Angela Gorrell addresses decision fatigue on the pod this week. Listen to this episode to find your way back to gumption.

You don’t have time for this podcast. You have 105 other emails just this morning, and you have 44 minutes till your next thing. (Make that 43 minutes.) But maybe you should skim it? Or maybe you should finalize this afternoon’s agenda? (Why did you schedule that meeting for 3:30?) Or maybe you should just delete a bunch of emails?

If you have too many tasks to do before mid-afternoon, you’re eventually going to suffer decision fatigue—aka, ego depletion, brain degradation, cognitive overload.

Sometimes the choices are big.

I wake up every morning with a weight in my chest—so, yeah, I kind of hate this job. But that other position I’ve been looking at has sucky health insurance. Maybe we could go on my partner’s plan, tho’. But I care about the mission here. Also, my hair’s falling out in the shower.

Other times, the choices are micro.

Should I hit the bathroom now? If I take my laptop with me, is that gross? Should I update my operating system like tech support’s been telling me to? Should I make a third cup of coffee?

But the scale of the choices matters less than the sheer fact of how many you have to make. And the longer the day, the less you can decide.

This week, the Mode/Switch’s intergenerational team—Emily, David, LaShone, Madeline, and I—talk with Dr. Angela Gorrell about her latest book, Braving Difficult Decisions: What to Do When You Don’t Know What to Do. We’re stans for the book, mostly because Angela redirects attention to what lies beneath decision fatigue.

What’s the deep difficulty in your life that’s making these decisions difficult?

Angela says that that when you look beneath the surface, you find cor, which is Latin for heart and, if you follow the etymology long enough, you get to courage.

If it feels like you don’t have time for this Mode/Switch, let our team make just one decision for you today: put in your AirPods and let the Mode/Switch Pod take you towards courage, even in the teeth of too many choices.

Connect and consult with Dr. Angela Gorrell. She’s responsive to DMs on Instagram. She welcomes you to her website. And, yeah, you should buy her books.

Hey there, and welcome to the Mode/Switch! This week, we make sense of Gallup’s ⁠shockingly low job disengagement numbers⁠. It's tempting to ask, "Are people just lazy?" or "Are jobs just pointless?"

But to improve worker engagement, we need better questions.

Lee C. Camp of the celebrated ⁠No Small Endeavor⁠ podcast joins our roundtable this week to transform how we investigate pointlessness and purpose on the job.

I learned a lot from Lee’s questions about virtue in the workplace. But I also came away convinced that you can’t understand worker disengagement today without intergenerational exchange. Senior leaders, listen up! You need…

• Gen Xer David Wilstermann’s skepticism about corporate “purpose,” and…

• Xennial Emily Bosscher’s quest for meaning through brain fog, and…

• Millennial LaShone Manuel’s critique of exploding task lists, and…

• Gen Z Sheila Aupperlee’s stories about going to grad school while working three jobs—and still looking for some meaning in work.

My cohosts raise the question: Is it possible, in today’s economy, for a job to be anything more than just a job? A lot of people are asking the same thing:

Brene Brown’s turning from the self-help space to⁠ focus on the workplace⁠. Karen Sergeant’s asking about how AI enables us to ⁠rethink the workplace⁠. Meryl Herr’s asking about what to do ⁠When Work Hurts⁠. Anne Helen Peterson’s ⁠recent Substack⁠ engages “The Futile Search for the Bullsh*t-Less Job.”

Look, if you're asking if you should quit your pointless job--or stick it out for the sake of your amazing coworkers, you’re not alone. But I don’t think you can answer those questions till you’ve addressed the one Lee C. Camp raises in this week’s Mode/Switch.

Here’s my professional recommendation. Find a part of your job today that requires only 7% of your brain power, and then do that while hitting up this podcast.

In the surging currents of generative AI, our work-culture team talks with Olajumoke Fatoki. She says the future of work is human. We have much questions.

The world’s most powerful companies are pouring oceans of dollars into large language models and their data centers—and the rest of us tread water and hope for toeholds.

I feel giddy, and I’m not alone. A recent BCG report notes that worker’s moods about AI swing wildly: “The share of employees who feel positive about GenAI rises from 15% to 55% with strong leadership support.” Whoa. If the boss feels hopeful about AI, workers are more likely “to use it regularly, enjoy their jobs, and feel good about their careers.” (But 75% of workers aren’t getting this sort of senior leadership.)

