.

Other team members will obsess on the process details, asking a million questions. These are the Poohs who get their heads stuck in the pot. They might feel fear or enthusiasm or a desire to impress everybody else. But whatever they feel, they are fused with those feelings. They become them. Their response pattern is adhesion.

Still other team members will respond to your message with erratic comments. These are the first responders—no, first reactors—who bounce unpredictably from idea to idea, obscuring the point, confusing the communication. Think of them as roughly like Tigger: their emotional response pattern is agitation.

Finally, you have the sour, the cynical, the acerbic, who are way too confident they know what’s really going on in this new process. They see through every new set of instructions to yet another power grab by senior leadership. Who knows? Sometimes, these Eeyores are right! But you’ll experience these acerbic responders as obstructive in everyday work.

Scripting Responses to Heffalumps

To adapt the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, we might say that everybody on your team has a rider and a heffalump. The rider is the employee’s rationality. It’s their capability to receive information and act on it coherently and predictably. The heffalump, in contrast, is their emotional response to a situation. Most of the time, when we’re talking to our coworkers, we tend to talk to their riders. But it’s their heffalumps that actually run things. (As Haidt would say, the riders are mostly there to justify the choices the heffalumps are making.)

As a leader squeezed between the demands of the accountancy department and your team, you want your internal communication to build trust, to transform conflict, to deepen collaboration, and to get some seriously good sh#t done. But to do all that, you’re going to need a mode/switch: always talk to the heffalump in the room.

Let’s work through a script for each of the four species described above.

If you’re talking to someone whose feelings are so intense that they feel like the only thing they do is to pull a Piglet (running the hellalump a way), you’re going to need to use language that helps them to be present to what’s here and now. Try saying this:

Script: I know, it’s tempting to think, This new process is going to kill our productivity! But we don’t have to go there. Let’s just concentrate on the steps for a minute and see if this new process doesn’t save us some time. If it doesn’t work, we can always go back and say so.

Think of this as cuing the avoiders on your team to be present to what’s going on now—not on some catastrophe in the future. You’re also communicating the provisionality of organizational processes. People often forget that provisionality can provide agency.

Some of your team members will not take the new information but will instead stick their heads down in their own feelings. These folks are (to use the language of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy) so fused to their feelings that they can’t process the new process. Try saying this.

Script: There’s a part of me that’s irritated by changes in our process. There’s a voice in my head that says, “New processes NEVER make things better.” But you know, I gotta admit, pretty often that voice is just flat out wrong.

What you’re doing by saying something like that is modeling for your team how to put distance between themselves and their feelings. By implying (with something like Internal Family Systems theory to back you up) that everybody has noisy brains with lots and lots of “parts” speaking up, you’re helping your stuck-in-the-pot adhesives to practice discernment about which of their internal voices they should trust and which they should ask to hold up for a moment.

Other members of your team will be reactionary. Actually, this is another kind of avoidance. Instead of being curious about themselves and their feelings, they react in a loud, dramatic, chaotic way. Try saying this to the agitators:

Script: Look, can we try an experiment? Let’s just take the process under advisement, try it out, but don’t give it anything. Just shrug. Just move on. Just no-big-deal-it.

This “gray rock” technique derives from the work of Dr. Jessica Borushok, who suggests that helping people under-respond to aversive experiences can actually help create a flexible engagement. The spiritual writer Rowan Williams calls this “writing in the dust,” in reference to how Jesus responded when the religious leaders of his day over-reacted to something. He just bent over from the waist and wrote something in the dust till everybody settled down.

Finally, there are the acerbics, the sourpusses, who often struggle to see a task through, because they’re so busy seeing through their tasks. Try saying this:

Script: What would happen if we try this new process for a week? What do you honestly think will happen?

This script obviously sets you up for a sequel in the next meeting. But you are also helping the cynics to do something called tracking. Your question about expectations challenges them to actually study the situation and then report back. If the new process actually doesn’t work, that’s valuable intel. But their tracking might persuade them to accept what they might otherwise dismiss. Note, too, that this script honors the expertise of the cynics, but it redirects that expertise not towards the goal of deconstruction but towards the goal of seeing what’s functional for the team.

Helping your heffalumps with humor

I love how the Winnie the Pooh story ends. Piglet dashes to Christopher Robin’s house and drags him to the pit where Pooh is slowly knocking himself senseless from inside his own honeypot. When Christopher Robin realizes what’s going on, he responds to what Piglet’s heffalump with laughter.

Some laughter can be cruel, of course. But laughter can also be a compassionate response to a situation where no explicit advice will do the job. I mean, you could try telling your coworkers, “Stop feeling the way you do!” But that’s what organizational theorists have called “management by instruction”—and it doesn’t work very well.

By making room for laughter in your leadership communication, you’re doing a contagious thing. I mean, laughter itself is hard not to join in. But laughter’s contagious in another way: it makes shareable our humanity, our common vulnerability, our almost universal tendency to heffalump.

Takeaways to Help You Tend Your Talk at Work

Geez, just weeks into the year, and already the workplace feels like a space shuttle with rivets popping off.

(Does “2026” look to anyone else like it belongs in a sci-fi title?)

Rumors of restructuring. Side eyes for gen AI. Rolled eyes for RTO. Digital overwhelm. Political spectacle.

If you lead from the middle—whether as a project coordinator, middle manager, program director, or department chair—you’re squeezed from above and below. In other words, your work is unavoidably relational.

So when the people around you feel stuck, you do, too.

I got up this morning to say one thing to you: the tech your org needs is already here. It’s on your doorstep, still in the box. It’s the extraordinary power of ordinary language.

The phrasing you use. The metaphors you select. The stories you tell. The framing you offer. The language you craft. More than any other technology this year, your internal comms will build trust, transform conflict, deepen collaboration, and get some seriously good sh#t done.

