The Next Leadership Crisis in MRO: It’s Not the One You’re Thinking About
Part 1 of a series on bench strength and leadership development in MRO
The industry has spent the better part of the last decade sounding the alarm on the A&P shortage. The numbers are real, the pressure is real, and the Part 147 schools have responded. Pipeline programs are expanding. Apprenticeships are forming. There is reason to believe the technician gap will narrow not immediately, but it will narrow.
What is not being talked about with the same urgency is what happens in the meantime and what that transition is quietly creating further up the org chart.
The Scale of What We’re Managing Through
Before getting to the leadership problem, it’s worth anchoring just how significant the technician shortage is. Oliver Wyman projects a shortfall of 43,000 to 48,000 aviation maintenance workers in North America by 2027, roughly 24 to 27 percent of the total workforce. ATEC’s 2024 Pipeline Report estimates the current shortage at 9 percent and projects it reaching nearly 20 percent by 2028. Nearly 38 percent of certified technicians are currently over 60.
These are not hypothetical future numbers. This is the environment MROs are operating in right now, filling seats, managing production, and trying to hold the standard.
The Vacancy Cascade
When experienced technicians leave the bench through retirement, attrition, or advancement they create openings. Those openings get filled. That is how organizations function. But in a labor constrained environment, the fill the seat pressure compresses timelines that would otherwise allow for deliberate development. Senior techs move up because someone above them vacated a role. That creates an opening below them. That opening gets filled by whoever is available.
At the end of that chain sits the front line: the lead tech, the crew lead, the first level supervisor. These are the roles absorbing the most pressure, and they are increasingly being filled by people whose primary qualification is holding an A&P certificate.
That is not a criticism of the individuals. An A&P is a hard earned credential that demonstrates technical competency. But technical competency is not leadership competency. Knowing how to inspect a control surface does not prepare someone to manage shift handoffs, address performance issues, maintain documentation discipline under pressure, or hold a team to a standard when an aircraft is AOG and everyone is looking for a shortcut.
What’s Actually at Stake
Front line leaders in Part 145 operations sit at the intersection of quality and production. They are close enough to the work to catch problems before they become findings. They set the tone for how the RSM gets followed, or doesn’t. They are the reason a crew either holds the standard or quietly decides the standard is negotiable today.
When that role is filled by someone without the skills to actually lead, and without the support to develop them quickly, the risk does not stay contained at the crew level. It surfaces in audit findings, escapes, turnover, and eventually in the reputations that take years to build and far less time to damage.
Industry voices are beginning to say it directly. At a recent ATEC conference, MRO providers reported that technical challenges are increasingly being rivaled by gaps in soft skills among newer hires: communication, teamwork, adaptability. One MRO leader noted these gaps are “ultimately not just about operational efficiencies, but safety as well.” That observation was made about entry level technicians. The same gap, unaddressed, follows people into lead and supervisor roles.
This is not a hypothetical. It is already happening in shops across the country. The technician shortage created the conditions. The leadership gap is the consequence that most organizations have not yet named.
The Gap Nobody Budgeted For
The industry has no equivalent to Part 147 for leadership development. There is no standardized curriculum, no recognized framework, no clear pathway from bench to lead to supervisor that includes anything beyond on the job exposure. This is not a new problem, an AAR VP of Operations acknowledged more than a decade ago that the MRO industry “historically has not done a very good job” developing the non-technical leadership skills required to manage the people issues that emerge virtually every day. What is new is the scale of the demand for those skills, arriving faster than the industry has prepared for.
Most organizations are defaulting to exposure. Watch, absorb, figure it out. That approach works when there is time and when the person in the adjacent role is a strong leader worth watching. Right now, many shops have neither.
The organizations that will come out of this period in the strongest position are the ones treating front line leadership development as an operational priority, not an HR initiative, not a budget line item to revisit next year, but a core function of workforce readiness that belongs in the same conversation as technician pipeline and workforce planning.
What It Requires
It does not require a university program or a multi-year initiative. It requires deliberate, job specific development that meets leads and supervisors where they are: on the floor, in the context of MRO operations, addressing the situations they actually face.
It requires organizations to define what qualified leadership looks like at the front line, and then build a path to get people there before they are already in the role and already struggling.
The technician shortage was visible because it showed up in open requisitions and production delays. The leadership gap is quieter. It shows up in quality metrics, in turnover rates, in exit interviews, and in the slow erosion of the standard setting that keeps a Part 145 operation reliable.
