Agentic AI seems to make middle managers obsolete. A psychologist (Irene Kraegel), a comms researcher (Craig Mattson), and an HR professional (Rachel Hammond) make visible what managers do that agents can’t.

In March of this year, Jack Dorsey and Roelof Botha made the case for eliminating middle management. Organizations, they said, need less hierarchy and more intelligence. And by intelligence, they meant faster flows of information. They noted that agentic AI will “coordinate work in ways that previously required humans relaying information through layers of management.”

Their argument’s become the conventional wisdom in the large corporations that employ most workers today—companies like Block, GitLab, Microsoft, and Meta.

But what about the many, many other companies (99.9% of businesses today) that have fewer than 500 employees? Should they imitate their larger cousins and get rid of hierarchy?

Should you at your company swap your managers for BoodleBox agents?

This week on Mode/Switch: Second Opinion, Irene Kraegel and I talk with Dr. Rachel Hammond, a management professor and an MBA director about the costs of eliminating the managers. Our discussion follows three movements:

• History: Eliminating management isn’t as fresh an idea as it sounds. (Rachel takes us back to Max Weber and forward to the business computers of the 1980s.)

• Process: Agentic AI liberates managers from hours of filling out forms. But is this tech freedom fostering human heedlessness? (Irene notes the neurological imperatives of human connection in the workplace.)

• Formation: If we cut the middle rungs of the workplace ladder, how do we grow our people into the leaders our organizations need?

But for me, the central question emerges in a recent conversation between Ezra Klein and Arvind Narayanan: is intelligence the same thing as power?

Sure, agentic AI can help us trade hierarchy for intelligence, bureaucracy for information. But are organizations more than the sum of their cybernetic flows? Are working communities more than the movement of information?

You might object that I’m leading the witness here with these questions. Objection sustained—if you hit play on the pod.

Cheers to all the humans, especially the manager ones!

Thanks for engaging Mode/Switch: Second Opinion with Craig Mattson & Irene Kraegel! Share this pod with 4 org leaders, 3 managers, 2 team members, 1 cat, and 0 bots.

Emma Harrington and Natalia Emanuel join our podcast to discuss in-person mentoring and why your reasons for RTO matter.

It’s a relational paradox: nearness can isolate and distance connect. Understanding this paradox can help managers enforcing return-to-office mandates to capitalize on the “proximity effect” of in-person work.

Just getting people back in the office won’t automatically improve collaborative productivity or rebuild organizational trust. But paying attention to what brain researchers call “neural synchrony” suggests that in-person work can support effective mentoring and a more reliable team.

But it all comes down to why you want those brains syncing up.

I encountered a failure of neural synchrony while researching for my book Digital Overwhelm. One rising professional told me that after taking a remote job with a firm, she would laugh at a joke in an email but then see her coworkers’ faces on Zoom and think, Oh, they weren’t joking at all. Her experience showed how hard it can be to connect with coworkers while staring into the depths of a laptop screen. (It didn’t help that her boss never read more than two lines of her emails.)

Sure, it’s possible to exaggerate the power of neural synchrony. But Emma Harrington and Natalia Emanuel join this week’s Mode/Switch Pod to argue that what happens when people work in the same location can catalyze stronger working communities.. Their just-released book, In Person: How Working Together Fuels Creativity, Productivity, and Growth, shows how.

I reached out to Emma and Natalia this summer after seeing their New York Times article, which shared data from research on togetherness and work. Their research suggests that a huge benefit of proximity comes with mentoring. Their conversation on this podcast shows how mentoring does more than help rising professionals survive workplace bureaucracy; it also helps them become generous contributors to working community.

If you as a manager are questioning the sacrifices you’re making to show up at work, this podcast’s for you. This week’s conversation fully acknowledges the obnoxiousness of your commute, the expense of childcare, and the peculiar obligation to put on grown-up pants. (Emma’s confession of “marital disharmony” and her husband’s sometimes ambivalence about his commute may be worth the pod.) But the podcast also helps you recognize that the best motivation for RTO may be to support the wisdom and wellbeing of your team.