I feel dread and anger and a lot of other unmanageable feelings, and I’m not alone in any of that either. When ChatGPT-5 dropped last week, users had a friggin’ melt down. Open AI had dialed back the model’s sycophancy—its tendency to suck up to users—with the result that some people missed GPT-4, yearning for its sweet-talking ways, like a football player missing a cheerleader girlfriend.

Sure, some soberminded users disliked GPT-5 for legitimate reasons: they had to revise their office workflows—again. That’s obnoxious.

But others seem to be asking, Why the heck isn’t ChatGPT5 calling me Man of the Year any more? (Read more here, especially about Kevin Roose’s idea for a Black Mirror episode about super intelligent suck-ups.)

I’m not sure if AI is a manageably rising tide or a friggin’ tsunami. And I’m wondering, what do managers and their teams need in this AI moment?

Here’s a start. We need courage. We need discernment. We need some humor. And we need a lot of stories about staying human when the current is strong and your toes just barely touch the sand.

We need an intergenerational Mode/Switch conversation.

This episode discusses art in the intergenerational workplace. Our team found the topic extra interesting, because three of the four of us had just moved into blank new offices.

Our big finding was that the art you hang on your walls can cost your workers cognitive wellbeing, especially if it's visually gaslighting.

We learned that term from our guest Dr. Vasu Tolia, a former pediatric gastroenterologist now turned visual artist. Her paintings build resilience, strength, and vibrant organizational community.

Ken Heffner, our Boomer, Emily Bosscher, our Xennial, LaShone Manuel, our Millennial, and Madeline Witvliet, our Gen Z discuss the surprising business outcomes of workplace art.

You can see Dr. Tolia's art at her website: www.vasutolia.art. She also has an active presence on LinkedIn.

If not, you need more psych safety. Tom Geraghty joins our roundtable to show you how to create workplace conditions where interpersonal risk, bold laughter, and a good cry are all fully possible.

Tom Geraghty spent the first four years of his life in silence. That experience of speaking disability led him to his now international work helping companies cultivate psychological safety, which is, as PsychSafety.com explains, “the belief, in a group, that we are safe to take interpersonal risks.”

Our intergenerational crew—Sheila the Gen Z, LaShone the Millennial, Emily the Xennial, and I the Xer—had plenty of questions about what makes interpersonal risk possible in the workplace. But we also have questions from you! Thanks to our listeners who shared psych-safety questions such as…

1. What do I do when my coworkers stop helping me on a project I love?

2. How do I talk about workflow with a colleague who does things really slowly?

3. What do I do when I can’t stop crying in a meeting?

4. Is psychological safety as important as physical safety?

5. What should you do when men assume women will take notes, bring snacks, and do other logistical tasks?

My big takeaway from our conversation with Tom is that psychological safety is not a merely negative value. It’s not just about avoiding harm or hurt. It’s about creating workplaces capable of sorrow and joy.

The crisis of employee disengagement today responds to workplace conditions in which people feel mute and work feels dead. Tom’s discussion of psychological safety helps us begin to restore the soundscape of a good working community. He’s a big idea guy, but he’s also like an at-your-elbow guide—as you’ll see from all the resources on his astonishingly well-resourced website.

You will love Tom’s ticklish sense of humor (and our roundtable is, as you know, prone to bust into laughter). But you will appreciate even more that Tom’s a good listener. He hears the questions behind the questions, which makes him a good work culture sherpa.

These are intense days we’re living through. Last night, my dreams were full, full of children in peril. And everybody’s days are full of news stories that are hard even to skim. We humans keep generating problems that, most days, it looks like we simply won’t ever solve. But here’s a thing you and I can do. We can turn our workplaces into what my colleague Debra Rienstra calls refugia, or hidden shelters for good life and work.

So, press play on this conversation and let Tom’s insights and our intergenerational exchange help you create a shelter for fully human tears, fully human joy.

Share

This week, executive coach Allison K. Williams joins the Mode/Switch Pod to help you discern how much of your private stuff it's okay to disclose at work.

Can I start with a slightly boozy story?

Yesterday I skipped lunch for a day too full of meetings to stick a fork in a salad. And then, at the day’s end, I joined my wife and a couple of friends for Detroit-styled cocktails. I can’t hold much liquor on a good day. Those drinks hit yesterday’s stomach so hard I had to hide a stagger on the way out to the car.

