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How to Find Future Downstream Refining Leaders

Refiners are facing a growing executive talent shortage, challenging them to rethink their pipeline strategies.
By Chadwick D. Covey and Margot Semkowski
March 2026
| 5 min read

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Key findings

  • Refiners are facing a shrinking executive pipeline as retirements outpace talent development and programs fail to build future critical capabilities.
  • Talent development programs must evolve, prioritizing enterprise leadership capabilities including cross-functional experience, strategic judgment and stakeholder influence.
  • Winning companies must blend proactive internal development with selective external hiring, rather than rely on reactive replacement of retiring executives.

When one refinery needed to fill a senior health and safety role, it hired an executive from the chemicals industry rather than drawing from internal talent pools. While cross-industry hires are common in other industries, this move reflects a change in hiring for the sector, driven by a growing talent crisis.

As a wave of executives retire, they are leaving behind a narrow bench of candidates for critical N-1 and even N-2 roles. Indeed, the refining sector is highly insular. Companies tend to promote leaders from small peer groups, often with limited exposure to different leadership models and perspectives. Talent development is also reactive, with skills acquired through M&A rather than forward-thinking internal programs.

At the same time, tightening margins, mounting competitive pressure, recent spikes in geopolitical uncertainty and supply shifts are reshaping the sector. These forces demand strategic commercially minded leaders with a breadth of capabilities that are in short supply internally. Together, these headwinds leave companies scrambling to fill vacant executive roles.

In this piece, we explore the capabilities future downstream leaders need to succeed in a complicated environment and offer two strategies that companies can use in tandem to acquire or develop them.

Leadership capabilities for downstream leaders

To be sure, a refinery’s business strategy shapes the kind of leadership capabilities it requires. Companies focused on optimizing existing assets need executives who can drive operational discipline. In contrast, refiners transitioning assets toward renewable fuels or petrochemicals need leaders who are comfortable with uncertainty and capital reallocation.

Regardless of strategic context, several attributes are becoming increasingly critical for all future downstream leaders:

  • Multisite leadership: Exposure to different refinery environments sharpens leaders’ understanding of how to operate and lead amid different cultures, contexts and constraints.
  • Strategic thinking and commercial acumen: The ability to translate business decisions into portfolio-level decisions with a clear understanding of how to create value and defend decision-making.
  • Cross-functional skills: Experience beyond operations — in areas such as supply chain or technology — enables leaders to make enterprise-level decisions rather than just functional optimizations.
  • Credible and performance-driven: First-hand experience with operations and a relentless focus on uptime, turnaround management and efficiency gains that compound at scale.
  • Stakeholder communication and influence: The ability to build trust and rapport with internal and external stakeholders — such as board members, regulators and investors — while navigating policy, regulatory and complex geopolitical challenges.
  • Organizational agility: The capacity to adapt decision-making and governance approaches to fit an organization’s operating model, scale and limitations, particularly when moving from large, highly bureaucratic enterprises to leaner, more nimble refiners.

Developing or acquiring these attributes requires intentional, proactive talent development strategies. Based on our experience, refining companies will likely need a hybrid approach — cultivating internal candidates to protect institutional knowledge while also hiring externally to inject fresh perspectives despite a learning curve.

Enhance leadership development programs

Companies should expose potential leaders to different areas of the business earlier in their career, enabling lateral moves across divisions to gain a breadth of experience and exposure to different leadership paths. This is particularly critical in smaller organizations where cross-functional moves don’t happen naturally.

For example, human resources can design pathways for talent to move up the ranks from chemical engineer to plant manager to GM, incrementally developing more capabilities from overseeing production and staff to managing P&L and leading cross-functional teams. In this way, individuals can cultivate leadership skills and better understand different areas of the business.

Companies can also give candidates assignments with uncertain outcomes, helping them become comfortable with ambiguity and learn when to take a calculated risk and when to hold back.

Finally, providing high-potential leaders with opportunities to engage with internal and external stakeholders such as the board of directors and investors helps build confidence, hone communication skills and refine strategic thinking.

Hire outside the industry — selectively

Companies that lack the time or resources to develop talent internally (or need to build up their pipeline first) may need to look externally. This could include looking at international markets and attracting expats back to their home countries. Refiners could also explore talent in adjacent industries, such as chemicals or LNG, who can bring fresh perspectives and transferable functional skill sets such as finance. When hiring externally, however, companies should provide individuals with a downstream-specific learning and development plan to ensure they are up to speed on sector nuances. If hiring from a large, integrated energy business, refiners should consider how a leader coming from a larger platform will align culturally into their smaller-scale environment and what support might be required to aid a successful transition.

Downstream companies that win over the next several years will be those that intentionally develop aspiring leaders through consistent and proactive development programs and strategies.

 

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