Regular listeners know that The Mode/Switch Pod features an intergenerational roundtable. I doubt there’s a topic that more requires intergenerational insight than the RTO vs. In-Person debates. I’m glad to be joined by my cohosts Ken the Boomer, David the Xer, Emily the Xennial, and Madeline the Z.

What can a TikTok dance tell you about your team member? Less than you think, says this week’s guest, Kylan Rutherford.

Podcasts like The Mode/Switch keep telling managers to try to better understand their team members. Get curious. Build empathy. Cultivate rapport.

What better way to do that than finding them on FB or TikTok?

Scratch that. Social media may be one of the worst places to get to know your team.

Or so says our Mode/Switch Pod guest Dr. Kylan Rutherford. He’s a social scientist who’s done work at NYU’s Center for Social Media and Politics, and he’s now the director of Normsy Labs, which uses AI to “transform toxic online behavior and build pathways to healthier digital conversations.”

The only way you’ll get to know your employee better is if you can access their finsta. Which you probably can’t. If you’re unsure what a finsta is, you’re in good company. Our intergenerational table was split on that one too, and Kylan brings everyone up to speed. Around the table: Gen X insight from David Wilson and me, Millennial tact from Josh DiMarco, and Gen Z skepticism from Alex Johnson.

If as a manager, you’ve ever caught yourself saying, “Well, my employee chose to post it, so why not check it out?” or “Following them online will help build rapport at work,” this conversation will give you pause. What you’re trying to learn on Insta, and what you’ll actually learn, Kylan says, will be widely divergent.

But here’s what you’ll come away from this podcast better able to do:

• Ask what an online signal tells you about a team member

• Grasp why some people disclose so much online while others don’t

• Stop treating an employee’s feed as their “real” self

• Discern when to make space for politics and religion in tricky workspaces

Managers, let me ask: Have you ever learned something about a coworker online that changed how you saw them at work? Let me know in the comments below!

You can learn more about Kylan Rutherford’s research here.

This podcast addresses dead nerve endings between and among managers, employees, and senior leadership. Welcome to a brand new podcast: Mode/Switch: Second Opinion!

This might sound like a bad LinkedIn post with a dubious moral parable. But I think managers need second opinions, too, especially when it comes to insensitivity between senior leadership and employees.

Dayforce Research now reports that “Only 42% of frontline workers say leaders understand their challenges.” That represents a 20% decline in two years. But managers don’t need that research to know that senior leadership has lost a feel for what’s happening on teams and in workflows.

Nobody feels this organizational neuropathy as painfully as managers. But the usual prescriptions are unhelpful: Be candid. Be clear. Be sincere. Be resilient.

But even after managers do all these things, the “Communication Gap Between Leadership and Frontline Employees” continues. And managerial consultancy and coaching basically say, “You’re going to have to live with this.”

Seeking help with a new podcast concept
Feeling the weight of this problem, I reached out to a clinical psychologist, Dr. Irene Kraegel, of Dwell Psychological Services, and asked her if she’d be willing to help me address wicked organizational problems for mid-level managers.

Once a month, we’ll welcome a mid-level manager to the table who’s experiencing a management problem—not a huge crisis, per se, but a puzzling challenge—and then discuss it, moving toward action steps. (Maybe checking back later to see how the action steps worked.)

This spinoff edition of The Mode/Switch would seek to help mid-level leaders make vital “reframes” in their work. We still call these “mode switches” but we’ll resource interdisciplinary expertise instead of the intergenerational wisdom the Mode/Switch Pod usually offers.

Steve Cuss joins the podcast to talk about emotional regulation on work teams.

When your team is sad or exhausted on the clock, you get them off the clock—right?

Do they take a vacation? See a therapist? Get a new job?

Sometimes they just can't. So Steve Cuss makes a better proposal: let's make it possible for people to be well at work!

This week the Mode/Switch team—Ken (Boomer), Craig (Gen X), Josh (Millennial), and Madeline (Gen Z)—works on that question with Steve, author of Managing Leadership Anxiety and host of the Being Human podcast. What does emotional health look like in the pressurized middle of an organization, where you have a lot of responsibility and not much authority?

