An op-ed, short for “opposite the editorial page”, is a written prose piece, which expresses the opinion of an author usually not affiliated with the publication’s editorial board.
Wes Paterson. Amazon
When activity climbs, the crunch isn’t only rigs and pipe. It’s people who can make good decisions without someone holding their hand.
By Wesley Paterson, CMC
Every time activity picks up in this industry, the conversation turns to equipment. Enough rigs? Enough pipe? Enough trucks? Fair questions. But in my work with industrial and energy clients, the constraint that bites first is rarely steel. It’s judgment: how many people on a crew can make a sound call when the boss isn’t standing beside them.
Every crew and field office has one. The most experienced supervisor. The one who fixes everything, answers every call at 2 a.m. and steps in the moment a job goes sideways. Everybody respects them, and they’ve earned it.
That’s exactly the problem.
When one person solves everything, everyone else learns to wait. Younger hands pick up the phone instead of picking up the problem. In slow years, nobody notices. When activity spikes, that supervisor gets stretched across too many locations. And when they retire, a big piece of the operation’s know-how walks out the gate with them.
I call this rescue culture. It’s a quiet drag on productivity, and on safety.
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The hidden cost of “let me just do it”
In my book, The Hero’s Rope, I use a simple picture. Someone is stuck on the far side of a river. The hero wades in and carries them across. Everybody claps. But the next time that person reaches a river, they’re waiting for the hero again. The better move is to throw a rope, stand on the bank and coach them across. They get wet. It takes longer the first time. But they never need carrying again.
Most of our best supervisors are carriers, not because they want control, but because they care and they’re fast. “Let me just do it” is efficient for the next hour. It’s expensive for the next five years.
I call that expense the Rescue Tax. You pay it in supervisor hours spent on problems the crew could have solved, in jobs sitting idle while everyone waits for a callback, in burnout among your best people, and in a bench too thin to promote from. None of it shows up as a line item, which is why it rarely gets fixed.
Betts Drilling Rig 1 near Manor on Oct. 27, 2026. Photo by Brian Zinchuk
Headcount isn’t capability
From 2020 to 2022, I served on PetroLMI’s Skills Match Community and Career Development Committee, looking at how energy workers in Alberta, Saskatchewan and across Canada could cross-train and carry their skills into new roles and industries. I’ve also run government-funded programs to upskill workers for oil and gas, and built competency-based training for employers and colleges.
The lesson I keep relearning: oilfield workers are among the most adaptable in the country. Their skills transfer. What doesn’t transfer automatically is the confidence to use those skills without someone standing over them. That’s not a character flaw. It’s a leadership and training design problem, and it can be fixed. You can fill seats quickly in a hiring push. You can’t fill them with judgment overnight.
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Three habits that build self-reliant crews
- Ask before you fix.
When someone calls with a problem, ask two questions first: “What are you seeing?” and “What would you do if you couldn’t reach me?” Often they already know. If the answer is sound, tell them to go ahead. If not, you’ve found a coaching moment instead of a repair job. It adds two minutes to the call and saves hundreds of calls a year.
- Teach it, then hand over the rope.
Industry already has a proven method, and it’s older than most rigs in the field. Training Within Industry, or TWI, was built during the Second World War to bring new workers up to speed fast. Its Job Instruction method is simple: prepare the worker, show the job step by step with the key points and reasons, have them do it while you watch and correct, then step back and check in. Its guiding line still holds: if the worker hasn’t learned, the instructor hasn’t taught.
That’s experiential learning, and it’s how field skills stick. When a job goes sideways, stay close, but let your people work the problem. Hand over the decision, not just the task. Then debrief: what worked, what didn’t, what they’d do differently. Ten minutes at the tailgate beats a day in a classroom.
This is not about stepping back when lives are on the line. If there’s an immediate hazard, you stop the job and act. Rescue culture lives in the everyday calls that are well within someone’s ability if they’re given the chance. Crews that practise making those calls also spot real danger sooner.
- 0136 CIC - SK Energy Security Awareness0136 CIC - SK Energy Security Awareness
- 0121 Ministry of Energy and Resources April 20260121 Ministry of Energy and Resources April 2026
- 0133 LC Trucking hiring Class 1A Payden0133 LC Trucking hiring Class 1A Payden
- 0132 UMWA 20260132 UMWA 2026
- 0129 Turnbull drivers operators0129 Turnbull drivers operators
- 0128 OSY Rentals updated0128 OSY Rentals updated
- 0126 Steel_Reef_Promo_0126 Steel_Reef_Promo_
- 0118 IBEW 30 sec0118 IBEW 30 sec
- 0114 Prospera Bold Vision0114 Prospera Bold Vision
- 0113 Miller Epic Cinematic Hollywood trailer0113 Miller Epic Cinematic Hollywood trailer
- 0102 Lori Carr Coal Extended0102 Lori Carr Coal Extended
- 0099 Mryglod Steel 1080p0099 Mryglod Steel 1080p
- 0095 Fast Trucking nearly 70 years good at it0095 Fast Trucking nearly 70 years good at it
- 0046 City of Estevan This is Estevan Teaser0046 City of Estevan This is Estevan Teaser
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- Measure capability, not heroics.
Most operations quietly reward rescuers. The supervisor who saves the day gets the praise; the one whose crew never needed saving gets overlooked. Flip that. Ask field leaders each week: “Which decisions did your crew make without you?” Keep a simple competency matrix showing who can run a location, lead a tailgate meeting or handle a breakdown alone, and who’s being cross-trained behind them. Make developing those people part of how supervisors are evaluated.
