5 Leadership Lessons for Tradies in Mining from Mechanic & Mortgage Broker Kurt Checketts

Guest: Kurt Checketts

Episode: Season 2, Episode 14

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Kurt Checketts is a light-vehicle mechanic, turned diesel fitter, who spent 12 years in mining, the last 5 years leading teams in one of the highest-stakes environments in the trades. He's since built Blue Collar Money, a mortgage brokering business designed specifically for tradies and FIFO workers who want to turn hard-earned money into real financial results.

Here’s what he’s learned about leadership as a mining supervisor.

Lesson 1: Leadership Is Empowering People to Be Their Best

Asked what leadership means to him, Kurt's answer draws on sport as much as site: "I think it's empowering people to sort of get the best outta someone," he says, describing the reward of leading as watching individuals perform well, not just the team as a whole.

That framing was tested almost immediately. At 25, newly promoted to leading hand on a coal mine, Kurt was thrown into running large groups of tradies within his first week when both his supervisor and the other leading hand went home sick.

"That real like, oh shit, what's gonna happen here moment," he says. "You sort of have to own those moments, don't you?"

He managed it by trusting instinct over certainty, leaning on the communication and people skills he already had rather than panicking about the technical answers he didn't.

Lesson 2: Lean Into Your Strengths As A Leader

Stepping into a coal mining supervisor role requires a formal interview with the site's senior executive, a process Kurt found intimidating at 25. Asked outright if he felt ready, he admitted he didn't feel like he knew enough about the machines.

His executive's response reframed everything: "The reason we want you to do it isn't that you know everything about every machine," Kurt was told. "It's because you're a really good communicator, and we feel that you care a lot about people."

"From that day it's like, lean into your strengths," Kurt says. "You always can work on your negatives, but you're always gonna have something inherently that you're not that good at."

He later applied the same thinking when choosing his own leading hand, deliberately picking someone strong in technical detail to complement his own strength in people and communication.

Lesson 3: Get to Know People as Individuals

Kurt is direct that flexibility in how you lead has to start with actually knowing the people you're leading.

"You'll never understand how to manage someone properly if you don't actually know them," he says. "People are all different, and people react in different ways."

He leans on a situational leadership model, a four-quadrant framework that maps how directive or hands-off a leader should be, depending on the person. A first-year apprentice needs close supervision, whereas a tradie with thirty years behind them wants to be told the job and given space.

"Every generation sort of likes being treated slightly different," he says, adding that the model only really clicks once you accept that everyone needs managing in a slightly different way.

In practice, that starts with something as simple as normal conversation, asking about a partner, kids, or what someone got up to on days off, not just how the shift's going.

Lesson 4: Small Standards Slipping Is How Serious Incidents Start

Kurt was a frontline supervisor when a coal miner on his site was crushed inside a haul truck after bypassing isolation procedures, an incident serious enough that it became a federal investigation.

The worker survived but never walked again.

Kurt could trace the outcome to weeks of small standards slipping beforehand, including one incident he'd personally caught and written up a month prior.

"He'd just broken what we call a cardinal rule," Kurt says. "You don't just make that jump, that risk, straight away."

He describes it as the Swiss cheese effect: each small thing a leader lets slide is another hole, until eventually they all line up.

"That standards piece is just really, really important," he says, right down to insisting on safety glasses, however much grief it earns him.

Lesson 5: Supporting Others Is Leadership

Twelve years in mining gave Kurt a front-row seat to tradies chasing bigger FIFO income, matching it with bigger liabilities, and ending up further from the life they wanted.

"They're away from their family, and they're really just turning the wheel," he says of a cycle he watched repeatedly, often at real cost to a worker's mental health.

He ran informal toolbox talks on finance long before leaving mining to build Blue Collar Money.

"I kind of thought that by now someone would've taken ownership of helping people in FIFO with their money," he says. "It's a space that I'm very, very passionate about."

Kurt’s Advice on Everyday Leadership

Know your own strengths before anything else.

"Take some self-awareness: what am I good at, not what am I bad at," he says. "If you can leverage what you're good at, that's essentially a leadership quality."

Catch the full conversation with Kurt Checketts on Tradies Who Lead for more leadership lessons for tradies, out now wherever you listen to podcasts.