Now that I think about it, hard liquor on an empty stomach is a pretty good metaphor for swallowing what your job pushes at you everyday—and pretending you’re good to go.

Most days, you’ve got what it takes to toss the job back. But there are other days, too.

For me, the question is, how much do you let your manager know when your gut’s as empty as a drum? Do you tell your coworkers about the test results you’re waiting on? Do you talk about your quarrel with your teenager? Do you explain the plantar fasciitis that makes it hard to get up from your office chair?

Or do you just hide your limp between 9 and 5?

It’s just the kind of subtly complex question this intergenerational roundtable loves to take on as we seek shifts in mindset or behavior that makes a difference. This week, Ken our Boomer, Emily our Xennial, LaShone our Millennial, and yours truly the Gen Xer engage our guest Allison K. Williams to better sort out all the selves we are in work and life.

Allison pulls up a chair to our podcast table with a pretty wild story about what she learned on the hardest night of her life. That night launched her on a career of executive coaching, where she helps people understand more fully what it actually means to “bring your full self to work.”

Before you bring your self to work, Allison says, make sure you actually know that self. Doing that, on an empty stomach, may take more grace than you think.

Glad you’re here! Would you hit reply and let us know about at time when you felt like you wondered if you should hide your stagger at work? Did you disclose what was going on? Keep it to yourself? Let us know!

Psychotherapist Dana Skaggs joins our intergenerational pod to discuss the wisdom of boundaries in the workplace.

Well hello there—and happy Tuesday! Welcome to the Mode/Switch Pod, a biweekly roundtable on work-culture questions. Our intergenerational team equips you to do more than cope when work’s a lot! This episode asks why boundary-setting’s so tricky, especially in the workplace. Do you wish you could assert yourself at work—without creating more passive aggression? This conversation’s for you!

We are all two kinds of humans at once--those who want closeness and those who need their space. But being both kinds of selves gets tricky at work. We feel the need to assert our rights. We feel the need to get along with others. How do we do both?

Does self-care require fences? Does working community require eliminating fences?

This week, our intergenerational crew—LaShone, Emily, Ken, David, and I—talk with psychotherapist Dana Skaggs about how to create strong but open boundaries at work. It’s not about building a fortress, or even a fence. It’s more like—well, you’ll have to listen to find out!

Dana’s good at finding the laughter in difficult conversations. She’s an easy-going communicator with a gift for vivid analogies. And we should know! We pushed her pretty hard, probing her concept of boundary-setting on the job, asking questions like:

• Don’t boundaries become some people’s excuse for getting out of work?

• Won’t boundary-setting make us all lonelier?

• Aren’t boundaries easier for people who like conflict?

Our workplace-focused conversation today focuses on interpersonal conflicts at work: How do we assert our rights on the job and show up to collaborate generously with others?

But the question of boundaries today quickly raises urgent, widely felt questions about society and culture in our divisive times. My wife and I felt this keenly in Northern Ireland recently, when we did some dark tourism and wrote prayers on the Peace Wall (see below). Our tour guide’s father was murdered in The Troubles, and hearing stories like that made it feel urgent to keep boundaries from becoming barricades.

I produce the Mode/Switch because I think the workplace is a space where we can seek ways to be human together. I believe this episode equips you for that good work!

-craig

Susan Collins joins the pod to find subtle cracks in leadership styles in today's intergenerational workplace.

There’s a reason our podcast team’s intergenerational. Without multiple perspectives, you can’t make sense of the subtle patterns in today’s dynamic workplace.

But sometimes the subtlest patterns are your own.

Welcome to the Mode/Switch Pod, which comes out every other Tuesday to make sense of American work culture and help you do more than cope when work’s a lot.

Susan Collins joins the roundtable as an ICF-certified coach—The Network Concierge—to discuss the hidden patterns in our own vocational formation. Especially for Gen X managers, the things you take for granted about what it means to do the job need to shift in today’s workplace.

This week, Ken our Boomer, David our Xer, Emily our Xennial, and LaShone our Millennial discuss how to spot hidden, sometimes detrimental patterns in your own practice of leadership. But we’re not playing gotcha! If you can find the hidden patterns in how you work, you can find the courage to do more than cope in a changeful workplace.

A long time ago, a rabbi warned about putting new booze in old bottles. We’re trying to keep up with that wisdom right alongside you. So pour something good and pull up to our roundtable.

-craig