Your sustainability team isn't short on talent. It's short on support for the hardest part of the job.
Dr Josie McLean helps corporate sustainability teams build the capability to drive change in complex conditions, hold the hard internal conversations, and sustain the passionate people the work depends on.
Dr Josie McLean works with sustainability and climate teams who are technically excellent but worn down by everything around the work: plans that go stale, conflict from every direction, and passionate people quietly burning out. Over a twelve-month engagement, Josie helps develop the team and its leader on their real projects, building the capability to work in complexity, hold hard conversations, and sustain themselves. This is not training. Capability gets built on live work, so it sticks.
Why brilliant sustainability teams are quietly exhausted
Most corporate sustainability teams are small, passionate, and quietly exhausted.
Not from the technical work. They're brilliant at that.
They're worn down by the internal fight:
Making the case for sustainability, again and again, to colleagues and executives who see it as a cost, a risk, or a box to tick.
A mandate that's broader than their authority and a team that's smaller than the task.
People who care deeply, carrying the lonely work of trying to shift an organisation built for growth.
The struggle is systemic, not a skills gap. The struggle isn't a sign your team lacks commitment or skill. It's systemic. These teams are doing complex change work inside a system that wasn't designed for it.
What Dr Josie McLean helps corporate sustainability teams with
Make progress when static plans stall
Predictive plans assume a stable world that's gone. Dr Josie McLean works alongside the team to run smaller, safe-to-fail experiments and adapt as conditions shift. You make measurable progress where traditional planning quietly fails.
Build the capability for hard conversations
The hardest conversations are internal: making the case to colleagues and executives who see sustainability as a cost. Dr Josie McLean helps people hold those conversations and manage the emotions in the room, so they build influence rather than burn out.
Sustain the people who sustain the change
Burnout is a predictable result of complex change work with too little support. Dr Josie McLean helps teams work sustainably, protecting the scarce, hard-to-replace talent this function depends on.
The method: capability built on real work, not training
This isn't training. It's how capability is developed so it sticks.
Most programs ask a team to leave the work, learn something in a room, then try to apply it at their desks. In complex conditions, that rarely sticks.
Dr Josie McLean works the other way around. She works with the team on its real projects and initiatives, developing the people and the team's functioning as they do the actual work.
The capability to hold a hard internal conversation gets built on a real one, not in a role-play. The team learns to run its initiatives as safe-to-fail experiments by actually running them that way. And because the support is sustained across the year, the organisation protects the scarce, passionate talent this function depends on.
The method and the message are the same thing: small, real, adaptive and human.
“Josie worked with me and my leadership team across multiple years when I was CIO at Flinders University, supporting a strategic uplift in leadership capability. She brought a thoughtful, evidence-based approach, built trust, and challenged constructively.”
What a twelve-month engagement involves
A typical engagement runs over twelve months:
Monthly leader coaching. Monthly coaching with the manager or team leader, to develop their own leadership in complex conditions and to keep their clarity and steadiness when the work is genuinely hard.
Regular team sessions on live work. A full day each quarter or a half-day each month, working on live initiatives while strengthening how the team thinks, decides, handles conflict and looks after itself.
The team delivers on the work that matters now, builds internal influence, and comes out more capable and more resilient.
Two low-risk ways to start
You don't have to leap straight in. If you lead a team and you're weighing whether this is right for you, there are two easy ways to begin:
A discovery conversation
For team leaders and managers genuinely considering this work, a no-obligation conversation to understand what's going on for you and your team, and whether I'm the right person to help. You'll leave with a sharper sense of the challenge either way.
A short block of three leader coaching sessions
A low-cost piece of real work where we develop your leadership together while jointly assessing what you and your team need. It ends with a clear picture of what a fuller engagement could look like.
Each step earns the right to the next. Nobody commits before they're ready, which is exactly the safe-to-fail logic this work is built on.
About Dr Josie McLean
Dr Josie McLean is a systems practitioner, author and organisational consultant. For her this work is a lifetime thread, a deep and abiding passion for the intersection of strategy, people and change, or put more plainly, how strategy actually gets implemented through the people who carry it.
She has spent more than two decades helping organisations navigate complex change, and late in 2025 she was named one of twelve global pioneers of Regenerative Coaching. She is co-founder of the Climate Coaching Alliance, now a global community of around 4,000 coaches and leaders, and co-editor of the first book on climate coaching, Ecological and Climate Conscious Coaching.
Her work sits where systems thinking, leadership development and purpose-driven change meet, across corporate, government and community sectors.
The change you're responsible for deserves your most sophisticated thinking, and a team that can sustain it.
Let's have a conversation about what's possible.
“I am deeply fortunate to have worked with Josie both through the Governor’s Leadership Foundation and then as an executive coach. Josie’s organisational development skillset is formidable. Her approach to systems is evidence-based while also being grounded in warmth, deep empathy and a value set that resonates with my own.”
Frequently asked questions
Who is this for? Sustainability and climate teams in government, councils and NRM/Landscape boards, and the managers and leaders who run them.
Is this training? No. Capability is built on your team's real projects and initiatives, not in a classroom, so the learning transfers and sticks.
How long is an engagement? A typical engagement runs over twelve months, combining monthly leader coaching with quarterly full-day or monthly half-day team sessions.
What problems does it address? Plans that stall in complex conditions, conflict with community, stakeholders and colleagues, and burnout in passionate, high-performing people.
How do we start? With a no-obligation discovery conversation, or a short block of three leader coaching sessions, whichever feels right.
Who is Dr Josie McLean? A systems practitioner, author and consultant with over two decades of experience in complex organisational change, named one of twelve global pioneers of Regenerative Coaching in 2025 and co-founder of the Climate Coaching Alliance.
