Developing Sustainability Teams for Climate Leadership

Your Team is Tired and That's a Signal Worth Reading

When you look at your sustainability or climate team right now, what do you actually see?

If you're honest, I suspect you might see some exhaustion. People who care deeply, who are working hard, and who are quietly running on empty. Maybe the team meetings that once buzzed with possibility have become a list of things that aren't moving.

Across the government, NGO and corporate teams I'm working with, I'm noticing this a lot. Frustration and tiredness are off the scale, and there's a feeling of 'panic mode' as the stakes rise. You can see it in the indicators too: vacancy churn, spikes in escalation, and governance that stalls. The people we ask to lead this work are often our most passionate and purpose-driven. And that very passion is what makes them vulnerable to burning out.

Here's what I've come to understand. This tiredness is not a sign that your people are weak or that they've lost their commitment. It's a signal. It's the system telling you something important about the mismatch between what the work demands and what the people doing it have been equipped to handle. If we read that signal well, it points us somewhere useful. If we ignore it, we lose good people and momentum on work that genuinely matters.

The Skills Gap Nobody Named

Here's the gap I see again and again. We hand teams some of the most complex, systemic challenges our organisations face, then manage them like a construction project: milestones, traffic lights, and a polite expectation the system will cooperate. We ask for a strategy, a set of targets, a Gantt chart, and then wonder why the strategy sits beautifully on a page while the world refuses to comply.

But climate and sustainability work isn't a technical problem you can solve once and file away. It's what complexity researchers call an adaptive challenge. There's no known answer. The problem keeps shifting. Progress depends on changing hearts, minds and behaviours across a whole system.

Ronald Heifetz, who developed the framework of adaptive leadership, draws a clear distinction. Technical problems can be solved with existing expertise. Adaptive challenges require people to learn new ways, shift their values, and sit with uncertainty. Switching to LED lighting is mostly technical; shifting procurement norms and 'what good looks like' across an agency is adaptive.

And here's the part that quietly wears people down. When you apply technical effort to an adaptive problem, you work harder and harder while the needle barely moves. That gap between effort and outcome is exhausting in a way that ordinary hard work is not.

What These Teams Actually Need to Learn

The good news is that adaptive leadership and the capacity to work with complexity can be developed. These are learnable capabilities, not fixed traits. I've watched leaders who felt utterly stuck rediscover their energy once they were given a different way of working with the challenge in front of them.

Three shifts make an enormous difference.

Systems seeing. Learning to work with the living system rather than against it, noticing the patterns and emergent dynamics that shape how it behaves. But the leader's job is to convene and hold the shared work, not to solve it on everyone's behalf. This alone lifts an enormous weight, because so many sustainability leaders quietly carry the belief that it's all on them.

Behaviour change. Most sustainability progress depends on people doing things differently. That's a psychology challenge before it's a policy one. When you stop reading resistance as a personal affront and start reading it as data about what the system fears losing, the whole conversation changes tone.

Self-regulation under heat. Adaptive work generates disequilibrium and pushback. Leaders who can stay steady, stay curious, and hold the discomfort without either caving in or bulldozing through are the ones who last.

Why Coaching Does What Training Can't

You can't fully teach these capabilities in a workshop. A two-day training gives you the map. It doesn't put you on the terrain when it's raining and you've lost the path. This is where coaching earns its place.

Over five months, I worked with a state government urban sustainability team in Adelaide to explore how living systems thinking could help them work in an uncertain, interconnected environment. I supported them to co-create a shared vision grounded in values, strengthen the connections across their projects, and redesign team roles to better reflect the wider system they serve. The result was greater clarity, energy and effectiveness. Notably, that energy shift came not from adding resources but from changing how they saw and engaged with their work.

One leader described how coaching helped her team become "confident navigators in complexity" rather than people who felt they had to have every answer before they acted. The tiredness lifts not because the work gets easier, but because the leader develops a different relationship with the difficulty.

Sustaining Energy is a Team Sport the Leader Ignites

I want to gently challenge one assumption I see everywhere. We treat energy as something people either have or don't, as though burnout is a personal failing.

It isn't. Energy is a systemic outcome. When people work in isolation on impossible-seeming problems with no space to reflect, of course they run down. And no amount of wellbeing webinars will fix a problem that lives in the design of the work itself.

Which means the system can also produce sustained energy. When we invest in our climate and sustainability teams as adaptive leaders, we're not being soft. We're being strategic.

So here's my reflection for you. If your team is tired and stretched, resist the urge to simply ask them to push harder. Instead, ask what capability the work is calling for that you haven't yet resourced.

Don't ask tired teams to push harder. Change the terrain they're pushing on. Start here:

●        Protect reflection time so thinking isn't the first thing sacrificed to delivery.

●        Embed adaptive practices inside live projects, not in a separate training room.

●        Provide coaching that meets leaders in their real, current challenges.