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.

Mid-level leaders have something to learn from Odysseus when it comes to coping with ambiguity. Seems like a stretch? Try listening to this week’s conversation between the Mode/Switch team and Dr. Jamie K.A. Smith about being a manager accustomed to ambiguity.

His book Make Your Home in This Luminous Dark might not strike you as a business-forward must-read. But our intergenerational conversation—David Wilstermann, Xer; Emily Bosscher, Xennial, and Jake Aupperlee, Gen Z—explored the managerial usefulness of ancient mystic thought.

The best things about talking with Jamie is his capacity for questions. We brought him on the show as an expert, but he quickly mode-switched from expert to novice. By answering our questions with questions of his own, he did more than urge the importance of humble curiosity. He embodied it.

Two questions emerged that matter for mid-level leaders:

1. Emily asked when uncertainty, ambiguity, and mystery become smokescreens. How do people in the middle of organizations discern the difference between ambiguity exploited and ambiguity earned? (Jamie’s response helps leaders discern when mystery becomes mystery-mongering.)

2. David asked when a leader’s embrace of uncertainty covers for incompetence. In other words, appealing to the “ambiguity” of a situation can disguise a leader’s ignorance and sloppiness. (Smith responds with the concept of "learned ignorance,” and it’s worth the podcast.)

I think you'll experience this podcast as surprisingly epic. The energy and humor and spirit probably came from the fact that Jamie was in-studio with us. Together, we found ways through the fog of working community.

You’re on your own odyssey. You’re trying to get home, seeking a place of where work feels safe and meaningful, yearning for flourishing for yourself and for your team.

Think of this podcast as a thirty-minute map. It offers the guidance of focused, substantive, multidirectional conversation about leaders in the luminous dark of their organizational life and work.

Table of Contents

00:00 — Cold Open
Why does information overload always seem to hit hardest when you’re already feeling insecure with your team? That tangle is the whole episode.

02:31 — Welcome, Jamie Smith
A stat that should needle you (87% of workers see manager capability as a company risk) — and Jamie’s origin story on the back of a pickup truck. What actually changes when a leader stops trying to win and starts trying to invite? Jamie walks through his own experience of an existential mode/switch.

05:58 — Learning to Live with Mystery
Can you build real tolerance for uncertainty without turning into the leader who’s just checked out? Here’s the line Jamie draws.

08:19 — Reassurance vs. Reorientation
“We got this” or “here’s where we actually are” — which one does your team actually need to hear from you?

09:08 — Earned Ignorance
Is “I don’t know” a strength or a dodge? David’s question splits the episode open, and Jamie’s answer — by way of Augustine — hands you a phrase you’ll want to keep.

10:39 — Can’t Think Our Way Out of the Culture Wars
More information keeps failing to make anyone less polarized. Jamie’s fix starts in an unlikely place: the mystics.

13:00 — Should Leaders Weigh In?
You probably don’t want your CEO tweeting about Iran or Ukraine — but you might want something else from them instead.

15:57 — Wonder, Curiosity, and Barry Lopez
Four questions a nature writer asks of a place might be the best onboarding tool you’ve never used.

19:44 — The Practical Pivot
One thing to actually try this afternoon. No retreat required.

21:39 — Post-Show Roundtable
What happens when you ask a candidate what they’re curious about? When you answer a nasty email with humility instead of a rebuttal? The hosts try the episode’s ideas on themselves.