Courtney Ellis joins the Mode/Switch to help managers lead through exhausting change. Listen to learn how your language choices affect your team's trust.

(And how to try birding at work!)

I have to admit, just seeing a goose puts me in control mode.

Hey, who ordered these stupid birds to show up? Also, the shoreline’s covered with poop. This beach needs better management!

If you're leading as a manager in the middle of an organization, you know this bind. Your senior leadership’s calling for big, loud, squawking changes. You didn’t choose them. But here you are, standing in the poop, explaining all the things to your team.

But poop-making and squawk-making, as it turns out, are an unavoidable condition of organizational leadership.

This week's Mode/Switch guest, Courtney Ellis, has spent years studying how birds, and the rest of the natural world, help us handle disruption not by achieving control but by practicing preparation, curiosity, adaptation, and resilience. Those four postures are central to her latest book, Weathering Change, and they shape the conversations of her podcast, The Thing With Feathers, about birds and hope.

Understandably, Gen Z cohost Madeline Witvliet asks in our intro, Why have a bird enthusiast on a work-culture podcast?

It’s a fair question. Courtney joins our intergenerational team to show how the natural world provides metaphors for improving trust at work, especially in seasons of disruptive change. (Her reference to starling flight patterns is worth the pod, btw.)

Courtney’s insights recall Lakoff and Johnson’s point about “the metaphors we live by.” Our metaphors aren’t just decorations for speech. They’re shapers of action.

For me, the surprising move in this episode is that birds suggest behaviors that are indispensable for leaders and their teams in the exhausting and changeful middle spaces of organizations.

For example, if you don’t know what a hummingbird’s torpor has to do with mid-level leadership, I encourage you to give this pod half an hour and find out!

This episode of the Mode/Switch builds on an ancient teaching, “Consider the birds of the air,” so you can cultivate team reliability.

Approximate Episode Timestamps

0:00 – 3:00 — Cold open: we introduce our intergenerational team, name this week’s topic (Changing Our Relation to Change Itself), and situate things in the context of exhausting organizational change.

3:00 – 24:00 — Main discussion with Courtney about what to do when changes mean, “The journey is too much for you.” We discuss why constant change makes us believe in a myth of control. We explore the limits and possibilities of adaptability, discussing change happening to vs. with us. Courtney shows how nature metaphors unify teams, support stasis, build equity, and cope with digital exhaustion.

24:00 – 27:00 — Mode/Switch: Courtney recommends a birding exercise you can do at work with your team.

27:00 – 33:00 — Roundtable wrap-up: LaShone talks about why “getting a grip” is so hard today. Emily waves a white flag at senior leaders. Madeline tells a story about starting her new role. Craig asks for prescriptions for leaders. We conclude with a book recommendation for leaders wanting to build trust in times of change.

What this episode will help you do in times of change:

1. Replace control with curiosity. Instead of trying to hold everything still, you’ll learn how to ask what’s actually going on for your team and for yourself.

2. Normalize rest and micro-recovery as equipment for living, not for indulgence. You’ll learn about the indispensability of torpor and stasis for pacing work well.

3. Build the trust that makes flexibility possible. We discuss concrete moves (floor visits, one-on-ones, self-disclosure about stress) that help you cultivate team trust.

4. Advocate upward and pace change deliberately. Courtney and the Mode/Switchers discuss tactics for middle managers to bring senior leadership into direct contact with affected teams in order to pace change better.

Mid-level leaders have something to learn from Odysseus when it comes to coping with ambiguity. Seems like a stretch? Try listening to this week’s conversation between the Mode/Switch team and Dr. Jamie K.A. Smith about being a manager accustomed to ambiguity.

His book Make Your Home in This Luminous Dark might not strike you as a business-forward must-read. But our intergenerational conversation—David Wilstermann, Xer; Emily Bosscher, Xennial, and Jake Aupperlee, Gen Z—explored the managerial usefulness of ancient mystic thought.

The best things about talking with Jamie is his capacity for questions. We brought him on the show as an expert, but he quickly mode-switched from expert to novice. By answering our questions with questions of his own, he did more than urge the importance of humble curiosity. He embodied it.

Two questions emerged that matter for mid-level leaders:

1. Emily asked when uncertainty, ambiguity, and mystery become smokescreens. How do people in the middle of organizations discern the difference between ambiguity exploited and ambiguity earned? (Jamie’s response helps leaders discern when mystery becomes mystery-mongering.)

2. David asked when a leader’s embrace of uncertainty covers for incompetence. In other words, appealing to the “ambiguity” of a situation can disguise a leader’s ignorance and sloppiness. (Smith responds with the concept of "learned ignorance,” and it’s worth the podcast.)

I think you'll experience this podcast as surprisingly epic. The energy and humor and spirit probably came from the fact that Jamie was in-studio with us. Together, we found ways through the fog of working community.

You’re on your own odyssey. You’re trying to get home, seeking a place of where work feels safe and meaningful, yearning for flourishing for yourself and for your team.