You'll get four questions that expose your team's emotional patterns, and a script for what to say when someone's sarcasm shuts the room down. You'll hear how Steve accidentally muted his own team, and how four generations handle all the feelings at work. You'll also hear us push back: Steve's advice assumes a boss who can take feedback. What if yours can't?

Mostly, though, you'll get a half hour that helps you do more than cope when work's a lot.

Podcast Table of Contents:

Segment 1 — Intergenerational discussion

02:36 — Dealing with the sponges, the oblivious, and the dangerous.

07:29 — Scripting what to say when someone slices others in a meeting.

12:30 — Asking 4 questions to expose your team’s emotional pattern.

14:53 — Sharing how Steve’s team confronted him about his combativeness.

16:05 — “The only thing worse than talking about it is not talking about it.”

17:24 — Approaching feelings from different intergenerational places.

Segment 2 — This week’s Mode Switch

Segment 3 — The roundtable follow-up

22:12 — The catch: Steve assumes a boss who’ll receive feedback. What if yours won’t?

24:03 — Ken on quitting your job: “It might be an open door, but it leads to an abyss.”

24:16 — Madeline on feelings and Gen Z: “I’d rather name it than hide it.”

24:38 — Josh on Black-and-Brown code-switching: “You probably won’t get all of me.”

26:16 — Can you afford four hours of emotional care for your team each month?

28:14 — We need psychic caffeine.

Brigid Schulte joins the podcast roundtable to share her journalistic findings on “stupid work.” She helps managers and their teams tell “a better story about work.”

Your communication with a team doesn’t just convey instructions. It does stuff.

That’s an insight from communication theory. But it’s also a persistent insight from this week’s podcast conversation with Better Life Lab’s Brigid Schulte, author of the recent book Over Work, a journalistic investigation of job addiction and its causes. For her, managerial communication can generate a lot of what she calls “stupid work.”

When your team does Stupid Work, you can be sure there are two factors at play. They will have internalized various work ethics. But they will also feel the external pressure of your organization’s culture and (quite possibly) your managerial communication.

It's possible for managers to be very pleasant people. “Thanks for what you do!” and “Appreciate you!” and “Wow, you’re up at 5:30 sending emails!” But the weird thing about compliments like those is, they mean well but do harm.

Managerial communication like that generates an enormous amount of what Brigid calls Stupid Work, intensive labor that’s marginal to the core work of an organization.

In this week’s podcast, you’ll hear some frank confessions of work addiction from our team. But Brigid’s journalism will help you do more than treat your overwork. She will also help you tell an entirely new story about work itself.

I’m pleased to share this week’s podcast, because I think it could make a difference for you and your team. Here’s one good way to get ready: jot down one thing your higher-ups say to you that tempts you into Stupid Work. Hit reply or comment below!

Table of Contents

0:00 — Craig comes in tender: why this week’s problem isn’t “out there.” Plus the number behind the episode: a 2026 workforce report finds nearly half of workers now describe themselves as workaholics.

2:30 — The system we’re recording inside: automation reshaping scheduling, algorithmic performance tracking, and middle managers left to translate .

3:20 — Brigid Schulte enters the studio. Where does the line get crossed between commitment and compulsion? On the “ideal worker” cultures that reward presence, busyness, and the appearance of productivity.

6:15 — “It is the only addiction that is rewarded.”

7:10 — Is this an American problem?

8:45 — LaShone asks the middle-manager question: you’re absorbing pressure from above and handing it down. How do you interrupt that?

11:45 — Craig on the scripts that circulate at work. Brigid goes to Japan for karoshi and to Iceland for shorter hours, and finds the same root in both places: ambiguity about what the work actually is.

15:50 — Generations and boundaries after COVID. Where the “young workers want flexibility, older workers don’t” story holds up — and where the data says it doesn’t.

19:50 — Faithful leadership when you don’t control compensation, staffing, or policy. Your sphere of influence, why rested people do better work, and the six-week arc where the overworkers lose their early lead. Plus a term for what happens next: the productivity cliff.

