Every industrial board conversation in 2026 eventually arrives at the same sentence: “we need someone who can actually run a resilient supply chain.” Few boards can yet say precisely what that means. The phrase has become a placeholder for a leadership brief that has changed faster than the language used to describe it — and the businesses moving fastest to reshore, nearshore and rebuild domestic capacity are discovering that the constraint is not capital or even factory floor space. It is finding a Managing Director who has actually done this before.
The Story Behind the Story
The headline data is now well established: rather than suppressing industrial dealmaking, tariff regimes and geopolitical friction are fuelling acquisitions aimed at domestic production, nearshoring and infrastructure resiliency. Cross-border industrial deal value has climbed to 56% of trailing deal value, up from 30% in FY22, and US-targeted deal value has nearly doubled to $72 billion, driven by global supply chain reconfiguration. Average deal size has risen from $155 million to $375 million in two years as buyers pursue larger, more transformative platforms rather than simple bolt-ons.
Private equity has moved with the same logic. Reshoring and supply-chain resilience have become a named investment thesis in their own right, with sponsors specifically targeting manufacturers and component producers positioned to serve domestic markets and reduce dependency on overseas supply chains — a trend reinforced by policy and capital expenditure incentives rather than short-term arbitrage. Over $1.2 trillion in planned investment is currently aimed at domestic production capacity in the US alone.
None of this activity closes on its own. Every reshored plant, every nearshored platform, every “supply chain resiliency” thesis in an investment memo eventually needs a Managing Director who can turn the strategy into an operating P&L. That is where the gap actually sits.
From Operator to Orchestrator
The clearest framing of what has changed comes from supply chain leadership research: the discipline has shifted from operational execution to strategic business leadership, as disruption, geopolitical risk, technological change and talent shortages have exposed the fragility of global supply networks. The same research borrows a distinction increasingly used in the trade press — that supply chain leaders must adapt from being operators of a linear process to orchestrators of intelligent, localised networks.
This is not an abstraction. Companies such as Barilla and Unilever have demonstrated that resilience during disruption depends on rapid coordination and cross-functional decision-making rather than efficiency alone — the capability that separates businesses that absorb a shock from businesses that are paralysed by one. The research identifies three leadership capabilities becoming essential, and increasingly hard to develop: mastering operational fundamentals, working effectively across teams, and driving change under sustained pressure.
The MD who ran a stable, single-geography supply chain for the last decade is not automatically the MD who can redesign one under tariff pressure this year. Those are different jobs wearing the same title.
The Competency Stack Boards Should Actually Be Screening For
Recruiters working reshoring-driven searches have started to define the profile explicitly, rather than leaving it to inference. Five capabilities recur across current hiring literature and search-firm guidance.
| Capability | What it looks like in practice |
|---|---|
| Trade and regulatory fluency | Working knowledge of frameworks such as USMCA, Section 301 tariffs and forced-labour import restrictions, and the ability to classify goods to minimise duty exposure rather than discovering the cost after the fact. |
| Total landed cost modelling | The ability to calculate the true comparative cost of reshoring versus nearshoring versus staying put — not freight rates alone, but the full legal, logistical and operational cost of relocating production. |
| Strategic network design | Re-engineering the physical footprint of a supply chain — where to source, where to manufacture, where to distribute — to balance speed, cost and risk, as distinct from managing an existing footprint well. |
| Workforce and automation integration | The ability to run a smart factory that blends legacy manufacturing know-how with IoT connectivity, robotics and a materially different, more technical shop-floor skill set than the plant had five years ago. |
| Multi-dimensional risk management | Assessing and managing geopolitical, cyber, climate and regulatory risk across every tier of a supplier network, not just the immediate supplier. |
What ties these together is a shift in vocabulary that is itself diagnostic. Tactical managers talk about shipping delays; strategic leaders talk about working capital optimisation and the case for investment in resilience measures. A candidate who can negotiate freight rates but cannot explain how their sourcing decisions affect duty exposure is, in this market, a cost centre rather than a hire.
