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.
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.
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.
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.
