When 2025 HDT Emerging Leader Chelsea Seger joined Waste Management as a shift maintenance supervisor late last year, the trucks weren’t the problem. The toxic atmosphere in the shop was.

“The guys didn't get along,” she says. “They had a lead tech that they didn't like. He would just sit in his chair and not actually do any maintenance work. And he was super mean. He didn’t lead by example.”

That was pretty much the opposite of Seger’s leadership style.

When she interviewed for the WM job last year, she says, the interviewer was looking for someone who could bring a different culture to their shop — one where it’s not the boss saying, “It’s my way or the highway.”

“He needed someone who could lead with empathy and listen,” she recalls.

Building Trust One Technician at a Time

Seger calls fixing the culture in the shop one of her greatest career achievements so far.

“I've been through shops where the culture was horrible,” she says. When she was a technician, she didn’t have a lot of recourse.

“But being that middle management, you're the stepping stone between corporate and the guys on the ground that are making sure these trucks run.”

When technicians take pride in their work, she says, both the company and its employees benefit.

So Seger went to work on changing the shop culture. She began by getting to know the technicians individually and coaching them on how to identify areas for improvement.

Despite her best efforts to work with the problem tech the same way, she says, eventually he left.

“I was fostering a culture that he could not adapt to,” she says.

The shop culture has turned around. Now, her technicians cook for each other nearly every night.

She’s proud to be “able to foster that culture where you want to come to work, you want to come see your buddies at work.”

Keeping 95 Trucks Ready to Roll Every Day

Seger manages a WM shop that is the second largest in the South Atlantic and the largest in her district.

"We have 95 units, and we roll 75 units a day constantly on routes.”

Those trucks have to be ready to run their routes, which is a change from many companies she has worked for, where the attitude is “just get it done when you can get it done” — an attitude that didn’t really sit well with her military background.

Bringing Mental Health to the Maintenance Conversation

Seger is active in the American Trucking Associations’ Technology & Maintenance Council. She’s the second vice chair of the S14 task force on medium-duty and vocational vehicles, where she’s working to try to get the group caught up on updating Recommended Practices.

She’s juggling that with work on a new task force under the S.5 fleet maintenance management group on personal protective equipment and technician wellness.

There was a lot of movement on that RP on physical wellness, she says, but she’s been passionate about the need to include mental health.

“I am very big on psychology and mental health wellness in the shop environment,” she says.

That’s not been something shop management has traditionally paid much attention to. But in order to continue recruiting and retaining younger technicians, she says, that needs to change.

Why Emotional Intelligence Matters in Modern Maintenance

“You have to be emotionally intelligent to be a leader in this generation,” Seger says. 

“I've been under a couple of people where it's like process and procedure, process and procedure, process and procedure. You can run a site like that. You cannot lead people like that. You have to lead people with empathy.”

Since she joined WM, Seger has hired several new technicians. Her hiring philosophy is partly a result of her five years in the military, she explains.

Hiring a technician straight out of diesel tech school who has the right attitude is easier, she says, than hiring an experienced technician with bad habits and bad attitudes and trying to change them.

Commanding Respect in a Traditionally Male Space

If there’s one place in trucking where women are scarcer in trucking than behind the wheel of long-haul trucks, it’s in the maintenance shop. And that’s not always an easy thing to be.

“As you grow in your career, you're going to hit a wall,” she says, where it may mean looking for a different  job “where you're actually looked at as a technician and not a woman.”

As a technician, she often ran into the “she doesn’t know anything, she’s just a girl” attitude.  In management, she’s had to deal with people — often older men — who underestimate her.

“You always have to give 110%,” she says, knowing people are watching her more closely simply because she’s a woman. Even now, she sometimes has to literally step forward to ensure drivers talk to her instead of the man standing next to her.

“It's all about how you hold yourself and how you present yourself.”

She recalls the first time she went to TMC’s annual meeting, when she was working at Benore Logistics. She heard her boss say to a supplier, “She walks into a room and she commands without saying a word.”

Hearing that from more experienced men in the industry that she looked up to seemed “crazy” at the time, but she’s gotten similar comments from other people.

“You can’t seem soft,” she explains, “but you can lead with empathy.”

Learning to Lead While Running a Busy Maintenance Operation

One of the things that appealed to Seger about the WM job was that it's an on-the-job management training program, where she's learning about managing the business aspects of the job.

She began her management journey previously at Benore Logistics, where she progressed from a B-level technician to an A-level technician and then to lead technician on the night shift.

She didn’t feel ready for it at the time, but her supervisor encouraged her.

“So I began to kind of understand what it meant to run a shop,” she says, for a fleet with 650 trucks and 2,500-plus trailers.

Her boss, the director of maintenance, was pleased that he wasn’t getting calls in the middle of the night like he had in the past, because Seger could handle things.

“I had a really good connection with that company. And I think that's where I started to say, I think I want more for my career,” which led her to WM.

At some point in the future, Seger says, she’d like to be a teacher.

“I really like teaching people and watching them learn. It’s really nice to see that you can teach someone and they can grab hold of it and run with it.”