When your sustainability team is worn down by everything around the work
Capability building for sustainability and climate teams working in complexity, in government, councils and Landscape boards
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Dr Josie McLean helps sustainability and climate teams in government, councils and Landscape boards across Australia navigate complexity, engage communities and stakeholders in real change, and keep the work moving without burning people out. These are 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 running out of steam.
This is not training. Over each engagement, Josie develops the team and its leader on their real projects, building the capability to work in complexity, hold hard conversations of change, and sustain themselves. Capability gets built on live work, so it sticks.
Why passionate sustainability teams are tired
You know this team. You might lead it.
They're capable and committed. That's not the problem.
Most of the time they're flat out, reaching for quick solutions, running from one pressure to the next. And when the pressure keeps climbing, the team tips into something closer to panic, scrambling to respond to events that keep outpacing the plan. It's usually somewhere in there that a team realises it needs a different way of working, not just more effort.
The system around the work makes it harder:
Plans overtaken by events. Months of work, outdated before it lands.
Consultation that doesn't shift anything. You ask, people answer, nothing moves.
Conflict from every direction. Landholders, communities, executives, all at once.
A mandate bigger than the authority. Expected to deliver more than you're empowered to.
The weight of the work. Sensing that the problem is expanding faster than the capacity to respond.
Then there's the part almost nobody talks about. These teams don't just do the work. They hold the emotion around it: the community's fear, the stakeholder's anger, the executive's impatience, and their own worry about a climate reality that keeps escalating. Day after day, they're expected to absorb and contain feeling that has nowhere else to go. That's a specific kind of exhaustion, and it wears down even the most passionate people.
Underneath it sits a quiet injustice. The people who pay for the decisions and the people who live with the consequences are often not the same people. Your team carries work whose costs and benefits land on different shoulders, and they feel that gap every day.
The result is frustration, exhaustion, and a sense that no one taught them how to do this part.
The problem isn't effort. It's that they're doing complex change work with a toolkit built for mechanistic systems, not living ones.
Josie's work addresses each of these pressures directly, building the capability the toolkit was missing.
Your team is still showing up. The fire has just gone flat. Three practical places to start getting it back.
Make progress in complexity
Josie helps your team learn how to run smaller, safe-to-fail experiments, build faster learning loops and adapt rather than push on regardless.
How capability gets built on real work
Josie builds three capabilities in the team, on the work they're already doing.
Build the capability for hard conversations
Josie helps your people hold the conversations that matter, with colleagues, executives, stakeholders and communities who hold competing and often heated priorities. These conversations are where new pathways for change actually emerge. Handled well, a difficult group conversation stops being something to survive and becomes the thing that unlocks change. Your people build the capability to influence politically and strategically, and to stay steady while feelings run high.
Engage people in real change
Josie helps sustainability teams move beyond consultation fatigue and into real change by shaping the conversations, experiments and processes that bring people with you and create change where it matters.
This isn’t training. It’s capability built in real time.
Josie works alongside the team and its leader on the work they're already doing:
Coaching the leader to hold complexity and steady the team
Working on the team's real projects, not case studies
Testing small experiments and learning from them together
Strengthening how the team thinks, adapts and handles conflict
Small, real, adaptive and human.
“Her deep understanding of complexity and exceptional coaching skills have allowed our team to test ideas and become confident navigators in complexity.”
What an engagement involves
Each engagement is shaped around your budget, capacity and the complexity of the work. Josie combines coaching for the leader, working sessions with the team, and support applied directly to your live projects, co-designed with you so it fits your context rather than a fixed template.
Sessions can be run online, which makes this accessible to teams anywhere in Australia, wherever you're based.
Two low-risk ways to start
You don't have to leap straight in. There are two easy ways to start:
A complimentary discovery conversation
An expense-free, no-obligation conversation for team leaders and managers genuinely considering this work, 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 with Dr Josie McLean to develop your leadership together while 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.
“Josie’s coaching has profoundly shaped the way I think, respond and practice in all my professional and personal roles. Her curious, relatable questioning allows me to reflect more deeply, and she challenges me to experiment and keep learning.”
Frequently Asked Questions
Who is this for? Sustainability and climate teams in government, councils and Landscape boards across Australia, along with the leaders who run them. It suits teams who are technically strong but worn down by complexity, conflict and the emotional load of the work.
How is this different from training? Training gives people content in a room, away from their work. This builds capability on the team's live projects, in real time, so what they learn is immediately used and sticks. Josie works alongside the team rather than presenting to it.
How long is an engagement? Twelve months. Complex capability builds through practice over time, not in a single workshop, so the engagement runs long enough for new ways of working to take hold.
Is it delivered online or in person? Both are possible. Sessions can be run online, which makes the work accessible to teams anywhere in Australia. In-person work is available depending on location and need.
What does it cost? Each engagement is shaped around your budget, capacity and the complexity of the work, so cost varies. The best starting point is a discovery conversation to understand what your team needs.
How do we start? With a discovery conversation, or a short block of three coaching sessions if you'd like to feel the difference first. Each step earns the right to the next.
About Dr Josie McLean
Dr Josie McLean is a systems practitioner, author and organisational consultant focused on how strategy gets implemented through people.
Josie has a PhD in organisational transformation, focused on shaping a sustainable and sustaining organisation. She has spent more than two decades helping organisations navigate complex change, and in 2025 she was named one of twelve global pioneers of Regenerative Coaching. Josie is a co-founder of the Climate Coaching Alliance and co-editor of Ecological and Climate Conscious Coaching.
Josie’s work sits where systems thinking, leadership development and purpose-driven change meet. She has worked with Green Adelaide, Landscape Boards, local government and the South Australian Governor’s Leadership Program.
Your landscape, your community, your people deserve your most sophisticated thinking.
Let's have a conversation about what's possible for your team.
“Josie’s coaching has profoundly shaped the way I think, respond and practice in all my professional and personal roles. Her curious, relatable questioning allows me to reflect more deeply, and she challenges me to experiment and keep learning.”
