After 30 Years of Leading People, the Safer Together Frontline Leadership Training Made Me Stop and Think

After more than three decades of leading soldiers, operational teams and frontline workers, I thought I’d seen most leadership courses had to offer. The Safer Together Frontline Leadership Training at Australian Well Control Centre challenged that assumption, not by teaching something completely new, but by reminding me of the leadership fundamentals that experience can sometimes cause us to overlook.

Like many people in leadership positions, I’ve completed more leadership courses than I can remember. Some have been exceptional, some have reinforced what I already knew, and others have simply become another certificate filed away in a drawer.

So, when I sat down in Brisbane on 7 and 8 July to complete the Safer Together Frontline Leadership Training, a practical frontline leadership course designed for supervisors, team leaders and emerging leaders, I thought I knew what to expect.

One of the earliest discussions focused on culture. Not culture as a vision statement on the wall or a list of corporate values, but culture as “how we do things around here.” It’s a simple phrase, yet it immediately changed the way I was thinking. Every decision a leader makes contributes to culture. Every conversation, every standard accepted, every behaviour ignored and every example set tells people what is truly important. The facilitators broke culture into three surprisingly simple components: systems, behaviours and symbols. Systems influence behaviour. Behaviours become habits. Symbols become the unwritten rules that tell everyone what is truly accepted. Once I started looking at culture through that lens, I couldn’t stop thinking about my own workplace.

That naturally led into discussions around team purpose. It sounds like an obvious question, but when was the last time you genuinely asked your team why they exist? Not what they do, but why they do it. The discussion wasn’t simply about defining a team’s purpose. It challenged us to think much deeper. Who do we really serve? What does fairness look like from our team’s perspective? What does success look like for them, not just for management? What behaviours are we rewarding? What behaviours are we allowing? More importantly, what culture are we unintentionally creating every single day?

One discussion stayed with me. We spend enormous amounts of time measuring hard metrics: production, utilisation, incidents, profitability, KPIs and outputs. Yet very little time measuring the soft metrics that drive every one of those results. Trust. Respect. Belonging. Communication. Leadership. The irony is obvious. We obsess over the outcomes while often neglecting the very things that create them.

For me, however, the strongest discussions centred on trust and psychological safety. In the military we often spoke about trust because lives depended on it. In the energy industry, almost everything we interact with has the potential to seriously injure or kill us. Heavy vehicles. Rotating machinery. High-pressure systems. Electricity. Suspended loads. Hazardous chemicals. Remote locations. Fatigue. Heat. Weather. Human error. Complacency. Every day we rely on people making good decisions, often under pressure. Trust isn’t built during emergencies. It’s built every single day through consistency, authenticity, competence and genuine care for people. It also reinforced something equally important: if people don’t feel psychologically safe to speak up, leaders lose the opportunity to prevent incidents before they occur. How often do we finish a pre-start meeting only to hear the real discussion five minutes later in the crib room, beside the ute or while walking back to the job? If the concerns are genuine, why weren’t they raised when everyone was together? Is the issue really the meeting or is it the culture we’ve unintentionally created?

Another area that genuinely challenged my thinking was accountability. Like many experienced leaders, I’ve always believed accountability was important, but this course reframed how accountability is actually created. It begins long before difficult conversations. It starts with giving people purpose, setting clear expectations, communicating effectively and coaching them to succeed. Only then can accountability become fair and meaningful. Good leaders don’t demand accountability-they create the conditions where accountability naturally occurs. Accountability isn’t something leaders enforce; it’s something they cultivate.

One discussion that really resonated with me centred around expectations. As leaders, we often assume people know what ‘good’ looks like. We assume they understand our standards because we’ve worked alongside them for years. The reality is different. Clear expectations remove assumptions, reduce frustration and provide the foundation upon which accountability is built.

It was a timely reminder that people can’t consistently achieve standards they have never clearly understood.

One of the things I appreciated most was that every topic built on the previous one. Feedback wasn’t taught as a disciplinary tool; it was presented as one of the most important responsibilities of every leader. Constructive conversations became less about correcting people and more about helping them grow. Coaching wasn’t about having all the answers but about asking better questions. Listening wasn’t simply about hearing words. It challenged us to reflect on how we actually listen. Not simply hearing words, but genuinely listening. That was surprisingly confronting. As leaders we often listen with the intention of replying instead of understanding. Once you recognise that habit in yourself, you begin noticing it everywhere. These are skills that sound simple until you honestly assess how often you practice them.

The sessions on self-awareness probably made me reflect the most. After years of leading people, it’s easy to think experience alone is enough. This reminded me that understanding yourself is just as important as understanding your team. Your mindset, your biases, your communication style and your reactions all influence the people around you, often more than you realise. One discussion generated more conversation than almost any other: bias. Not bias in the traditional sense, but the shortcuts our brains naturally take. As leaders we all have people we instinctively trust, people we naturally challenge and people we unconsciously avoid. Until we recognise those biases, we can unintentionally create inconsistency within our teams. That was an uncomfortable but valuable reminder.

Influence was another interesting discussion. Position and authority might gain compliance, but influence earns commitment. The two are very different. One relies on hierarchy. The other relies on credibility. We explored how frontline leaders build influence not through rank, but through consistency, communication and genuine relationships.

The final discussions around communication, influence and developing a personal leadership action plan brought everything together. Rather than leaving with pages of notes that will eventually collect dust, I left with practical actions that I could implement immediately, not only within my own workplace but also in the way I train and mentor others. The structured learning journey concludes by helping participants convert concepts into a practical leadership action plan they can immediately apply within their own teams.

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