Julie Quade did not set out to become a manager. She set out to find a leader worth following and when she could not find one, she decided to become that person instead. Now, as Northern New South Wales Health Allied Health Manager, she oversees occupational therapy, dietetics, speech pathology, social work, physiotherapy, podiatry and genetic counselling across a district that stretches from Grafton to Tweed.

In this episode of It Takes Heart, Julie shares what she has learned about leading people through one of the most demanding systems in the country.

From the Farm to Dietetics

Julie grew up on a small farm in Tullamore, in rural New South Wales, where the career options she could see were teaching, farming or nursing. She was heading toward teaching until a dietitian visited her PDHPE class in Year 11 and talked about the food pyramid.

She went on to study dietetics, deliberately built a broad clinical base in her early years, including community, hospital, eating disorders and paediatrics. This allowed her to take on diverse locum roles when she moved to the UK to travel. By 2019, she had stepped away from clinical practice entirely and moved into leadership and project redesign roles. She has not looked back.

Why Clinicians Move Into Leadership

Julie’s motivation for stepping into management was not ambition. It was frustration. She had wanted a leader who made decisions for the collective rather than for personal comfort, and she had not found that. So she decided to learn the system, move into that space, and do it differently.

That logic, scaling impact rather than delivering it directly, is what drives how she leads today. Her job, as she sees it, is not to face upward and please the organisation. It is to serve the people who report to her, so they can serve their patients.

What Great Leadership Actually Looks Like

Julie is specific about what she looks for when identifying emerging leaders in her teams. She watches for people who think about the collective rather than themselves when making decisions. She looks for emotional steadiness, the ability to stay calm when things get difficult and the capacity for clear thinking under pressure.

She also looks for people who can take a complex, layered healthcare situation and simplify it, then communicate it clearly and build the relationships needed to move things forward. In a system as large and interconnected as public health, that combination is rarer than it sounds.

Buffering the Noise

One of the clearest threads running through Julie’s leadership philosophy is the idea of protecting her team from the noise of the system. New South Wales Health is large, fast-moving and frequently reactive. Her job, she believes, is to absorb as much of that pressure as possible before it reaches the clinicians who are focused on patient care.