Leadership Philosophy
“Empower other people to solve challenges — and have a great time doing it.”
That was my mission statement at Royal. It still is.
Most of the leadership advice out there is about authority, accountability, and performance management. That’s the scaffolding. The actual job is simpler and harder: get people to trust themselves enough to do the thing in front of them.
Don’t Answer. Lead.
The most formative leadership lesson I ever got came from Daniel Franklin, a duty chief at Santa Clara County EMS. The man wrote more policy than anyone I’ve worked with. And whenever you came to him with a question about policy, he never answered it directly.
He asked you questions until you found the answer yourself.
At first this was maddening. Then I understood it. Retention is dramatically better when you discover the answer on your own. You sought it, you wrestled with it, you found it — so now it lives in you. Not in him. EMS protocol is dense and dry and critical. When it matters, it really matters. The version of it that sticks is the version you worked for.
I built everything on top of that model. Every debrief, every FTO shift, every field call. Not “here’s the answer.” Always “what do you think is happening here?”
The Provider Identity Trap
Most people who become supervisors were excellent field providers. That’s why they got promoted. The trap is trying to keep being the best field provider in the room.
Your job changed. You are not the best clinician anymore — or if you are, that’s not what matters. What matters now is whether your crew can handle what’s in front of them without you. If they can’t function without your direct intervention, you haven’t built anything.
The measure of good supervisory work is: what happens when you’re not there?
Spread the Good Stuff
This one sounds soft. It isn’t.
My mission as an EMT was to make my patient smile and make my partner laugh. Every shift where I got both was a good shift, clinically aside.
When I became a supervisor and an FTO, the audience got bigger. But the drive didn’t change. You are setting the emotional temperature of the room. If you bring warmth, humor, genuine care — it compounds. People work harder for supervisors they like. They tell you the real problems. They bring you the hard stuff before it becomes a crisis.
Don’t underestimate what a well-timed joke does for a crew that just ran something awful.
Trust Is a Condition You Create
People brought me things they didn’t bring to others — clinical questions, training struggles, and occasionally things far more serious. That didn’t happen because I asked for it. It happened because I was consistent, I wasn’t political, and I made it clear that the conversation stayed with me unless it couldn’t.
You don’t earn trust by asking for it. You earn it by being the same person every single time, especially when it’s inconvenient.
Related
- The Debrief — where this philosophy gets applied most directly
- Training FTOs — how to teach it to others
- First 90 Days — how to start building it
Take this further
The companion tool for this chapter is Tool 07: Supervisor Self-Evaluation — a quarterly reflection built around five questions drawn directly from this garden. Ends with one commitment. Run it every 90 days. Included in the EMS Supervisor Field Guide, free with your email on Gumroad.