Jay Johnson joins the roundtable to help you cope with difficult people on the job.

He's used to working with corporate execs who have lost their way. (You can connect with him here, btw.)

But in our conversation, he’s talking to people in the middle of organizations, people triggered by their higher-ups as well as by their direct reports. Here are some of the things the team asked him about.

1. Emily asks if she has to talk to a Mean Girl at work. Isn’t avoidance the better part of valor in this situation?

2. Madeline’s wondering, as a Gen Z, what you do when the difficult person you have to deal with is your boss.

3. David worries that, as a skeptical Xer, he’s got a reputation as the curmudgeon in the office. What do you do when you’re the difficult person?

4. Ken guesses he needs therapy for times when he’s obnoxious to others who hate it when he keeps bring up the organizational mission all the time.

5. Craig’s got a coworker who tends to say, “Not to be cynical, but”—and then proceeds to be very cynical.

We came away from the conversation impressed by the power of everyday language for helping mid-level leaders survive people difficulties.

Difficult people can make you feel closed off to the world. Difficult people can make you feel myopic and compulsive. Difficult people make you feel disconnected from what you actually care about.

But healing comes, often enough, by changing the language you use to frame things. It helps to use words simply to name that such and such a person triggers you. It helps to notice that these feelings of annoyance are happening to you—and then simply to state what’s happening in order to deprive of it some of its power in your head. It helps to recommit to what matters to you.

Dr. Lola Adeyemo joins the pod to help you, as a mid-level leader, re‑engage employees whose life experience beyond the workplace is radically different from your own.

A tough fact of organizational leadership. You’re a caring mid-level leader, but your immigrant employees might still feel uneasy about you.

If that suggestion pokes you a little bit, I invite you to be curious about the irritation for a moment. Ask your soul what might be going on.

And then hit play on this roundtable conversation with Dr. Lola Adeyemo and Ken the Boomer, Craig the Xer, Emily the Xennial, LaShone the Millennial and Madeleine the Gen Z.

Karen Sergeant joins the pod to discuss misplaced fears about AI. These new tools can be scary, sure. But they can also make leadership miscommunication utterly visible and surprisingly reparable.

A tree falls at work…does it make a sound?

The question is partially inspired by a personal story. My family’s front yard Norway Maple fell in a winter storm just before New Year’s. Thankfully, nobody was in the yard when it fell, but we definitely heard the whoooooooouuuumph the tree made as it hit the ground.As we chainsawed it into firewood, piled up the brambles, and ground the stump, I kept wondering:

Was there anything we could have done to keep this tree from falling?

This sad tree story is also a parable for struggling workplace leadership.

The winds at work today are gale-force. We’re enduring political storms (who can stop thinking about Alex Pretti and Renee Good?). We’re blown about by digital overwhelm: so many shiny new tools, so few trust-building encounters. And to make things gustier, there’s Hurricane AI.

These storms are real. But today’s Mode/Switch guest, Karen Sergeant, redirects focus from external forces to root problems. Last summer, I started reading her Substack Human in the Loop to benefit from her indispensably fresh takes on AI and work culture. Now, I’m so pleased to have her join the Mode/Switch to show how the windstorm of generative AI could transform the workplace for the better if it’s a “forcing function for better leadership.”

But (you ask), how could all those sycophantic chatbots force leaders to recognize patterns of mis-communication? Our 30-minutes podcast will show you how. So, pull up to the roundtable!

I confess my opening question above was a little misleading. I’m not suggesting that you’re about to fall like that tree in my front yard. I’m more worried that, if you don’t communicate clearly, your team will.But improve your internal comms, and you’ll improve the whole ecology.