The industry learned the hard way that waiting on the technician pipeline cost years it did not have. The same lesson is available now, at a lower cost, if organizations choose to take it.
This article is the first in a four part series on bench strength, succession planning, and leadership development in MRO. The series examines the leadership gap that is building behind the technician shortage, how it forms, who it affects, and what organizations can do about it before it becomes a crisis they are managing instead of a problem they prevented.
Part 2 — The Hidden Cost of Promoting Your Best Technician looks at what actually happens when technical excellence gets mistaken for leadership readiness, and what that costs an MRO operation in steady state and under growth conditions.
Synopsis / Teaser:
The MRO industry has made the A&P shortage front page news, and rightly so. But a quieter crisis is building behind it. As experienced technicians retire or move up to fill vacated roles, front line lead and supervisor positions are being filled by the least experienced people in the shop, often with no leadership development to support them. The vacancy cascade is real, it’s already underway, and its consequences show up not in open requisitions but in quality metrics, audit findings, and the slow erosion of the standard setting that keeps a Part 145 operation reliable. This article makes the case that front line leadership development is not an HR initiative it is a workforce readiness problem the industry has not yet named.
The Hidden Cost of Promoting Your Best Technician
Part 2 of a series on bench strength and leadership development in MRO
There is a decision that plays out in MRO shops across the country with enough regularity that it barely gets questioned anymore. A lead position opens. The manager looks around the floor, identifies the strongest technician, the one who knows the work cold, who the other techs respect, who can troubleshoot anything, and promotes them.
It feels like the right call. It is often the wrong one.
Not because the technician isn’t talented. Not because they don’t deserve the opportunity. But because technical excellence and leadership readiness are different capabilities, and promoting one does not automatically produce the other. When that distinction gets ignored, and in a labor constrained environment, it gets ignored constantly, the organization doesn’t gain a leader. It loses a high performer and inherits a problem.
The Double Loss
The math on an unplanned promotion is worse than most operations account for. When a strong technician moves into a lead role without adequate preparation, the shop absorbs two hits simultaneously.
The first is the loss of productive capacity at the bench. The technician who was carrying significant weight, the one other techs came to with the hard problems, is no longer doing that work. Their output drops because their role changed, and the work they were doing doesn’t disappear. It redistributes, usually unevenly, to a crew that is already stretched.
The second hit is harder to quantify but more consequential over time. An underprepared lead creates friction at the front line. They may avoid the difficult conversations that need to happen because they don’t yet have the tools to navigate them. They may struggle to hold accountability without damaging the relationships they spent years building as a peer. They may default to doing the technical work themselves rather than managing the crew doing it which means the shop gets a very expensive technician in a lead role, and no actual leadership at the front line.
Both of those losses compound. And in a Part 145 environment, where the front line is the last reliable check before a finding becomes an escape, the compounding happens fast.
The Expansion Problem
The stakes get significantly higher when growth is on the table. An MRO adding a capability, expanding a shift, or taking on a new customer contract is placing a bet that the organization can execute at a higher level. That bet depends entirely on whether there is qualified leadership available to run the expanded operation.
Too often, the expansion plan accounts for equipment, certifications, hangar space, and headcount. It does not account for bench strength. The assumption, usually unstated, is that leadership will figure itself out, the same way it always has.
But the same gap that exists in steady state operations is magnified under growth conditions. More work, more people, more pressure, and the same underprepared leads trying to hold it together. The capability that looked sufficient before expansion looks thin the moment the operation has to perform at a higher level.
Organizations that have built leadership bench strength before they needed it grow with stability. Organizations that haven’t spend the expansion period firefighting at the front line while trying to deliver on the commitments that justified the growth in the first place.
What It Actually Costs
The direct costs are visible, turnover, rework, extended turnaround times when crew cohesion breaks down. The indirect costs are harder to see but more damaging: the slow erosion of the standard when no one at the front line is equipped to hold it, the audit findings that trace back to a breakdown in oversight, the customer relationships that degrade when reliability becomes inconsistent.
There is also the cost to the individual. A technician put into a leadership role without development is set up to fail in a very public way, in front of the peers they came up with, in an environment where credibility is hard-won and lost quickly. That is not a retention strategy. It is a fast path to losing someone who had genuine potential, along with the institutional knowledge they carried.
A Different Starting Point
The alternative is not complicated, but it requires a decision to treat leadership readiness as a planned outcome rather than an assumed one.
It starts with defining what ready actually looks like at the front line, not in generic terms, but in the specific behaviors and capabilities that determine whether a lead can hold a Part 145 operation to its standard under pressure. It continues with building a deliberate pathway to get identified candidates there before the vacancy exists, not after.
