Preparation before the crisis. Trust during it. Honesty after it. Episode 99 with Brett Simpson with The Courage to Lead may be one of the clearest demonstrations yet of what leadership looks like when theory becomes reality.
There are leadership conversations where we discuss theory. Then there are conversations where someone has actually had to put those theories into practice when lives depended upon it. My conversation with Brett Simpson is one of those.
Brett Simpson is a senior NSW Ambulance leader at Paddington, President of the Australian Paramedics Association NSW and someone whose foundations in leadership began much earlier as a teenage surf lifesaver with Surf Lifesaving NSW. He was also the first paramedic and initial ambulance commander to arrive at two extraordinary mass-casualty incidents: Bondi Westfield and, later, Bondi Beach. Yet what struck me most throughout our conversation was not the scale of those incidents. It was Brett’s calmness. And where that calmness came from.
Leadership begins long before the crisis
As a young surf lifesaver, Brett Simpson was mentored by a rescue boat skipper named Ian. Ian taught him something deceptively simple: when confronted by an emergency, don’t simply rush.
Stop. Pause. Take stock. Regulate yourself. Then act.
Decades later, Brett still draws on that lesson. The environment has changed dramatically. The young lifesaver became a paramedic, a manager and an emergency commander. But the principle survived. Brett makes another crucial point: you cannot learn major incident command when the major incident is already happening. He describes repeated mass-casualty exercises, including multi-agency training at Sydney Airport. The exercises allow commanders to make mistakes when the consequences are not real, receive feedback and adapt. As Brett says, the actual emergency will never perfectly match the playbook.You need to know the playbook well enough that you can adapt when reality refuses to follow it. That is a lesson well beyond emergency services. Preparation doesn’t remove uncertainty. It gives us something solid to fall back upon when uncertainty arrives.
Trust multiplies capability – Brett Simpson
One of the most powerful stories Brett Simpson shares in the interview involves the Surf Life Saving volunteers at North Bondi. During the Bondi Beach incident Brett directed walking wounded patients towards North Bondi Surf Club.
Why?
Because he understood the people inside it. He knew they were volunteers committed to serving their community. They might not have regarded themselves as perfectly prepared for what was arriving at their door, but Brett trusted their character, capability, care and compassion. That trust allowed him to concentrate scarce clinical resources where they were most urgently needed. Brett later explained to those volunteers why he trusted them. The story illustrates something fundamental about leadership: You don’t have to personally possess every capability. You need to understand the capabilities of the people around you and trust them to use them.
The courage to accept help
At Bondi Beach, Brett Simpson’s own capacity was being rapidly consumed by the sheer volume of decisions confronting him. His colleague Andrew Bibby arrived and initially asked whether Brett needed him as a clinical resource or command resource. Brett initially chose clinical.Andrew could see something Brett couldn’t. He put a hand on Brett’s shoulder and effectively said: you need me here as your deputy. Brett accepted it. There was no bruised ego. No argument over authority. No need to demonstrate that the commander could do everything himself.
Brett later acknowledged that he shudders to think how much harder the incident would have been had he refused that help. Then Brett’s senior leader and long-time mentor Stuart Clark arrived. He didn’t take command away from Brett. He listened to the briefing and told him: You’ve got this. I’m not taking over. I’ll be behind your right shoulder. Anything you need from the organisation, I’ll get for you. That is empowerment. A senior leader recognised that the person closest to the problem was leading effectively. Instead of taking control to demonstrate his own authority, he strengthened the leader already doing the job.
“I’m fine.” – Brett Simpson
Brett Simpson is equally open about what happened after Bondi Westfield. He told himself he was fine. He wasn’t. He continued performing. Rosters were completed. Staff were supported. Targets were met. Life continued. And that became dangerous because visible performance created the illusion that everything underneath was okay. Brett describes insomnia, fatigue, irritability and the mask occasionally slipping. Eventually he realised that simply continuing to function was not the same as being well. After Bondi Beach he deliberately did things differently: professional psychological support, conversations, debriefing and sharing the load.
His reflection is confronting: He had made the recovery after Westfield vastly harder than it needed to be because he thought he could process it himself. He also recognised that it hadn’t only affected him. It affected his partner, family, staff and colleagues. There is a profound leadership lesson here.High performance can hide poor wellbeing. A person can still hit every KPI and be struggling badly. That is why leaders must know their people beyond the spreadsheet.
Mistakes aren’t the end of leadership
Brett Simpson repeatedly returns to feedback. During the coronial process following Bondi Westfield, decisions made in an extraordinarily compressed period were examined second by second. That experience was humbling. But Brett chose to listen. Some of the feedback about triage and command was subsequently incorporated into his response at Bondi Beach. His description of mistakes deserves attention. A mistake does not have to become something we hide from. When we acknowledge it, learn from it and change what happens next, it becomes a learning and growth opportunity.
That requires vulnerability. It requires feedback. And it requires an environment in which people can tell the boss something the boss may not want to hear.
Creating leaders who surpass you – Brett Simpson
Near the end of the conversation, Brett Simpson explains what he wants to do with everything he has learned. Pass it on. He actively looks for emerging leaders — managerial, command and clinical — and pours his experience into them. But his objective isn’t to produce another Brett Simpson. It is much better than that.He wants them to surpass him. Because if they do, they will be better prepared to develop the generation that follows them.
After almost 100 conversations on The Courage to Lead, I keep returning to the same conclusion: The true measure of a leader is how many other leaders they create. Brett Simpson demonstrates exactly what that can look like.
And when I finally asked Brett for his three leadership principles, he only needed one:
Honesty.
Honesty with others. Honesty with yourself. Because honesty creates trust.
And, as Brett Simpson’s experiences demonstrate so powerfully, when everything else becomes uncertain, trust may be the most important resource a leader has.