Let the front line map the work
Habits last longer inside a system that supports them. Good organizational excellence frameworks connect people, processes, systems and technology to the results that matter most, and build improvement into daily work.
The people who know how a job really runs are on the front line, not in head office. Newer tools put them in charge of the mapping. One I work with, Process Genesis™ from Ionic Innovate, lets the people doing the work describe how it actually runs, then turns that into process maps, flags bottlenecks and builds the case for what to fix first. The real value is the experienced supervisor and the newer hand mapping the work together, so know-how in one head becomes something the whole crew can see and improve.
- 0136 CIC - SK Energy Security Awareness0136 CIC - SK Energy Security Awareness
- 0121 Ministry of Energy and Resources April 20260121 Ministry of Energy and Resources April 2026
- 0133 LC Trucking hiring Class 1A Payden0133 LC Trucking hiring Class 1A Payden
- 0132 UMWA 20260132 UMWA 2026
- 0129 Turnbull drivers operators0129 Turnbull drivers operators
- 0128 OSY Rentals updated0128 OSY Rentals updated
- 0126 Steel_Reef_Promo_0126 Steel_Reef_Promo_
- 0118 IBEW 30 sec0118 IBEW 30 sec
- 0114 Prospera Bold Vision0114 Prospera Bold Vision
- 0113 Miller Epic Cinematic Hollywood trailer0113 Miller Epic Cinematic Hollywood trailer
- 0102 Lori Carr Coal Extended0102 Lori Carr Coal Extended
- 0099 Mryglod Steel 1080p0099 Mryglod Steel 1080p
- 0095 Fast Trucking nearly 70 years good at it0095 Fast Trucking nearly 70 years good at it
- 0046 City of Estevan This is Estevan Teaser0046 City of Estevan This is Estevan Teaser
- 0077 Caprice Resources Stand Up For Free Speech0077 Caprice Resources Stand Up For Free Speech
- 0061 SIMSA 2024 For Sask Buy Sask0061 SIMSA 2024 For Sask Buy Sask
- 0051 JML Hiring Pumpjack assembly0051 JML Hiring Pumpjack assembly
- 0049 Scotsburn Dental soft guitar0049 Scotsburn Dental soft guitar
- 0032 IWS Summer hiring rock trailer music
- 0022 Grimes winter hiring
- 0018 IWS Hiring Royal Summer
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Capability decides the next upcycle
Any expansion will need a bigger labour force, and experienced people to lead it. The companies that win won’t simply have the most crews. They’ll have crews who can think, decide and act when the best supervisor is three locations away, or retired and out fishing.
So here’s my challenge to field leaders. Tomorrow, when the first call comes in, don’t fix it. Ask. Then teach. Your best supervisors are some of the finest people in this industry. Let’s stop making them the bottleneck and start making them the people who build the next generation.
Grab the rope. Then teach someone else to hold it.
————————————————————
Wesley Paterson, CMC, is president of Paterson Consulting Inc. in Medicine Hat, Alberta, and vice-chair of CMC Alberta. His orphan-well-to-community-solar work received the 2026 ASTech Award for Best in Sector: Energy Innovation. He served on PetroLMI’s Skills Match Community and Career Development Committee from 2020 to 2022 and designs competency-based workforce development programs for industry. He works with Ionic Innovate on Process Genesis™. He is the author of The Hero’s Rope: Stop Carrying People Across the River and Start Teaching Them to Cross Themselves. He can be reached at wes@patersonconsulting.ca.
- 0136 CIC - SK Energy Security Awareness0136 CIC - SK Energy Security Awareness
- 0121 Ministry of Energy and Resources April 20260121 Ministry of Energy and Resources April 2026
- 0133 LC Trucking hiring Class 1A Payden0133 LC Trucking hiring Class 1A Payden
- 0132 UMWA 20260132 UMWA 2026
- 0129 Turnbull drivers operators0129 Turnbull drivers operators
- 0128 OSY Rentals updated0128 OSY Rentals updated
- 0126 Steel_Reef_Promo_0126 Steel_Reef_Promo_
- 0118 IBEW 30 sec0118 IBEW 30 sec
- 0114 Prospera Bold Vision0114 Prospera Bold Vision
- 0113 Miller Epic Cinematic Hollywood trailer0113 Miller Epic Cinematic Hollywood trailer
- 0102 Lori Carr Coal Extended0102 Lori Carr Coal Extended
- 0099 Mryglod Steel 1080p0099 Mryglod Steel 1080p
- 0095 Fast Trucking nearly 70 years good at it0095 Fast Trucking nearly 70 years good at it
- 0046 City of Estevan This is Estevan Teaser0046 City of Estevan This is Estevan Teaser
- 0077 Caprice Resources Stand Up For Free Speech0077 Caprice Resources Stand Up For Free Speech
- 0061 SIMSA 2024 For Sask Buy Sask0061 SIMSA 2024 For Sask Buy Sask
- 0051 JML Hiring Pumpjack assembly0051 JML Hiring Pumpjack assembly
- 0049 Scotsburn Dental soft guitar0049 Scotsburn Dental soft guitar
- 0032 IWS Summer hiring rock trailer music
- 0022 Grimes winter hiring
- 0018 IWS Hiring Royal Summer
- 0013 Panther Drilling PO ad 03 top drive rigs
- 0002 gilliss casing services0002 gilliss casing services
- 9002 Pipeline Online 30 sec EBEX9002 Pipeline Online 30 sec EBEX
- 9001