Think of this podcast as a thirty-minute map. It offers the guidance of focused, substantive, multidirectional conversation about leaders in the luminous dark of their organizational life and work.

Table of Contents

00:00 — Cold Open
Why does information overload always seem to hit hardest when you’re already feeling insecure with your team? That tangle is the whole episode.

02:31 — Welcome, Jamie Smith
A stat that should needle you (87% of workers see manager capability as a company risk) — and Jamie’s origin story on the back of a pickup truck. What actually changes when a leader stops trying to win and starts trying to invite? Jamie walks through his own experience of an existential mode/switch.

05:58 — Learning to Live with Mystery
Can you build real tolerance for uncertainty without turning into the leader who’s just checked out? Here’s the line Jamie draws.

08:19 — Reassurance vs. Reorientation
“We got this” or “here’s where we actually are” — which one does your team actually need to hear from you?

09:08 — Earned Ignorance
Is “I don’t know” a strength or a dodge? David’s question splits the episode open, and Jamie’s answer — by way of Augustine — hands you a phrase you’ll want to keep.

10:39 — Can’t Think Our Way Out of the Culture Wars
More information keeps failing to make anyone less polarized. Jamie’s fix starts in an unlikely place: the mystics.

13:00 — Should Leaders Weigh In?
You probably don’t want your CEO tweeting about Iran or Ukraine — but you might want something else from them instead.

15:57 — Wonder, Curiosity, and Barry Lopez
Four questions a nature writer asks of a place might be the best onboarding tool you’ve never used.

19:44 — The Practical Pivot
One thing to actually try this afternoon. No retreat required.

21:39 — Post-Show Roundtable
What happens when you ask a candidate what they’re curious about? When you answer a nasty email with humility instead of a rebuttal? The hosts try the episode’s ideas on themselves.

Elaine Howard Ecklund & Denise Daniels join the Mode/Switch Pod to help managers engage the sacred as a source of strength on the job. (You'll also learn to avoid missteps!)

Since the everything in the world feels so peaceful right now, let’s bring up an easy topic: religion at work.

I know, I know. But if you’re feeling of missteps about what your people hold sacred, this podcast is for you!

This week’s Mode/Switch Pod engages sociologist Elaine Howard Ecklund and entrepreneurship professor Denise Daniels to share their research (15,000 surveys, 300 qualitative interviews!) on how huge a driver faith is in the workplace.

Our intergenerational team—Josh (Millennial), Madeline (Gen Z), and I (slacker Gen X)—probe their findings, examining the startling power of religious faith to provide meaning beyond oneself.

Isn’t it complicated to talk about faith at work? Um, yes.

But Ecklund & Daniels’s new book Working for Better: A New Approach to Faith at Work and this week’s podcast helps you practice a respectful pluralism as you encounter religious difference in the workplace.

Our intergenerational team (Gen Z, Millennial, and Gen X) probe these researchers’ arguments, engaging questions like…

• Is religion at work a Trojan horse for proselytizing?

• What is legitimate religious expression at work? What’s discriminatory?

• Why are men more willing to talk about faith at work, even though women are more likely to find religious meaning in their work?

• How can you create psychological safety for religious practitioners at work?

  If you’re a mid-level leader who studiously avoids mentioning the sacred at work, you might be trying to be non-discriminatory. Thank you for that! But I encourage you to listen to this brisk, funny, and definitely data-driven conversation to learn how it’s not actually religiously neutral to ignore people’s diverse faith commitments on the job.

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?

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.

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.

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!

Lyle Wells joins the pod to talk about how you, as a mid-level leader, can speak clearly with your team, yes, but also how you can get an actual hearing with your higher-ups.

That's a question that drives the Mode/Switch podcast: how can mid-level leaders be seen, heard, and known by their higher-ups?

The latest Gallup workplace polling suggests 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 in 2026 become Bad and Lazy People? Nah. 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 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 to your team.

But our team kept hammering home 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 slogan.) But we ask impossible questions, because we know you, as a mid-level leader, 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 too noisy to hear what you’re saying?

Lyle urges you in this podcast to be generous and compassionate. For you, 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 rational and reasonable actions. The problem is their 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. They make sense. And, in your senior leadership’s case, they may look and feel like bold actions. But these actions are actually dysfunctional. They are the confident choices of trapped people.

Learning to see your higher-ups as making logical but dysfunctional moves is an important step in being heard, seen, and known by them.

When you feel (as one Mode/Switcher put it in this week’s roundtable) non-existent in your organization, Lyle Wells will help see the blend of interpersonal and structural problems that keep you there. For now.

This podcast will equip you to make the most of every conversational opportunity, both with your team and with your senior leadership. I

f your higher-ups are stuck in a particular mindset about you and your work, listen to this podcast (and subscribe to the Mode/Switch Newsletter) to begin helping your higher-ups to…

• build awareness (that they’re being avoidant)

• name the broken loop (of dysfunctional but oh-so-tempting choices)

• encourage presence (to what your team is actually experiencing).

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.