23:00 — A better story about work — “beyond lunchtime yoga.” Brigid on the change agents who gave her hope, including a family reforming the culture of medicine after losing an ER doctor to burnout.

25:10 — Mode/Switch! Stop stupid work. Brigid’s three concentric circles: the real work, the work around the work, and the performance of work. Why we spend our days in the outer two.

27:35 — Roundtable: Can a mid-level leader misdiagnose work addiction in someone else? Are there workaholic seasons? LaShone on self-awareness and naps, Madeline on “I’ll just make a little progress here,” Craig on why “stupid work” is too close to laugh at. The better questions we might ask each other instead of “How’s work?”

Courtney Ellis joins the Mode/Switch to help managers lead through exhausting change. Listen to learn how your language choices affect your team's trust.

(And how to try birding at work!)

I have to admit, just seeing a goose puts me in control mode.

Hey, who ordered these stupid birds to show up? Also, the shoreline’s covered with poop. This beach needs better management!

If you're leading as a manager in the middle of an organization, you know this bind. Your senior leadership’s calling for big, loud, squawking changes. You didn’t choose them. But here you are, standing in the poop, explaining all the things to your team.

But poop-making and squawk-making, as it turns out, are an unavoidable condition of organizational leadership.

This week's Mode/Switch guest, Courtney Ellis, has spent years studying how birds, and the rest of the natural world, help us handle disruption not by achieving control but by practicing preparation, curiosity, adaptation, and resilience. Those four postures are central to her latest book, Weathering Change, and they shape the conversations of her podcast, The Thing With Feathers, about birds and hope.

Understandably, Gen Z cohost Madeline Witvliet asks in our intro, Why have a bird enthusiast on a work-culture podcast?

It’s a fair question. Courtney joins our intergenerational team to show how the natural world provides metaphors for improving trust at work, especially in seasons of disruptive change. (Her reference to starling flight patterns is worth the pod, btw.)

Courtney’s insights recall Lakoff and Johnson’s point about “the metaphors we live by.” Our metaphors aren’t just decorations for speech. They’re shapers of action.

For me, the surprising move in this episode is that birds suggest behaviors that are indispensable for leaders and their teams in the exhausting and changeful middle spaces of organizations.

For example, if you don’t know what a hummingbird’s torpor has to do with mid-level leadership, I encourage you to give this pod half an hour and find out!

This episode of the Mode/Switch builds on an ancient teaching, “Consider the birds of the air,” so you can cultivate team reliability.

Approximate Episode Timestamps

0:00 – 3:00 — Cold open: we introduce our intergenerational team, name this week’s topic (Changing Our Relation to Change Itself), and situate things in the context of exhausting organizational change.

3:00 – 24:00 — Main discussion with Courtney about what to do when changes mean, “The journey is too much for you.” We discuss why constant change makes us believe in a myth of control. We explore the limits and possibilities of adaptability, discussing change happening to vs. with us. Courtney shows how nature metaphors unify teams, support stasis, build equity, and cope with digital exhaustion.

24:00 – 27:00 — Mode/Switch: Courtney recommends a birding exercise you can do at work with your team.

27:00 – 33:00 — Roundtable wrap-up: LaShone talks about why “getting a grip” is so hard today. Emily waves a white flag at senior leaders. Madeline tells a story about starting her new role. Craig asks for prescriptions for leaders. We conclude with a book recommendation for leaders wanting to build trust in times of change.

What this episode will help you do in times of change:

1. Replace control with curiosity. Instead of trying to hold everything still, you’ll learn how to ask what’s actually going on for your team and for yourself.

2. Normalize rest and micro-recovery as equipment for living, not for indulgence. You’ll learn about the indispensability of torpor and stasis for pacing work well.

3. Build the trust that makes flexibility possible. We discuss concrete moves (floor visits, one-on-ones, self-disclosure about stress) that help you cultivate team trust.

4. Advocate upward and pace change deliberately. Courtney and the Mode/Switchers discuss tactics for middle managers to bring senior leadership into direct contact with affected teams in order to pace change better.