This podcast addresses dead nerve endings between and among managers, employees, and senior leadership. Welcome to a brand new podcast: Mode/Switch: Second Opinion!

This might sound like a bad LinkedIn post with a dubious moral parable. But I think managers need second opinions, too, especially when it comes to insensitivity between senior leadership and employees.

Dayforce Research now reports that “Only 42% of frontline workers say leaders understand their challenges.” That represents a 20% decline in two years. But managers don’t need that research to know that senior leadership has lost a feel for what’s happening on teams and in workflows.

Nobody feels this organizational neuropathy as painfully as managers. But the usual prescriptions are unhelpful: Be candid. Be clear. Be sincere. Be resilient.

But even after managers do all these things, the “Communication Gap Between Leadership and Frontline Employees” continues. And managerial consultancy and coaching basically say, “You’re going to have to live with this.”

Seeking help with a new podcast concept
Feeling the weight of this problem, I reached out to a clinical psychologist, Dr. Irene Kraegel, of Dwell Psychological Services, and asked her if she’d be willing to help me address wicked organizational problems for mid-level managers.

Once a month, we’ll welcome a mid-level manager to the table who’s experiencing a management problem—not a huge crisis, per se, but a puzzling challenge—and then discuss it, moving toward action steps. (Maybe checking back later to see how the action steps worked.)

This spinoff edition of The Mode/Switch would seek to help mid-level leaders make vital “reframes” in their work. We still call these “mode switches” but we’ll resource interdisciplinary expertise instead of the intergenerational wisdom the Mode/Switch Pod usually offers.

Steve Cuss joins the podcast to talk about emotional regulation on work teams.

When your team is sad or exhausted on the clock, you get them off the clock—right?

Do they take a vacation? See a therapist? Get a new job?

Sometimes they just can't. So Steve Cuss makes a better proposal: let's make it possible for people to be well at work!

This week the Mode/Switch team—Ken (Boomer), Craig (Gen X), Josh (Millennial), and Madeline (Gen Z)—works on that question with Steve, author of Managing Leadership Anxiety and host of the Being Human podcast. What does emotional health look like in the pressurized middle of an organization, where you have a lot of responsibility and not much authority?

You'll get four questions that expose your team's emotional patterns, and a script for what to say when someone's sarcasm shuts the room down. You'll hear how Steve accidentally muted his own team, and how four generations handle all the feelings at work. You'll also hear us push back: Steve's advice assumes a boss who can take feedback. What if yours can't?

Mostly, though, you'll get a half hour that helps you do more than cope when work's a lot.

Podcast Table of Contents:

Segment 1 — Intergenerational discussion

02:36 — Dealing with the sponges, the oblivious, and the dangerous.

07:29 — Scripting what to say when someone slices others in a meeting.

12:30 — Asking 4 questions to expose your team’s emotional pattern.

14:53 — Sharing how Steve’s team confronted him about his combativeness.

16:05 — “The only thing worse than talking about it is not talking about it.”

17:24 — Approaching feelings from different intergenerational places.

Segment 2 — This week’s Mode Switch

Segment 3 — The roundtable follow-up

22:12 — The catch: Steve assumes a boss who’ll receive feedback. What if yours won’t?

24:03 — Ken on quitting your job: “It might be an open door, but it leads to an abyss.”

24:16 — Madeline on feelings and Gen Z: “I’d rather name it than hide it.”

24:38 — Josh on Black-and-Brown code-switching: “You probably won’t get all of me.”

26:16 — Can you afford four hours of emotional care for your team each month?

28:14 — We need psychic caffeine.

Brigid Schulte joins the podcast roundtable to share her journalistic findings on “stupid work.” She helps managers and their teams tell “a better story about work.”

Your communication with a team doesn’t just convey instructions. It does stuff.

That’s an insight from communication theory. But it’s also a persistent insight from this week’s podcast conversation with Better Life Lab’s Brigid Schulte, author of the recent book Over Work, a journalistic investigation of job addiction and its causes. For her, managerial communication can generate a lot of what she calls “stupid work.”

When your team does Stupid Work, you can be sure there are two factors at play. They will have internalized various work ethics. But they will also feel the external pressure of your organization’s culture and (quite possibly) your managerial communication.

It's possible for managers to be very pleasant people. “Thanks for what you do!” and “Appreciate you!” and “Wow, you’re up at 5:30 sending emails!” But the weird thing about compliments like those is, they mean well but do harm.

Managerial communication like that generates an enormous amount of what Brigid calls Stupid Work, intensive labor that’s marginal to the core work of an organization.

In this week’s podcast, you’ll hear some frank confessions of work addiction from our team. But Brigid’s journalism will help you do more than treat your overwork. She will also help you tell an entirely new story about work itself.

I’m pleased to share this week’s podcast, because I think it could make a difference for you and your team. Here’s one good way to get ready: jot down one thing your higher-ups say to you that tempts you into Stupid Work. Hit reply or comment below!

Table of Contents

0:00 — Craig comes in tender: why this week’s problem isn’t “out there.” Plus the number behind the episode: a 2026 workforce report finds nearly half of workers now describe themselves as workaholics.

2:30 — The system we’re recording inside: automation reshaping scheduling, algorithmic performance tracking, and middle managers left to translate .

3:20 — Brigid Schulte enters the studio. Where does the line get crossed between commitment and compulsion? On the “ideal worker” cultures that reward presence, busyness, and the appearance of productivity.

6:15 — “It is the only addiction that is rewarded.”

7:10 — Is this an American problem?

8:45 — LaShone asks the middle-manager question: you’re absorbing pressure from above and handing it down. How do you interrupt that?

11:45 — Craig on the scripts that circulate at work. Brigid goes to Japan for karoshi and to Iceland for shorter hours, and finds the same root in both places: ambiguity about what the work actually is.

15:50 — Generations and boundaries after COVID. Where the “young workers want flexibility, older workers don’t” story holds up — and where the data says it doesn’t.

19:50 — Faithful leadership when you don’t control compensation, staffing, or policy. Your sphere of influence, why rested people do better work, and the six-week arc where the overworkers lose their early lead. Plus a term for what happens next: the productivity cliff.

23:00 — A better story about work — “beyond lunchtime yoga.” Brigid on the change agents who gave her hope, including a family reforming the culture of medicine after losing an ER doctor to burnout.

25:10 — Mode/Switch! Stop stupid work. Brigid’s three concentric circles: the real work, the work around the work, and the performance of work. Why we spend our days in the outer two.

27:35 — Roundtable: Can a mid-level leader misdiagnose work addiction in someone else? Are there workaholic seasons? LaShone on self-awareness and naps, Madeline on “I’ll just make a little progress here,” Craig on why “stupid work” is too close to laugh at. The better questions we might ask each other instead of “How’s work?”