Climate Change Coaches Heather Lynch, Katherine Ellsworth-Krebs & Shona Russell explore the impact which working in the sustainability profession can take on personal wellbeing – and give advice on thriving in these careers.
If you asked sustainability professionals why they do what they do, most would speak to their commitment of driving positive change and creating a better future for all living beings.
Sustainability professionals aren’t just working to pay the bills – they’re working to create the best chances of a liveable future for us all.
Yet, despite their commitment, many face significant personal challenges.
This year, we surveyed more than 90 sustainability professionals and conducted in-depth interviews with 28. We asked about the day-to-day realities of working in these roles: their challenges, most important skills and what support would make the biggest impact on their ability to transform organizations and society.
What emerged was clear: the biggest challenges that sustainability professionals face couldn’t be solved with more knowledge or technical skills.
Instead, we found that softer skills were most important for sustainability professionals to develop: learning communication, influencing and persuasion skills and self-motivation, persistence and resilience, were what was needed for them to overcome their main challenges and be more capable of working towards a sustainable future.
Eco-anxiety, burnout and greenwashing worries
Eco-anxiety—grief, fear, and worry about the state of the planet—came up in most of our interviews. Sustainability professionals have a huge amount of knowledge about the climate and ecological crises and, as part of their job, are constantly exposed to information about food insecurity, natural disasters, biodiversity losses and other consequences of climate change.
One interviewee said: “Climate change always has this really heavy, serious weight about it…so thinking about that all the time. I think whether I realise it consciously or not, is something that definitely impacts me”.
These constant existential emotions and fears can make it hard to switch off.
Many of our interviewees feel isolated, often being the only one working on sustainability in their organisation, surrounded by people who don’t share their level of concern for the climate and ecological crises.
Without supportive communities or colleagues, this loneliness deepens the emotional toll, exacerbating eco-anxiety and in some cases leading to burnout and people leaving their roles.
Sustainability professionals are expected to be champions and motivators, at the same time as being accountability holders and challengers for their colleagues.
They’re tasked with driving large-scale change but often lack the resources, authority, or senior buy-in needed to make it happen.
In this way, sustainability professionals find themselves having to cajole colleagues to act without any direct line management or KPIs to underpin their requests. From our survey, 37% felt like their goals were always superseded by business interests and 22% said they felt burnt out by the challenges.
Participants shared they felt like sustainability was “all on them” and they are “the only one who cares”.
When we asked participants if their organisations were responding sufficiently to social and environmental challenges, 76% said “no” or “sort of.”
Many sustainability professionals worried they were contributing to greenwashing in the sense that their organisation, at times, made grand sustainability commitments but wouldn’t follow through and give sustainability professionals the support and the resources internally to make these changes happen.
For example, one participant from an environmentally-focused B-Corp said, that leadership “spent more time in the boardroom talking about branding colours than about sustainability”.
Yet sustainability cannot sit only on the shoulders of a small sustainability team or one sustainability professional in an organisation.
Supporting sustainability professionals to thrive
Systemic challenges like climate change require collective responses and there are opportunities for organisations and professional bodies to support the development of soft skills related to self-motivation, persistence and resilience that sustainability professionals said were essential.
For example, in our survey, 50% of sustainability professionals were keen for group coaching specific to this role, 34% wanted more regular engagement with sustainability professional peer networks and 27% desired 1:1 sessions with a coach or therapist to improve their efficacy at work.
Sustainability professionals are integral to the transformation of businesses and organisations to create a better future for everyone. Their resilience, mental health and well-being is essential for them to continue this critical work.
Here are three ways to support sustainability professionals and those working in the sector to increase the likelihood of achieving systemic transformations:
Organisations and line managers: Offer professional development budgets for coaching, therapy, or access to peer networks for your sustainability staff. Or, if you only have one sustainability staff member, hire another (even part time). From our interviews it was clear that having more than one person in an organisation concerned about climate and social justice made a world of difference for motivation and momentum.
Sustainability professionals, know you’re not alone! There are hundreds of thousands of people around the world working in organisations on sustainability, you can find solace in LinkedIn networks, national conferences and peer-support groups. Don’t think this is all on you, find some peers and you’ll discover others who completely ‘get’ the complexities and challenges you’re grappling with and you can learn from and support each other.
Everyone, ask someone else how the climate crisis makes them feel. If we all made a little more room to talk about what it’s like when you see unprecedented weather events in the news or realise that the next generation may not have the same opportunities you experienced, it takes a weight off those tasked with responsibility for sustainability to hold space for others to process their climate grief and anxiety. We can all contribute to creating a psychologically safe and more open, honest and transparent working environment where we take collective responsibility and respond appropriately to the crises we are faced with.
This piece was originally published on edie on November 27th 2024.