Why This Is a Hiring Problem, Not a Training Problem
Boards sometimes assume this capability can be built into an existing plant leadership team through a course or a consultant engagement. The workforce data suggests otherwise. US manufacturing job openings reached 462,000 in March 2026, the third consecutive monthly increase, while the hire rate remains compressed relative to recent peaks — organisations are filling a smaller share of open roles each month even as demand rises. Structural, not cyclical, is the phrase used repeatedly across current labour market analysis: driven by retirements, automation complexity and training pipelines that have not scaled fast enough.
The scarcity is concentrated precisely where reshoring investment is heaviest. Ninety percent of manufacturers report their operations functions are the most affected by the labour shortage, and sixty-nine percent are now investing in robotics and hardware specifically to fill the gap left by people they cannot hire. At the leadership layer, the constraint compounds: the calibre of MD able to run a reshored, automated, tariff-aware operation is scarcer than the technicians beneath them, and search professionals report that the strongest candidates for this profile are not the ones actively applying to job postings.
What This Means in Practice for a Search Brief
Before writing the job description, a board should be able to answer four questions:
- Are we hiring for the plant we have today, or the reshored, automated, tariff-exposed plant we will have in eighteen months?
- Does our shortlist include anyone who has actually executed a total-landed-cost relocation decision, or only people who have managed a stable existing footprint well?
- Have we tested candidates’ fluency in the specific trade frameworks that apply to our sourcing geography, rather than assuming general supply chain experience transfers?
- Is our compensation benchmark still calibrated to a “plant manager” role, when the market is now pricing this as a strategic, P&L-accountable leadership position?
The Financial Case Boards Need This Leader to Make
Part of the new brief is unavoidably commercial. Industrial dealmakers are now paying premiums of 15–30% above sector medians for assets that sit at the convergence of AI infrastructure, grid modernisation and defence/resilience demand — automation, power equipment, thermal management and advanced components. An MD who cannot articulate why a resilience investment protects or expands that premium, in the language a PE-backed board or an investment committee expects, will struggle to win the capital the reshoring strategy actually requires. This is precisely the “tactical manager versus strategic leader” distinction the recruiting literature keeps returning to: the ability to secure investment for resilience measures, not merely to manage around a shortage of it, is often the difference between a business that treats disruption as a minor cost and one for which it becomes a crisis.
Jenova Partners’ Perspective
We are seeing this capability gap directly in mandates across capital equipment, industrial machinery and process industries — sectors where reshoring and tariff exposure are rewriting the operating brief faster than most internal succession plans can respond. The mistake we see boards make most often is running a like-for-like replacement search against an outdated job description, then being surprised when the new hire manages the plant they inherited rather than the one the strategy actually requires.
The fix starts before the search brief is written: defining, specifically, which of the five capabilities above the business is missing today, and which it will need in eighteen months once the reshoring or nearshoring thesis is executed.
Sources
- PwC, “Industrial manufacturing: US Deals 2026 midyear outlook,” and PwC, “Global M&A trends in industrials and services: 2026 mid-year outlook.”
- Cherry Bekaert, “Private Equity Report: 2025 Trends and 2026 Outlook.”
- Scope Recruiting, “Plant Manager Job Description, Salary, and Skills,” 2026.
- I by IMD, “Supply chain upheaval and the future of leadership,” April 2026.
- Panel Built / Harvard Business Review framing, “Is Your Supply Chain Ready for 2026? The Era of Resilience.”
- Scope Recruiting, “Hiring Supply Chain Leaders: 5 Nearshoring Skills for 2026,” January 2026.
- Michigan State University Online, “Supply Chain Resilience 2026.”
- Hueman RPO, “Manufacturing Job Market Report,” May 2026 (BLS JOLTS data).
- Netchex, “Manufacturing’s Labor Shortage in 2026: Numbers, Causes, and What HR Can Do.”
- CADDi / SME, “2026 Manufacturing Outlook Study,” reported via AdvancedManufacturing.org.
Evgeny Polyakov Ph.D.
Founding Partner
m: +44 7369 293997
t: +44 20 7856 0372
e: evgeny@jenovapartners.co.uk
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a: 128 City Road, London EC1V 2NX, UK
Jenova Partners Limited is a private limited company registered in England and Wales (Company No. 17240640), with its registered office at 128 City Road, London EC1V 2NX.
Disclaimer: This article is intended for general informational purposes for boards, investors and industrial leadership teams navigating reshoring, nearshoring and supply chain resilience decisions, and does not constitute legal, financial, or investment advice.