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.