When you end up with a disappointing hire after a C-level executive search for a manufacturing VP, you might assume the leader didn’t have the necessary technical expertise. Maybe their production metrics didn’t match the role, or their supply chain background was too narrow for your organization.
But most Plant and Operations Leaders have the right industry experience and functional expertise. They fail because they can’t build credibility and trust across departments.
The Basics of Cross-Functional Credibility
Cross-functional credibility involves earning trust and building genuine working relationships with people whose priorities, language, incentives, and goals may be different from yours. It’s delicate work and requires a combination of soft skills.
Clear communication is a big part of cross-functional credibility, along with the ability to adjust to your audience. A VP of Manufacturing who talks to everyone like they’re on the plant floor will struggle to collaborate with other departments. Working across functions requires flexible communication and problem-solving.
Whether your leader can integrate into your company depends on how they treat people. A production executive who treats supply chain conversations as someone else’s problem or resists collaboration creates tension and conflict between departments and slows down the whole operation. Cross-functional credibility requires your VP to take ownership, hold other leaders accountable, and facilitate collaboration.
Trust also grows between your leadership team as your head of manufacturing consistently collaborates and navigates with other departments. When they demonstrate that they will do what they say and expect everyone to respect one another as they do, your VP establishes the credibility they need to move between functions.
Cross-functional credibility requires your production executive to balance flexibility with reliability, ownership with collaboration, expertise with communication, and humility with authority. It’s not easy to define, though it’s obvious in action. A VP of manufacturing with the right combination of skills leads your entire organization, not just your operations.
The Intersection of Culture and Experience
The exact traits your VP of manufacturing needs depend on your company culture. Your organization has a specific communication style, a particular pace of decision-making, and a set of values that govern how conflict gets resolved and how trust gets established. A VP who thrives in one culture may never find their footing in another, regardless of how capable they are.
For example, a candidate who built cross-functional credibility in a highly hierarchical, process-heavy environment may not be able to bring departments together in a fast-moving organization that values speed and informal collaboration. They have real leadership experience, but the context is different.
That means you need to define what kind of leader can build alignment across departments in your organization. Good VP executive recruiters for manufacturing companies know that you should build consensus about a successful candidate by talking to the heads of the different departments, along with the stakeholders doing the hiring. You need a full picture of your culture and the dynamics the leader will navigate to recruit the right person. Then, you should vet each candidate’s style, goals, values, and skills to see if they align with the company’s culture.
An Executive Search for Cross-Functional Credibility
Evaluating candidates for cross-functional credibility begins by building consensus on the traits a leader needs to fit your culture and continues throughout the recruitment process. Here’s what screening for this essential trait looks like at different stages of the hiring process.
Resume Reviews
When you review resumes and job histories, look beyond titles. A title may not tell you whether a candidate built cross-functional trust or worked in isolation. But initiatives that require buy-in from other departments or lateral career moves are evidence that the candidate has the variety of experience needed to lead the whole manufacturing firm.
For example, you might prioritize a candidate who has worked with both supply chain/procurement and engineering. You might also focus on a candidate who has led transitions with a broad reach. Perhaps they championed a digital transformation that touched multiple departments and implemented new safety protocols company-wide.
Reference Checks
When candidates provide references, they often choose a supervisor with whom they worked well. But you can screen for cross-functional credibility by requesting a reference from a former peer, such as the CFO, or a former internal customer, like a Business Unit Leader.
Ask these references from other departments how the candidate reacted to collaboration. Focus on their response during a crisis. A leader who siloes their team to solve a problem may lack the instinct to collaborate as the VP of manufacturing.
Interviews
If you’re prepared with a good interview process, you can uncover many things that don’t show up in early screening. Questions to surface cross-functional credibility may include:
- Tell me about a time you had to build consensus with a team whose priorities fundamentally differed from yours. What did you do, and what got in the way?
- When introducing new technology or systems, how have you bridged the gap between IT’s technical requirements and your plant manager’s operational realities?
- Describe a situation where production needs conflicted with the commercial team’s commitment to a customer. How did you handle it, and how did it affect that relationship going forward?
- How have you managed tension between meeting immediate shipment deadlines and working with the Quality department to maintain compliance standards?
- Walk me through a capital investment you championed. How did you bring finance and engineering to an agreement, and where did the process break down?
- How have you shifted the company dynamics to soften a department that was initially resistant to working with your team?
The candidate’s answers reveal how they think about relationships and conflict, which are important to building alignment across an organization.
Peer Panels and Case Studies
It would be ideal to have every candidate take on the VP role in your company for a day or a week so you could see them in action. Using case studies and peer panels gives a way to watch leaders solve problems and interact with the rest of the leadership team.
During a leadership case study, propose a scenario where the plant is failing to meet delivery targets due to rising material costs, high labor turnover, and outdated IT systems. A candidate who suggests a purely operational fix demonstrates a more isolated mentality than the one who suggests working with HR, finance, procurement, and IT on an interdepartmental solution.
When you arrange for a panel of peers, ask each departmental head to compare the candidate to their area of expertise. For example, the VP of Sales should evaluate the leader’s customer-centric mindset, and the Head of Finance should evaluate the candidate’s financial literacy.
A peer panel may ask specific interview questions, craft hypothetical scenarios, or observe other interviews or case studies. The choice is up to your hiring team. But the more chances your leadership team has to interact with the candidate, the better you can observe their chemistry and credibility across functions.
Redo Your Process, Not Your Search
Hiring a manufacturing VP for their functional expertise is usually the fastest path to starting another executive search. Rather than wasting your time and money recruiting based on industry knowledge alone, redo your process.
Look for a leader with the right skills to build credibility across every function in your organization. Screening candidates’ abilities at every stage of the process means that those who make it to the final round have the cross-functional credibility to lead your entire manufacturing firm.
