From Best Mechanic to Best Leader: Why Ammonia Refrigeration Needs Both | Blog No. 135

I was recently on LinkedIn and came across a survey that a training leader in the ammonia industry posted. It was a survey that asked what you feel is the most important area when it comes to Process Safety Management in your industry. Four options covered detailed parts of the program that ranged from culture to the procedures for conducting management of change and how you keep your PSI library up to date. I paused for a minute before taking the survey because the one answer I wanted to select was not an option. It is the answer that would cover all of the options to ensure that they are all taken care of properly. Good Leadership.

Leadership is something often overlooked in developing technicians for their next role in the industry. It is common for a refrigeration technician, welder, or operator to be promoted to a lead or forman, based on their superior skill set or their ability to plan jobs. The next advancement is then to a supervisor role that will own the covered process and lead the team that they were once part of in some capacity.

These individuals often struggle in their new roles of managing priorities, budget planning, regulations, and personnel issues because those are not the skills that got them in the new role.

The Peter Principle in Industrial Operations

This is a well-known idea in management theory called the Peter Principle, and it states that people are promoted based on performance in their current role until they reach a role where those skills no longer apply.

The best mechanic, the most senior tech, the person who “knows the system inside and out” gets pushed into a supervisory or compliance leadership role without leadership training. It makes sense on the surface. That person has earned it, and the crew respects their technical ability. But running a compressor room and leading the people who run it are two different skill sets, and only one of them was ever evaluated before the promotion.

The consequence in ammonia refrigeration and PSM is specific: technical excellence does not equal the ability to enforce procedures, coach a crew, drive a safety culture, or manage compliance documentation like PSSRs, MOCs, and PHA follow-ups. Those are leadership skills. They have to be built on purpose, not assumed because someone can troubleshoot a screw compressor with their eyes closed.

Why This Matters More in PSM-Regulated Environments

Ammonia isn’t a forgiving chemical. It’s covered under OSHA’s Process Safety Management standard and EPA’s Risk Management Program for a reason, and every element of that program mechanical integrity, operating procedures, training, MOC, incident investigation depends on people executing consistently, day after day, shift after shift. That consistency isn’t something a procedure manual creates on its own. It’s something leadership creates.

A supervisor who understands refrigeration but hasn’t developed as a leader can still run a program on paper. But the elements that actually prevent a release operating discipline, a crew that reports near-misses instead of burying them, MOC that gets followed instead of skipped when things get busy those are leadership outputs, not technical ones. When leadership is weak, the gap doesn’t show up immediately. It shows up in drift: a shortcut here, a skipped step there, until an audit or an incident investigation reveals how far the program had wandered from what’s written down.

Extreme Ownership as the Corrective

So if the Peter Principle explains how our industry ends up with under-prepared leaders, what fixes it?

Extreme Ownership, written by former Navy SEAL officers Jocko Willink and Leif Babin, offers a mindset that translates surprisingly well to industrial leadership. Their central idea is that a leader owns everything in their world, not just the wins, but the failures, the miscommunications, and the mistakes their team makes. No blaming the crew, the schedule, the equipment, or “the way it’s always been done.” If the mission fails, the leader failed to lead.

That’s a hard standard, and it’s exactly the standard that closes the gap the Peter Principle opens. Technical skill gets someone promoted. Extreme ownership is what makes them effective once they’re in the role, and unlike technical mastery, it isn’t something absorbed automatically from years on the tools. It’s a mindset that has to be built deliberately, the same way a technician builds troubleshooting skill: through practice, feedback, and repetition.

What This Looks Like on the Floor

Extreme Ownership. When there’s a near-miss, a missed audit finding, or a procedural violation, the supervisor owns it, not the operator who cut the corner. Ownership starts with asking what training, communication, or reinforcement was missing before asking what the crew did wrong.

No Bad Teams, Only Bad Leaders. A crew with recurring shortcuts or a pattern of near-misses isn’t a “bad crew.” It’s a leadership gap. Willink and Babin are blunt about this in their book, and it holds up in a machine room the same way it holds up on a battlefield.

Believe. A leader has to understand why a PSM element exists well enough to explain it with conviction, not just enforce MOC or PSSR as a box to check. Crews can tell the difference between a supervisor who believes in the procedure and one who’s just relaying orders from corporate.

Check the Ego. The technician who got promoted because they were the best mechanic on the crew has to let go of “I could do this faster myself.” Leading the team is a different job than outperforming it.

Decentralized Command. No supervisor can personally verify every valve lineup or every step of every procedure. Leadership means training the team well enough, and trusting them enough, to make sound calls within their scope without every decision bottlenecking through one person.

Prioritize and Execute. In an upset condition or an ammonia release response, a leader who tries to fix everything at once fixes nothing. The best leaders identify the single biggest risk in the moment and execute against it first.

Practical Takeaways for Ammonia Refrigeration Leaders

• Don’t promote on technical performance alone. Assess and develop leadership ability as its own competency, separate from mechanical or operational skill.

• Build leadership development into your PSM program, not just technical and regulatory training.

• Push for ownership language in incident investigations: “What did I miss as a leader?” instead of language that lands on the operator.

• Give operators and technicians real authority within their scope, so the program doesn’t depend on one person being everywhere at once.

  
  

Closing Thoughts

Have a plan to train your new leaders in the same manner you train your junior mechanics and technicians. You do not need to use the same leadership principles and methodologies that are listed here.  There are thousands of leadership training organizations, just like there are multiple organizations that can train your operators to prepare for the RETA exam. Budget for continued leadership training for your team. This could also include how to give performance evaluations, understanding of M&R budgets, or higher-level knowledge of the OSHA/EPA guidelines and IIAR standards. You can evaluate each leader to tailor the training to their needs. The only thing that you should not do is let them figure it out on their own and assume that your best technician will turn into your best leader on their own.

Previous Blog: Hiding From PSM | Blog No. 134

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