The Hummingbird Effect
The Hummingbird Effect: How Courtney McCloud Is Redefining What Strategic Communications Can Do
There is a small bird native to the Americas that most people in Australia would recognise on sight but have never seen in the wild. The hummingbird is extraordinary in its own right, hovering with impossible precision, its wings beating up to eighty times per second. But its most significant quality is not what it does for itself. It is what it does simply by existing and playing its role.
Over 8,000 species of flora and fauna depend on the hummingbird for their survival. It feeds, it moves, it transfers pollen without any particular intention of doing so, and entire ecosystems are sustained as a result. Remove the hummingbird and habitats collapse, food sources disappear, and the ripple effects spread far beyond what the bird’s small size would suggest is possible.
Courtney McCloud spent months waiting for the right name for her business. When the hummingbird arrived, it brought with it exactly the depth she had been looking for.
Because that is what she believes communications does, when it is done well.
A career that defied the expected shape
Courtney’s path to founding The Hummingbird Effect took more than two decades and refused to follow a straight line. She finished school knowing she wanted to do many different things but quickly learned that was not considered an acceptable answer. So she picked the next step, and then the next, and trusted that the shape of it would eventually become clear.
She studied and became a high school English teacher. She worked across not-for-profit organisations in international development and social services. She completed a master’s in communications at the University of Technology Sydney. She moved through roles in education, corporate communications, construction, and energy, each one adding a layer of understanding about where communication matters most and what happens when it is absent or poorly executed.
Looking back, she can see how perfectly the journey prepared her for entrepreneurship, even though she could not have recognised that at seventeen. The winding path was not a detour. It was the education.
What the hummingbird taught her about communications
The imagery at the heart of The Hummingbird Effect is not decorative. It is structural.
Courtney was drawn to the hummingbird because of the gap between its size and its impact. Well known globally, perhaps, but not fully understood in terms of what it actually does for the world around it. Communications, she observes, faces a similar challenge in organisations. It is recognised as something everyone does every day, which paradoxically can make its strategic value harder to see. If we all communicate, how specialised can it really be?
The answer, in her experience, is profoundly. The hummingbird does not intend to sustain ecosystems. It simply does its job with precision and consistency, and the impact accumulates. Communications, done with the same consistency and care, does the same for organisations. It shapes culture, builds trust, influences behaviour, and contributes to enterprise value in ways that are often invisible until they are absent.
She also brought the natural world into the business for a deeper reason. Nature is not separate from who we are. Our relationship with it is fundamental to how we exist in the world. Courtney wanted that relationship to be woven into the fabric of what she was building.
The two-directional truth about communications
One of the most practically useful ideas Courtney shares is deceptively simple. Good communications is not one directional.
The dominant model, in organisations and in leadership, tends to treat communication as a broadcast. A leader speaks, employees listen. A brand publishes, customers receive. The flow moves in one direction and the job is considered done.
But this is where trust erodes. Research consistently shows that people do not expect organisations or leaders to agree with them or to give them everything they ask for. What they do expect, and what they lose faith in when it does not happen, is to be heard. There is a significant difference between a message being received and a person genuinely feeling understood.
Two-way symmetrical communication, the academic term for what Courtney describes as the gold standard, means that the leader and the organisation are both speaking and listening, and that what is heard is then reflected back in the communications that follows. Not at one town hall a year, but consistently and authentically across every channel and every interaction.
When that loop closes, culture strengthens, employees become brand ambassadors, and trust compounds over time. When it does not close, the gap between what an organisation says and what its people experience quietly widens until it becomes very difficult to bridge.
The CFO question and the AI answer
Not long before this conversation, Courtney sat down with a CFO who asked her directly: why should I pay for someone like you when I could just get AI to write an email to my employees?
She appreciated the honesty of the question. It is the kind of challenge that cuts to the heart of what communications professionals are often up against, a perception that the discipline is fundamentally about producing content, and that content is now something machines can produce cheaply and quickly.
Her response reframed the question entirely. The email is almost never the actual issue. The real questions are: what are you trying to achieve through your relationship with your people? How are you building culture consistently, not just at formal announcements? How are you listening? How are you taking on board what you hear and feeding it back into how you communicate?
And then there is a more human question underneath all of it. If you want the people in your organisation to feel seen and valued, if you want them to read what you send them and feel that someone took care with it, there is an honour in writing that yourself. That does not mean every word of every communication must be crafted without any tools. It means that the quality of attention you give to how you communicate with people is itself a communication. It tells them whether or not they matter.
Communications also draws on a rich ecosystem of adjacent disciplines: behavioural science, statistics, media practice, graphic design, and videography, among others. The more senior a communications professional becomes, the broader their toolkit needs to be. Writing an email, even a well-crafted one, is a small fraction of what the discipline actually encompasses.
The women who gave before they had to
Throughout her career, Courtney has been shaped by the generosity of women who had no obligation to invest in her but chose to anyway. Senior leaders with full diaries who made time for coffee. Women she met briefly through community programs who said: people did this for me, and I know how much it matters.
She was nobody to some of these women. A twenty-something running a program they happened to volunteer in. And yet they showed up, freely and genuinely, and pointed her toward possibilities she had not yet seen in herself.
That imprint is powerful and lasting. It is also, she believes, part of why paying it forward feels less like obligation and more like instinct. When you have experienced that kind of generosity, the compulsion to offer it to others is simply part of who you become.
It is the work she now wants to build more formally, mentoring the next generation of professionals who are in the middle of figuring out their own winding paths and need someone to sit across from them and say: here is what I can see from where I am standing.
Not my monkey, not my circus
For someone who has spent her career making things work better for others, learning to let go of what is not hers to fix has been one of Courtney’s most significant ongoing lessons.
As an eldest daughter and a natural problem solver, she sees a challenge and immediately wants to plan her way through it. In the right context, that quality has driven some of her best work. In others, it has led her to pour energy into situations that were never hers to resolve.
The lesson is not about becoming less caring or less committed. It is about recognising the boundary between what is genuinely in your remit and what belongs to someone else’s story. Learning to let a train run away without you, as she puts it, is an act of genuine discernment, not indifference.
It is, perhaps, the most human thing about a woman who has built a career on helping others communicate more clearly. Sometimes the clearest message you can send is knowing when to step back and let things unfold.
To learn more about Courtney McCloud and The Hummingbird Effect, visit her website to book a discovery call or reach out via the contact page.
