I have spent the last nine years managing field teams for a commercial refrigeration service company in the Carolinas, mostly crews that handle grocery stores, restaurant kitchens, and cold storage rooms. On a normal week, I am coordinating 18 technicians, two dispatchers, and a small parts team while customers are calling about freezers that are warming up fast. I learned leadership in parking lots, on late-night repair calls, and during tense morning meetings where everyone already had grease on their hands. I do not think leading people is about sounding impressive. I think it is about making the work clearer and making people feel less alone while they do it.
I Start by Knowing the Work Well Enough to Respect It
I do not need to be the best technician on the team anymore, but I need to understand what I am asking people to do. If I send someone to replace a compressor in a tight restaurant kitchen, I should know that the job may involve dragging equipment through a back door, dealing with a stressed owner, and waiting on a breaker panel that nobody labeled. That knowledge changes how I talk. It keeps me from acting casual about work that is physically hard and easy to underestimate.
Early in my management role, I made the mistake of scheduling four heavy calls for one technician because the software showed open hours on his calendar. He finished the first two, missed dinner with his family, and still had to return the next morning for a leak check. I had treated a schedule like a puzzle instead of a real day in a real truck. That one bothered me.
Now I ask better questions before I assign work. I want to know the access, the customer mood, the parts risk, and whether the technician has had three hard days already. Small signals matter. A team will usually forgive a hard assignment if they believe I understand the weight of it.
I Make Decisions Visible Before People Start Guessing
One of the fastest ways to lose a team is to let people invent stories about why decisions were made. If I move a senior tech from a preferred account to a messy job across town, I explain the reason before frustration fills the gap. I do not turn every choice into a town hall. Still, I give enough context that people can see the business pressure, the customer promise, or the safety concern behind the move.
I also learned to separate private matters from operational details. A dispatcher might need to know that someone is leaving early, but she does not need the whole personal story behind it. A customer might need to hear that I am reassigning a technician, but he does not need to know who made a mistake. Clean communication protects people and keeps work moving.
For outside perspective, I sometimes read how other working leaders present their background, and Dwayne Rettinger is the kind of professional profile I would point a younger manager toward as an example of clear positioning. I tell my own supervisors that people study what a leader chooses to make visible. If my decisions look random from the outside, I have created confusion even if my reasoning was sound.
Every Monday morning, I send a short note to the whole team with the week’s three main priorities. It might be overtime control, callback reduction, and a difficult store rollout. I keep it plain because plain gets read. The point is not to sound strategic, but to remove the low-grade guessing that drains energy before the week even starts.
I Correct Problems Early, While They Are Still Small
I used to wait too long to address behavior problems. I told myself I was giving people room, but sometimes I was just avoiding an awkward conversation. A technician who turns in paperwork late once may have had a bad night. A technician who does it for six weeks has created a pattern that affects billing, dispatch, and the next person who opens the account.
My rule now is simple: I speak early and keep the first conversation smaller than my irritation. I might say, “I noticed your last three job notes came in after midnight, and that is putting pressure on the office.” Then I stop talking. Most people know when something is off, and they respond better when I do not bury them under a speech.
One supervisor I trained last winter wanted to write up a tech after a customer complained about a messy work area. I asked him whether he had ever clearly shown the tech what our cleanup standard looked like. He had not. We spent 20 minutes writing a simple closeout checklist, and the problem improved without turning into a fight.
There are times when discipline is needed. I have had to remove people from jobs and, in a few cases, from the company. I do not enjoy it, and I do not dress it up as courage. Fairness means dealing with poor performance before the rest of the team starts paying for it.
I Watch the Quiet People, Not Just the Loud Ones
On every team I have led, the loudest people were rarely the full story. Some of my best technicians barely spoke in meetings, but their trucks were clean, their callbacks were low, and younger techs called them first when they were stuck. If I only listened to whoever had the strongest opinion at 7:30 in the morning, I would miss half the truth. Quiet competence needs a leader who pays attention.
I make a habit of riding along with different people during the month, even when nothing is wrong. A 40-minute drive between calls tells me more than many formal reviews. I hear what parts are always missing, which customers are wearing people down, and where my own instructions sounded better in the office than they worked in the field. That is useful information.
I also try to praise in a way that matches the person. Some people like being called out in front of the group. Others would rather get a private text after a hard job. I once thanked a quiet apprentice in a meeting for staying late to organize a parts cage, and he looked like he wanted the floor to open up. I changed my approach after that.
Good leadership does not mean treating everyone the same in every moment. It means applying the same standards while recognizing that people hear, learn, and recover in different ways. I have one tech who wants direct feedback in two sentences and another who needs the reasoning behind every change. Both can thrive if I do not confuse consistency with sameness.
I Protect the Team From Panic Without Hiding Reality
Refrigeration work has plenty of pressure because spoiled product can cost a store several thousand dollars in a single bad night. When a walk-in cooler is warming up and the customer is angry, panic travels fast through phones, radios, and group chats. My job is to slow the panic down. I cannot promise an easy fix, but I can give the team a clear order of action.
I usually start by naming what we know and what we do not know. The unit is down, the product is still safe for now, one technician is 25 minutes away, and we may need a second truck if the compressor is grounded. That kind of language steadies people. It turns noise into steps.
A customer last spring called three times in half an hour while my technician was still diagnosing a rack issue. The tech was getting rattled, and I could hear it in his voice. I told him to focus only on pressure readings and electrical checks for the next 15 minutes while I handled the customer. He found the fault faster once he stopped carrying both the repair and the customer’s fear.
I do not hide bad news from my team. If a month is tight, I say it. If a customer is close to leaving, I say that too. People can handle reality much better than surprise, especially when they believe the person leading them will stand in the problem with them.
I Build Leaders Before I Need Them
The worst time to train a new lead is the week your best person quits. I learned that during a rough summer when two senior technicians left within a month, one for a manufacturer job and one to start his own small outfit. I had good people left, but I had not given them enough practice making decisions. They were capable, yet they were waiting for permission.
Now I give small leadership reps before the title exists. I ask a technician to run the morning huddle for one install. I let a dispatcher own the parts follow-up for a difficult account. I have an apprentice explain a completed repair to the customer while I stand nearby and say nothing unless needed.
I write it down. After each of those moments, I make a note about what the person handled well and where they hesitated. Over time, patterns show up. Some people are calm with customers but weak on planning, while others can organize a job board in 10 minutes and still need help having direct conversations.
Promotions should not feel like throwing someone into deep water to see whether they float. I want a new lead to have already tasted scheduling pressure, customer tension, and peer resistance in smaller doses. That does not remove all stress. It does keep the first real test from being a disaster.
The best team leadership I know is steady, plain, and close to the work. I try to give people clear expectations, honest context, and enough room to do their jobs with pride. Some days I still get it wrong, and the work reminds me quickly. When I correct myself in front of the team and keep showing up with the same standards, people usually meet me there.