That is the difference between succession planning and seat-filling. One produces leaders. The other produces the problem described above, on a recurring basis, for as long as the organization keeps making the same call.
The technician shortage put MRO in a difficult position. The leadership gap is a consequence of how the industry has responded to it and it is one that organizations can address deliberately, if they choose to.
This article is the second in a four-part series on bench strength, succession planning, and leadership development in MRO. The series examines the leadership gap that is building behind the technician shortage, how it forms, who it affects, and what organizations can do about it before it becomes a crisis they are managing instead of a problem they prevented.
Part 3 — Succession Planning Is Not a Large-Shop Problem challenges the assumption that bench strength planning is something only large MRO operations need to worry about, and makes the case that smaller Part 145 shops may actually be the most exposed.
SYNOPSIS
Promoting your best technician feels like the right call. In MRO, it’s often the wrong one. When technical excellence gets mistaken for leadership readiness, the organization absorbs two losses at once, a high performer off the bench and an underprepared leader at the front line. The consequences compound quickly in a Part 145 environment, and they get significantly worse when expansion is on the table. This article breaks down the real cost of unplanned promotions and makes the case for treating leadership readiness as a planned outcome rather than an assumed one.
Succession Planning Is Not a Large-Shop Problem
Part 3 of a series on bench strength and leadership development in MRO
There is a version of this conversation that happens in mid-size and smaller Part 145 operations with some regularity. Someone raises the topic of succession planning, bench strength, leadership pipeline, what happens when a key person leaves, and the response, sometimes stated and sometimes just implied, is that succession planning is something the big shops do. AAR. ST Engineering. The large airline MRO divisions with dedicated HR departments and formal development programs and org charts deep enough to absorb a departure without missing a beat.
Not us. We’re too small for that. We just figure it out.
That assumption is wrong. And in MRO, it is an expensive one.
The Smaller the Shop, the Higher the Exposure
Succession planning is not a complexity that scales with organizational size. It scales with key-person risk and smaller operations carry more of it per role, not less.
In a large MRO, the loss of a lead technician or front-line supervisor is a problem. There are typically other experienced people in adjacent roles, organizational depth to absorb the transition, and enough management bandwidth to stabilize the situation while a replacement is developed or sourced.
In a shop with thirty, fifty, or eighty people, that same departure can compromise an entire operation. There may be one person who knows how to run the night shift. One inspector whose institutional knowledge of the customer’s aircraft is irreplaceable. One supervisor holding the crew together who, if they left tomorrow, would leave a gap that cannot be filled quickly from the outside and was never developed from the inside.
That is not a staffing problem. That is a structural vulnerability and it exists precisely because the shop was too small to think it needed a plan.
Key-Person Risk Is a Compliance Risk
In a Part 145 environment, key-person exposure is not just an operational inconvenience. It is a compliance consideration. Repair stations are built around qualified personnel, accountable managers, quality control personnel, supervisors with the authority and competency to maintain the approved maintenance system. When those roles turn over without a prepared successor, the organization is not just short-handed. It may be operating with gaps in its quality system that an FAA inspector or customer audit will surface.
The RSM does not run itself. The approved procedures do not enforce themselves. The people in the roles responsible for those functions are the mechanism by which a Part 145 operation maintains its certificate and its customer relationships. When succession planning is absent, that mechanism is one resignation away from breaking down, regardless of shop size.
The One-Resignation Problem
Here is a useful diagnostic for any Part 145 operation, regardless of size: identify the roles in your organization where a single unplanned departure would create an immediate operational or compliance problem. Not an inconvenience but an actual crisis.
Most smaller shops, when they work through that exercise honestly, find more of those roles than they expected. And most find that they have no developed successor for any of them.
That is the one-resignation problem. It is not theoretical. It plays out every time a key person retires without a handoff plan, takes a position at a competing shop, or leaves for reasons nobody saw coming. The organization that had been functioning because of that person’s knowledge, relationships, and competency suddenly has to function without them and finds out in real time how dependent it actually was.
Growth Makes It Worse
Smaller shops pursuing growth face an accelerated version of this risk. Adding a capability, pursuing an additional rating, or taking on a larger customer contract all require the organization to perform at a higher level. That performance depends on leadership. And if the leadership bench was thin before the growth decision, it will be thinner still once the demands of the expanded operation arrive.
The shops that grow successfully are not necessarily the ones with the most resources. They are the ones that understood, before they committed to growth, whether they had the people in place, or in development, to execute on it. Bench strength is not a post-expansion problem to solve. It is a pre-expansion question to answer.