This year, open the Mode/Switch newsletter not for self-help, but for people-help. There are plenty of newsletters and podcasts that help you fix yourself. The Mode/Switch equips you to equip others for psychological flexibility, spiritual acuity, and highly reliable decisions.

Every other week, you’ll get practical language tools—frames, figures, and phrasing—to help your team become the people they yearn to be.

(And in the off weeks, you’ll hear intergenerational insight from the Mode/Switch team’s roundtable podcast.)

But look out! The more you equip others for transformation, the more you yourself will change. Are you ready to see where that takes you? I’m eager to go with you!

What can you expect next from the Mode/Switch?

• Next Tuesday, January 20, the newsletter shares what to do with your New Year’s Resolutions—not for yourself, but for your team. You’ll learn how everyday language can frame interventions on perfectionism, cynicism, and burnout, freeing your people for better engagement. I’ll offer you three effective scripts.

• The following Tuesday, January 27, Karen Sergeant will join the podcast roundtable to discuss generative AI in the workplace. She argues that, as disruptive as AI has been, it can make what you’re doing with your team clearer and more ethical. Plus, it will leave you less tired, less enmeshed.

The Mode/Switch Team for our every-other Tuesday podcast. Hard to get us all in the frame! But down-center is Karen Sergeant our first guest for 2026!

I’ll never forget the time when an actor got a note from Ray and then replied, “What about doing it this way instead?” Ray watched him, staring like a laser burning through metal, and then said, “You’re not supposed to be able to do this better than I.” And then he laughed his big laugh.

Pretty good leaders become great leaders when their followers can push back, propose new ideas, and speak with candor.

That insight about the relationship between good leadership and great follower-ship emerges in this week’s intergenerational conversation 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 and risky art. 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. So, yep, we had to cut some things. Here’s a story that 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, he 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 tales Elan tells to show how attentive leadership (what he was trying to do as a dad) and active follower-ship (what his self-directed daughter modeled) are integrally bound up in each other.

As a rabbi, community organizer, social entrepreneur, innovator, nonprofit leader, and CEO, Elan’s done a lot of leading. He’s also been published in The Atlantic, The Guardian, Washington Post, and Religion News Service. He’s spoken here at Calvin University’s Festival of Faith & Writing sharing insights from his co-authored book Picking Up the Pieces: Leadership After Empire (2023, Fortress Press).

His storytelling and insight provoked our team to some soul-searching, as you’ll hear in our Roundtable Wrap-up at the end of the show.

This week’s Mode/Swich 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 this week’s guest, I’d be especially remiss if I failed to say Happy Hanukkah!

P.S. If you’d rather not listen to this in your inbox, check it out on Spotify or Apple.

Christmas Giveaway!

Got some last-minute shopping for that early-to-mid-career professional in your life? Reply to this email with your P.O. address, and (for the first two respondents) I’ll send a free copy of my book, Digital Overwhelm for a stocking near you.

This newsletter has been my circuit breaker in 2025. In an era of institutional, societal, and technological upheaval, the Mode/Switch has allowed me to channel the big, hot questions of the American workplace. Not that I knew what to do with them! Usually, they blew my fuses, and everything’d go dark. (It’s frustrating to be in the dark, but at least the house isn’t burning down!) And then, every Tuesday morning, I’d get back down to the work of writing, hit a mode/switch or two, and the light’s would go back on. For awhile.

This is the second-to-last last Mode/Switch of 2025. Next Tuesday, you’ll be hearing the podcast a final time for this year. But for now, let’s go all High-Fidelity and give a few of my Top 5s from ‘25.

5 Fuse-Blowing Realities at Work

These themes blew my breakers this year, sending me to the work of writing this newsletter week after week, fumbling for a switch to turn the lights back on for awhile.

5 Stories that Rewired Work in ‘25

These cultural texts and fictive stories kept me charged up in the quest for vocational meaning this year.

* The Pitt

Institutional identity and the drama of precarity. Season 1 helped me explore what happens when professionals keep going even as institutional ground gives way.

* Severance

Apple TV’s dystopian series about splitting work and self. Season 2 gave me a chance to talk about compartmentalization, meaning-making, and depersonalization.

* Mare of Easttown

This gritty detective drama illustrated the complexity of trust and truth-telling in tight-knit hard-working communities.

* I Cheerfully Refuse

The newsletter cited this Lief Enger novel—a favorite read for me this year—for its complex hopefulness and its complete comfort with “the grace of the overlooked.”

* The Conversation

Coppola’s 1974 film about surveillance and paranoia helped me think about losing the point of it all—and losing the all as well— at work.

5 High-Beam Ideas in the Newsletter

These concepts were flashlights for me. Their small, high-powered beams got rid of shadows in work culture.

• Brain rot: what happens when tech means cognition, especially in an AI-slop-filled workplace.

• Differentiation: Edwin Friedman’s practice of maintaining non-anxious presence in highly anxious job situations.

• Hive switch: Jonathan Haidt’s term for moving from chimp to bee in community—that is, shifting from self-interestedness to team-mindedness.

• Phubbing: the use of smartphones to physically opt out of a meeting because “I gotta take this call” or “I need to text my kid.”

• NSFW: So many trends we explored this year proved to be Not Safe for Work.

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5 Posts Most Read This Year

According to you, these were the top posts from the last twelve months, filtered by view rates.

5 Fav Reader Comments in ‘25

I’m thankful, very thankful, to you for keeping company with the Mode/Switch. I’m eager re-connect with you after the holidays in mid-January in the unimaginable 2026.

The Mode/Switch will be back one more time in ‘25 with our intergenerational crew, podcasting with Elan Babchuck on how followers can unlearn bad leadership habits.

Merry Christmas!

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