Suzanne Rabicoff joins our intergenerational roundtable with two perspective‑switches that ease the pressure mid‑level leaders feel when mistrust becomes their problem to solve.

When Jenni Field’s book argues that Nobody Believes You, how do you respond? Do you, as a mid-level leader, immediately take all the blame?

This week’s episode of the Mode/Switch Pod eases up that self-blame, especially if you’re feeling like a digital conduit for senior leadership’s strategy dumps—or an electronic backsplash for your employees’ complaints.

For me, this week’s guest, Suzanne Rabicoff, suggests a perspective shift:

What if mistrust isn’t being generated where you think it is?

Suzanne’s answer will ease the pressure you put on yourself. Pressure to be reliable. Pressure to be credible. Pressure to be stable.

I mean, you should be those things! But this episode will also help you see the pressures external to your organization, especially the technological pressures that make trust hard these days.

Suzanne will make you laugh. She’s a shrewd observe 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 figure what’s making it so hard to believe each other today.

Emily Stewart (of Business Insider) joins our intergenerational roundtable to urge grace towards the Boomers who keep their jobs past what your Gen Zs feel is the expiration date.

I recently had to grind the stump of a fallen tree and wondered about the longevity of a nearby conifer. The arborist said (a little surprisingly) that I should leave it be.

That still-standing tree came to mind this week, while finishing 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.

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.

Dr. Meryl Herr joins the Mode/Switch roundtable to look beneath worker disengagement to uncover the reality of "work hurt." Her advice to managers? Work has probably hurt your team. But it's hurt you, too. Deal with that first.

Meryl is an organizational researcher and nonprofit consultant who’s skilled at locating the hidden disappointments, buried devastations, and quiet disillusionments of doing a job.

Her book When Work Hurts: Building Resilience When You’re Beat Up or Burnt Out isn’t primarily addressed to mid-level leaders. But there was a moment at our roundtable with Madeline (the Gen Z), LaShone (the millennial), Emily (the xennial) and David (who, along with me, is an Xer) where she brought things home for managers.

She helped us see that when you’re baffled and disappointed by your team, when it seems to you that they are stuck in a cycle of disengagement, you might want to ask if they’re experiencing work hurt. Not that you can automatically fix their injury. But you can work on your own work hurt. Believe it or not, you’ve got it. Everybody does.

What struck me is just how easy it is to get on somebody’s else’s case in order to avoid your own devastation and disillusionment.

Needing help dealing with that work hurt? Press play on the pod and pull up to the roundtable with Meryl and our team!

This week, the Mode/Switcher team probes work hurt from all directions:

• Madeline asks, how do you know when pain means you should quit your job? When is it just a rough season—and when is it a definitive red flag?

• Emily asks, is it safe for women to express work hurt on the job? Or will they be labeled as too emotional? (She uses a stronger word than that.)

• David wonders how admitting work hurt might victimize you—how can you be more than your work hurt?

• LaShone tells a story about her work hurt as a Black woman professional in predominantly white organizations.

• Craig wonders if hidden hurt ever brings hidden gift with it.

We learned a lot from talking with Meryl. She gives language for dimensions of work that are all too easy to ignore. For me, though, it comes down to this:

If you’re disappointed by your team’s disengagement, it may be time to ask what else is going on inside you. Try asking what’s beneath your urgency and your irritation. You may find reasons to show yourself a clarifying compassion.