What Succession Planning Actually Looks Like at This Scale
For a smaller Part 145 operation, succession planning does not require a formal program, a dedicated HR function, or a multi-year initiative. It requires three things.
First, an honest assessment of where the key-person risk actually lives, which roles, which individuals, and what the operational and compliance impact of an unplanned departure would be.
Second, a defined picture of what readiness looks like for each of those roles not a generic job description, but the specific competencies and behaviors that determine whether someone can actually perform the function under pressure.
Third, a deliberate effort to develop identified candidates toward that standard before the vacancy exists. Not after the announcement. Not during the transition. Before.
That is not a large-shop capability. It is a leadership decision that any organization can make and that smaller operations, given their exposure, have more reason to make urgently than anyone.
The Shops That Will Be Ready
The technician shortage has forced MRO organizations of every size to think carefully about their workforce pipeline. The leadership gap requires the same discipline applied one level up to the leads and supervisors who determine whether the operation holds its standard regardless of what is happening around them.
The shops that come through this period in the strongest position will not necessarily be the largest ones. They will be the ones that recognized that bench strength is not a luxury reserved for organizations with the resources to formalize it. It is a survival requirement for any Part 145 operation that intends to remain reliable, compliant, and ready to grow.
Size is not a reason to skip succession planning. In MRO, it is a reason to take it more seriously.
This article is the third in a four-part series on bench strength, succession planning, and leadership development in MRO. The series examines the leadership gap that is building behind the technician shortage, how it forms, who it affects, and what organizations can do about it before it becomes a crisis they are managing instead of a problem they prevented.
Part 4 — Succession Planning Is Not an HR Function addresses the organizational philosophy that has to underpin all of it: why bench strength and leadership development belong to operational leadership, not HR, and what changes when organizations treat it that way.
Building the Bench Intentionally: Why Succession Planning Can’t Be an Afterthought
Part 4 of a series on bench strength and leadership development in MRO
Succession planning exists in most MRO organizations the same way a known defect gets carried forward on a defer list, acknowledged, documented, and consistently pushed because it isn’t stopping production today. It shows up in conversations. It appears as an agenda item that gets pushed. It lives in the intention of leaders who know it matters and haven’t yet made it a priority. And then someone retires, or resigns, or takes a call from a competing shop and the organization finds out in real time exactly what it wasn’t building while it was focused on everything else.
That is not succession planning. That is succession reacting. And for MRO organizations with growth on the horizon or investor conversations in the pipeline, the difference between the two is not just operational. It is existential.
Rarely Intentional. Rarely Organizational. Rarely Strategic.
The honest description of succession planning in most Part 145 operations is that it happens to the organization rather than being built by it. A retirement gets announced and the scramble begins. A key supervisor gives notice and the DOM spends the next three months doing two jobs while trying to identify a replacement. A lead who was being informally groomed for the next level leaves for a competitor and takes with them the institutional knowledge and crew relationships the operation depended on.
Each of those events triggers a response. The response gets called succession planning. It isn’t. It’s crisis management with a more optimistic label.
Real succession planning is intentional. It is built before the pressure exists, not assembled during it. It treats leadership pipeline the same way a well-run maintenance operation treats airworthiness as an ongoing condition to be maintained continuously, not a problem to be solved when something goes out of service.
The gap between those two approaches is where most MRO organizations currently live. And the conditions of the industry, high turnover, constrained technician pipelines, lean operational teams running at capacity, make it easy to stay there indefinitely, because the cost of not doing succession planning is invisible right up until it isn’t.
What Growth Exposes
For organizations pursuing expansion, a new capability, an additional rating, a larger customer contract, a new shift, the leadership pipeline conversation changes character entirely. Growth does not create the bench strength problem. It exposes the one that was already there.
An operation that was functioning adequately with its current leadership bench will find that bench significantly thinner the moment the demands of the expanded operation arrive. More work, more people, more complexity, and the same leads and supervisors who were already stretched trying to hold it together at a higher level. The capability that looked sufficient before expansion looks inadequate the moment the organization has to perform against the commitments that justified the growth in the first place.
The organizations that grow successfully are not necessarily the ones with the most resources. They are the ones that asked, before they signed the contract, before they pursued the rating, before they committed to the expansion, whether the leadership bench could support what they were building. And if the answer was no, they addressed it before the pressure arrived rather than during it.
