May 2026

The New Operator – Why Manufacturing’s Moment Depends on Leaders Most Companies Are Not Hiring

John Nimesheim

Senior Managing Director

Companies investing in the manufacturing resurgence are largely hiring for a job that no longer exists.

The capital is real. Nearshoring, onshoring, data center buildout, AI-driven infrastructure investment, PE capital returning to industrial platforms. The manufacturing momentum is genuine, but this moment will be won or lost by a relatively small group at the top of the org chart. Chief Operating Officers (COO), Chief Supply Chain Officers, Chief Commercial Officers and P&L leaders must execute at a level of complexity that did not exist ten years ago.

Q1 2026 defined a clear focus on transformation. Clients prioritized foundational improvements to position their organizations for the next stage of growth. Twenty-five years of placing these leaders points to a consistent pattern: companies enter a search with a clear picture of the leader they want, usually drawn from the last person in the role. However, that illustration was built for a different set of conditions.

The job changed. The job description needs to catch up.

A generation ago, a strong industrial COO was defined by operational discipline (Lean, Six Sigma, multi-site management, cost control, safety record). Those fundamentals have not gone away, they remain at the core. But the operating environment has been restructured by technology, geopolitical volatility and capital pressure that moves faster than most organizations are built to absorb.

Today’s operator must make real capital allocation decisions about automation and AI, not as a spectator, but as someone accountable for the outcome, and the leaders who struggle with this have historically observed these decisions rather than owned them.

They must think about supply chain footprint at a geopolitical level (tariffs, nearshoring, tier-two and tier-three supplier risk), the kind of visibility many organizations do not have. The leaders who get this wrong are usually the ones who have managed supplier relationships transactionally rather than strategically, they know their tier-one partners and very little beyond that.

Today’s operator must build and align cross-functional teams through transformation that never fully ends, which requires a different kind of resilience than managing a stable operation through good conditions. The tell in a candidate conversation how they describe change: as something that happened to their organization or as something they drove through.

“Five years ago, clients were focused on optimizing what they had; today, the conversation is centered around building what they lack. The mandate has shifted from steady-state execution to leaders who can architect and drive transformation in real time. A client said it plainly to me recently: ”We’re not looking for someone to run the machine; we need someone who can rebuild it while it’s running.” That sentiment comes up far more today than it did even five years ago.”

– John Nimesheim, Senior Managing Director

Three Telling Searches

Earlier this year, three very different mandates landed almost simultaneously.⁽¹⁾

A Chief Supply Chain Officer for a large global public company, multi-billion-dollar, multi-continent. The mandate was optimization and resilience: redesigning a footprint built for a world that no longer exists. The role required someone who had genuinely lived through supply chain transformation, not managed a stable network through good conditions.

A Chief Commercial Officer at a high-growth PE-backed data center business. Nothing was built yet, not the commercial engine, not the infrastructure. The profile fitting for the first search would have failed here. This role needed a builder: someone who runs toward ambiguity rather than waiting for the ground to stop moving.

A Chief Operating Officer at a PE-backed industrial business in turnaround. Not the same person as either of the above. This was about fixing, stabilizing and leading through genuinely difficult change: accountability, decisiveness, the ability to make tough calls without perfect information.

Three companies; all industrial. Three completely different leadership profiles. The market tends to treat “operations talent” as a single category. These three mandates are a reminder of why that assumption is where searches begin to go wrong.

A Portrait of the New Operator

The candidates winning in this environment share traits that do not show up prominently on a traditional industrial resume.

Digital fluency beyond awareness. Not someone who attended a conference on Industry 4.0, but someone who has made decisions about automation investment, implemented digital tools at scale and understands where AI creates leverage and where it creates risk. Manufacturing COOs are eager to invest in AI and the budgets are there. The gap lies in the human side of that investment. A COO must personally lead the adoption, not just approve the investment. This means aligning the organization, upgrading talent and embedding AI into day-to-day operations to drive measurable outcomes, not just isolated pilots.

The ability to execute through permanent change. Tariffs shift, supply chains get redesigned and PE sponsors change strategy at the portfolio review. What separates the operators who thrive in these environments is not resilience in the abstract, it is the ability to keep a team aligned and moving when the destination keeps changing. That is a specific skill one that shows up clearly in how a candidate talks about the hardest stretch of their career.

Giving HR a seat at the table. The COO who treats HR as a support function is running on a model no longer fit for the moment. The best operators treat talent as a core lever of performance and recognize the workforce problem: the shortage of skilled talent, the generational shift and the competition for people who can operate in a digital manufacturing environment. These leaders do not wait for HR to bring them a solution; they are already working on the problem and partner closely with HR to shape the workforce, build leadership depth and address capability gaps before they become constraints on growth.

The hiring mistake companies keep making

The most common mistake is hiring for the last version of the role. Too often, a company writes a candidate profile that essentially describes the person who just left without asking whether the job has changed. The right question to ask before the position specification is written: what does this leader need to accomplish in the first 18 months?

When a client says, ‘we need to stabilize operations and protect margin’, they need a disciplined operator who can drive rigor and accountability. When they say, ‘we need to build for the next phase of growth,’ they need a builder who can create a structure, not just manage it. And when they say, ‘we need someone who can transform the business’, it points to a leader who has led through ambiguity and made real decisions without a playbook.

Start there and the search is sharper. The shortlist is more relevant. The placement holds.

The window is real. So is the risk.

Manufacturing’s moment is genuine. The investment is real, the demand is real and the opportunity to build something lasting is immense. But capital and infrastructure do not deliver results on their own. The leaders at the top of these organizations are the variable that determines whether the investment pays off or stalls.

The talent market for the new operator is tight. Those who can genuinely do this job at the level required are not waiting by the phone. Finding them takes time, discipline and a clear-eyed view of what the role demands today, not what it demanded five years ago.

The companies that identify this person early and build a search process designed to find them have a meaningful advantage. Those that do not will learn why the distinction matters.

⁽¹⁾Search details anonymized. All three mandates were completed or in active process as of Q1 2026.

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