For academic leaders
For Deans, Heads of School and the leaders carrying a talented team through a sector that keeps asking for more. The exhaustion is real, and it is not a resilience problem.
The moment
The 2025 national psychosocial safety census put Australian universities in the high risk band, with 82 per cent of staff reporting high emotional exhaustion. Its sharpest finding was not the exhaustion. It was that senior leaders rated the psychosocial risk low while their own staff rated it high.
That gap is the whole problem in one line. If the people responsible for the conditions cannot see what the conditions are producing, no amount of wellbeing programming reaches it.
Working harder is not the way through. Changing how the work is made is.
Since December 2025 this has also been a legal duty rather than a good intention. Victoria's OHS (Psychological Health) Regulations carry a positive duty to identify psychosocial hazards and reduce them so far as is reasonably practicable. Your institution almost certainly has a plan. The question is whether anything has changed in your School.
None of this is a flaw in your leadership. It is what happens to a good team under real and sustained demand, when nobody has been given the room to redesign how the work is actually done.
Your world
What I hear from Heads of School
The false choice underneath it
The reframe
Academics do not break under challenge. They came for challenge. They break when they are cut off from the work they love, and left carrying loads nobody chose and nobody sees. The researcher buried in administration who never gets to look at the data. The teacher whose evenings belong to marking. That is where the exhaustion comes from, and it is why no wellbeing day has ever fixed it.
A leader's job is not to rescue people one at a time. It is to compose the expedition: to make sure each person is making the contribution they feel they were made for, while the whole range still gets covered. Get that right and the grunt work stops grinding people down. It dissolves into willing pitching-in at the end of a good day.
I am a behavioural scientist with a doctorate in psychology and twenty years working on people and leadership across not-for-profits, health, business and higher education, a good part of it inside and alongside Australian universities. I am an academic speaking to academics, which mostly means I will not tell you the sector is fine, and I will not pretend the answer is that your people need to cope better.
Where this usually starts
Schools usually start with one of these rather than all of them. Universities buy in February and November with lead time in between, so the useful first conversation is often a season ahead of the work.
Shifts how a whole group sees the work, while they are all still in the room.
Where the leadership group settles the work and cuts the track.
Take the route down a layer and turn it into practice, on your own material.
Tests each leader's own change on real ground, which is what makes the rest hold.
They are not four alternatives. Each one does something the others cannot, and they build on each other in order. Taken together they are one guided season, and that is what I call The Expedition. Most organisations take some of it rather than all of it, which is the design working rather than a compromise.
Is this the right thing
This is for you if
It is not for you if
Read the thinking first
The full argument, the research and the model, written for university leaders. It is free, there is nothing to fill in, and it is worth circulating with your leadership group before we ever talk. Download the whitepaper (PDF).
Where to start
Bring your School as it actually is. I will tell you honestly whether this is a fit, and you will leave with at least one thing you can use either way. No pitch.
Quickest way in: grab a 30 minute conversation in my calendar. Book a 30-minute conversation → Or leave your details and I will come back to you personally.
Thanks, Brad will be in touch.
He'll follow up personally, usually within a day.
Only Human
The diagnostic is the fastest way to find out. It is free, it takes about five minutes, and it shows you the conditions you are creating for the people around you. Take the diagnostic →
Or leave your details for a short piece of thinking, every so often, written for leaders who are curious about the humans they lead, including themselves.