What Investors and Growth Partners Are Actually Evaluating
For organizations engaging with investors or strategic partners, the leadership pipeline carries a dimension that most operational leaders underestimate.
Investors are evaluating organizational stability. They are asking, explicitly or through the due diligence process, whether the leadership structure of the organization can support the growth they are being asked to fund or partner with. An organization that cannot demonstrate depth in its leadership bench is not presenting an operational gap. It is presenting a risk profile.
The question is not just whether the organization has qualified people in current roles. It is whether there is a coherent, visible plan for what happens when those people move, retire, or step into the expanded roles that growth requires. An organization that can answer that question with a structured, evidence-based pipeline is a fundamentally different investment conversation than one that answers it with the names of a few people they have in mind.
Bench strength, approached intentionally and documented clearly, is not just a workforce planning tool. It is a demonstration of organizational maturity, the kind that tells investors and partners that the leadership running this operation is thinking beyond the current quarter and has built the internal infrastructure to execute on what they are committing to.
The Cost of Informal
Most succession planning that does exist in MRO organizations is informal. It lives in the DOM’s head. It exists as a general sense that a particular lead has potential, or that a certain supervisor is probably ready for more responsibility. Those instincts are valuable. They are not a plan.
Informal succession planning has several predictable failure modes. It is invisible to the rest of the organization, which means it cannot be acted on consistently or built upon over time. It is dependent on the people who hold it, when they leave, the institutional knowledge of the pipeline leaves with them. It is vulnerable to bias, because informal assessments of potential are shaped by familiarity and visibility rather than defined criteria. And it produces no accountability, because there is no shared picture of where the organization stands and what closing the gap actually requires.
The organizations that move from informal to intentional do not necessarily do something dramatically different. They make the implicit explicit. They take the knowledge that lives in the heads of operational leaders and put it into a structure that the organization can see, act on, and build over time.
What Being Intentional Actually Looks Like
Intentional succession planning in a Part 145 environment does not require a formal program or a dedicated organizational development function. It requires three things done consistently and honestly.
The first is a clear map of key-person risk. Every role in the organization where an unplanned departure would create an immediate operational or compliance problem needs to be identified and named. Not as a theoretical exercise, but as a genuine assessment of organizational vulnerability. Most operations that work through this honestly find more of those roles than they expected. Naming them is the necessary foundation for everything that follows.
The second is a defined picture of readiness for each critical role. Not a job description, the specific behaviors and capabilities that determine whether someone can actually perform in that role under pressure in a Part 145 environment. What does a qualified front line supervisor look like when a customer aircraft is AOG and the crew is looking for a shortcut? What does a qualified lead look like when a documentation error surfaces at the end of a shift and the next crew is already walking in? If the organization cannot define readiness in those terms, it cannot develop toward it, assess progress against it, or make defensible decisions about who is prepared to step into a critical role.
The third is a shared conversation between HR and operational leadership not to assign ownership or divide responsibility, but to build a joint picture of where the organization actually stands. HR brings knowledge of the organizational structure, the people processes, and the development infrastructure. Operational leadership brings knowledge of what the work demands, who is performing at what level, and what ready genuinely looks like on the floor. Neither side has the full picture alone. The partnership between them is where intentional succession planning becomes possible and where the gap that most MRO organizations are currently living in begins to close.
The Organizations That Will Be Ready
The technician shortage forced a reckoning about pipeline. The leadership gap requires the same reckoning applied one level up and with the same urgency the industry eventually brought to the technician problem, ideally before the cost of waiting becomes as visible.
Organizations pursuing growth, engaging investors, or simply trying to perform reliably in a constrained environment cannot afford to leave leadership pipeline to chance, to informal instinct, or to the hope that the next generation of leaders will figure it out the way the last one did.
The last generation figured it out in a different environment, one with more experienced people at every level, more time to develop, and less pressure compressing the pipeline from every direction simultaneously. That environment is gone.
What replaces it is intentionality. A deliberate decision to treat bench strength as an organizational priority rather than a deferred item that never makes it to the top of the list. To build the pipeline before the vacancy exists. To define readiness before the pressure arrives. To have the conversations that most organizations keep pushing forward until the cost of not having had them becomes impossible to ignore.
That is not a large-shop capability. It is a leadership decision. And it is available to any Part 145 organization willing to make it.
This is the fourth and final article in the Building the Bench series on bench strength, succession planning, and leadership development in MRO. The series examines the leadership gap building behind the technician shortage, how it forms, who it affects, and what organizations can do about it before it becomes a crisis they are managing instead of a problem they prevented. The full series is available on LinkedIn.
