Jenni Fields joins the pod to show why workplace effectiveness depends on likability, not on being liked. (Our Gen Z and Boomer discuss the the up and downsides of riz.)

Some years ago, a manager cautioned me about my performance. I took the warning seriously, because I’d made some mistakes that confirmed what I took to be his poor opinion of me. Maybe he gave me the caution because he was genuinely trying to help me out. Maybe I nodded my head because I was trying to be openminded. But it was clear we didn’t like each other very much.

Although we smiled a heckuva lot, the room was thick with mistrust.

The discomfort was so distracting in fact that I didn’t notice the backhanded compliment in his cautionary word:

“You know, well-liked people,” he said, nodding in my direction, “have to be careful.”

I wish now that I’d held up my hand like Diana Ross of The Supremes, “Stop! In the name of like!” I wish I’d said, “Boss, it’s time for a mode/switch!” I wish I’d said that the real question wasn’t, ‘Am I well-liked at work?’ but ‘Am I likable?’” But I couldn’t have said those things back then, because I hadn’t yet read Jenni Field’s excellent new book Nobody Believes You.

This week on the Mode/Switch Pod, it’s time to rewrite work-culture communication! Jenni helps correct the confusion between the Michael Scott Syndrome (I Need to Be Liked) and the quality of credible leadership that Jenni calls likability (I need to be warm and competent). If you’re wondering what the difference is, you’re in good company. Our team—Ken the Boomer, David the Xer, Emily the Xennial, and Madeline the Gen Z—had quite a time “unpicking” (as Jenni would say, in her British idiom) all sorts of complex emotional qualities like charisma and competence and lightheartedness.

Jenni’s great laugh is contagious, and her flexible thinking will help you find flow in the trickiest dynamics of working community.

She's also an authentic work-culture sage. Wait, scratch that! She dislikes the word authentic and prefers the word credible, a term she’s thoroughly discussed in Nobody Believes You, a book that helps you (as her subtitle puts it) “Become a leader people will follow.” (She’s also written the resourceful text Influential Internal Communication: Streamline Your Corporate Communication to Drive Efficiency and Engagement, which is sitting at my elbow as I write this podcast description.)

This is our 93rd episode. I think it may be our very best. The conversation moves fast, but goes deep. It allows for difference but shares good humor and good will. Jenni has a way of pouring wisdom into people around her and then pulling it out of them as well.

So, if you’ve been reading these podcast descriptions over the past few months and thinking that, sometime in here, you really oughta listen. This is your sometime.

What if the best way to improve workplace communication is to do less of it, at least for a while? Ross Chapman joins the pod to explain why new rhythms of rest can do what more messaging never will.

Workplace miscommunication is expensive. According to one Axios report, “Employees lose over a month each year dealing with ineffective internal communication.” Not hard to imagine, right? You know what it’s like trying to find instructions buried in an email—only to realize the instructions actually came through a Teams message. Or a post on Viva Engage. Or, wait, did the boss text us the protocols?

Workplace miscommunication is so expensive, in fact, that it’s tempting to give into the desperate maxim that better communication must mean more communication.

But this week’s guest, Ross Chapman of the Denver Institute, suggests counter-intuitively that some silos in the workplace can’t be dismantled by more and more messaging. Intergenerational silos, in particular.

His organization has, in fact, innovated a provocative practice that improves workplace community by creating new rhythms of rest.

Wait, sabbaticals for every employee, not just the CEO? Whut? How? I know, I know, but Ross shows us how it’s done.

I gotta say, too, that, as a workaholic Gen Xer, I love what happens to my consciousness every time I sit down with my Mode/Switch cohosts: Madeline (Gen Z), Ken (Boomer), Emily (Xennial), and LaShone (Millennial). If you’re asking, “Am I crazy? Is work supposed to be this pressurized?” These amazing coaches validate the widespread sense that workplaces too often feel like stuck places. I’m an infernal optimist. But their realism keeps me grounded—without letting go hope for renewal.

Big shout out, too, to Riley Johnston, our Mode/Switch audio editor, who helps keep our conversations tight and on point.

Falon Peters joins the pod to discuss how organizations not only wreak change but design it for flourishing. Our crew is open to her ideas but skeptical as well (and, ok, fatigued).

Here's a lead-up to the show:

When you jerk people around in a workplace—through layoffs and policy revisions, e.g.—you’re not just reshuffling columns on a spreadsheet. You’re intervening on a biota.

Think of a biota as a forest or a piece of farmland, sheltering and relying upon a complex network of interdependent elements. What gives vitality to a biota is the energy that flows from seemingly unimportant parts of the place (like the soil) to more conspicuous elements (like the crops and insects and birds) to the most obvious participants (like hunters and farmers).

In organizations, too, vitality fountains up from nonobvious to more obvious participants. But American workplaces tend to drive organizational change not by attuning to the complexity of their biotas but by the urgencies of monetary efficiency.

Think of Amazon’s plan to eliminate 14,000 middle managers, announced last week.

Heck, I wouldn’t want to be a middle manager at Amazon. Maybe it’s a good thing that machines do all that managerial work, drafting memos, tying down lists, assigning shifts, monitoring production reports. But Amazon’s decision will affect more than middle managers. It will affect the whole ecology of early-to-mid-career professionals, redirecting their career pathways and obstructing the energy flowing upwards that Amazon’s own biota relies on.

Years ago, Elizabeth Kolbert warned of a coming “Sixth Extinction” in the history of our planet. We can’t address such large-scale crises at the Mode/Switch roundtable. But here’s what our intergenerational crew—Emily, LaShone, Ken, and I—can do. We can help prevent the next workplace extinction by sharing the wisdom of people like our guest this week, Falon Peters of the Grand-Rapids-based Crowe X-Design Lab. She’s got ideas (and we have questions) about how organizations can do more than wreak change. They can also design it for everybody’s wellbeing.

You’ll want to stick around for our roundtable wrap-up. Things get dark for us in this conversation. But then, we’re trying to pay attention to death and resurrection in the American workplace.

-craig

P.S. Can you spot my dependence on Aldo Leopold’s work in what I wrote above? See his essay “⁠The Land Ethic⁠“ for more on the mutuality of biotas.