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.