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Leadership Trends
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SCOPE News
Friddy Hoegener
16 September 2025
If tariffs, regulations, and global geopolitical shifts aren't on your leadership team's agenda, your business is already operating at risk. The question isn't whether the next disruption will happen—it's whether your leadership team has the global experience to navigate it successfully.
According to McKinsey's 2024 Global Supply Chain Leader Survey, 90% of supply chain leaders faced significant challenges this year alone. Yet only 30% of executives believe their boards truly understand supply chain risks. This disconnect between boardroom awareness and operational reality is creating dangerous leadership gaps just when companies need the most experienced global leaders.
The companies succeeding in this environment aren't just weathering disruptions—they're building leadership capabilities that turn regulatory challenges into competitive advantages.
Global regulatory changes now happen faster than many companies can adapt. When U.S. regulations suddenly prohibit certain components from China, or when new EU sustainability directives require complete supply chain transparency, companies don't get transition periods—they get compliance deadlines.
This reality demands leaders who understand regulatory landscapes across multiple jurisdictions, not just operational efficiency. The difference between companies that thrive and those that struggle often comes down to whether they have leaders who saw these changes coming and prepared accordingly.
The most effective supply chain leaders don't just ensure compliance—they use regulatory knowledge as a strategic advantage. They understand how tariff structures will affect sourcing decisions, how sustainability requirements will reshape supplier relationships, and how geopolitical tensions will influence facility locations.
This type of strategic thinking requires leaders with experience navigating complex international regulations, not just domestic supply chain optimization.
Many companies have supply chain leaders with excellent operational track records—but exclusively domestic or single-region experience. When global disruptions hit, these leaders find themselves managing challenges they've never encountered: navigating international trade law, managing currency fluctuations, understanding cultural differences in business practices, or coordinating across time zones during crisis response.
The pandemic and subsequent disruptions revealed how quickly single-market expertise becomes insufficient when supply chains span continents and regulatory environments.
As companies evaluate reshoring and nearshoring strategies, they need leaders who can assess not just cost implications, but the full complexity of geographic transitions: regulatory requirements in new markets, workforce availability and training needs, supplier ecosystem development, and infrastructure capabilities.
Many domestic operations leaders have never managed international relocations or built supplier networks from scratch in new geographic markets. This experience gap becomes costly when companies need to execute complex geographic transitions while maintaining operational continuity.
Modern supply chain leaders need fluency in regulatory frameworks across their operating regions. This includes understanding how changes in trade policies will affect sourcing strategies, staying current with evolving sustainability and compliance requirements, and building relationships with regulatory bodies before issues arise.
As recognized by Advisory Excellence, the most effective executive search processes now prioritize candidates with proven experience managing complex regulatory environments across multiple jurisdictions.
Global supply chain transformations require different change management skills than domestic operational improvements. Leaders must coordinate across cultures, legal systems, and business practices while managing stakeholder expectations in multiple countries simultaneously.
This includes managing workforce transitions during reshoring initiatives, coordinating supplier transitions across different regulatory environments, and maintaining operational performance during major geographic shifts.
Traditional supply chain risk management focused on supplier performance and logistics optimization. Modern risk management requires understanding geopolitical trends, regulatory trajectories, and macroeconomic factors that affect global trade flows.
The most effective leaders build risk management frameworks that account for political stability, regulatory predictability, and long-term strategic positioning—not just operational efficiency.
As our recent podcast on third-party risk management highlighted, companies often overlook the full lifecycle of vendor relationships. In a global context, this oversight becomes exponentially more dangerous. When suppliers operate across multiple jurisdictions, data flows cross borders, and regulatory compliance requirements vary by country, traditional risk management approaches fall short.
Global supply chain leaders must understand how vendor relationships create exposure across different regulatory frameworks and how to manage risk when partners operate under different legal and business standards.
The Volkswagen data breach example from the podcast (where a former vendor with retained customer data suffered a security incident) illustrates how risk extends beyond active business relationships. In global operations, this complexity multiplies: former vendors may retain data under different privacy laws, terminated suppliers may still have access to proprietary processes, and regulatory requirements for data handling vary significantly by jurisdiction.
Leaders with global experience understand these extended risk scenarios and build frameworks that address them proactively.
Deloitte research on supply chain resilience shows that 86.2% of manufacturers have worked to de-risk their supply chains in the last two years, with ongoing disruptions continuing to create extended lead times and delivery challenges. The most successful organizations build adaptive capabilities that allow them to respond quickly to unforeseen challenges.
This requires leaders who think systematically about scenario planning, maintain relationships across multiple geographic markets, and understand how regional disruptions can cascade globally.
Modern supply chain leadership isn't just about logistics—it's about integrating operational excellence with regulatory compliance, risk management, sustainability initiatives, and strategic positioning. This requires leaders who can balance multiple priorities simultaneously while maintaining operational performance.
Global supply chain transformations require building capabilities within organizations, not just hiring external leaders. The most effective global leaders focus on developing internal talent with international experience, creating succession plans that account for global capabilities, and building knowledge-sharing frameworks across geographic regions.
Finding leaders with genuine global supply chain experience requires specialized recruiting approaches. These candidates often aren't actively looking for new opportunities, may be located internationally, and require evaluation criteria that go beyond traditional operational metrics.
Working with specialized executive recruiters who understand global supply chain leadership becomes essential. The right recruiting partners can identify candidates with the regulatory navigation skills, change management experience, and risk mitigation capabilities that global operations demand.
Companies that invest in global supply chain leadership capabilities early gain significant competitive advantages. They can capitalize on regulatory changes that constrain competitors, execute geographic transitions more efficiently, and maintain operational continuity during disruptions.
This leadership investment becomes particularly valuable when regulatory or geopolitical changes create opportunities for companies with the right capabilities to capture market share from less-prepared competitors.
Every month companies delay investing in global leadership capabilities, they become more vulnerable to regulatory changes, geopolitical tensions, and competitive disadvantages. The companies that wait until disruption forces their hand consistently pay higher costs and face longer recovery times.
The most successful companies treat global supply chain leadership as a strategic investment, not a crisis response. They build capabilities before they need them, establish regulatory relationships before issues arise, and create risk management frameworks that prevent problems rather than just solve them.
This proactive approach requires recognizing that global supply chain leadership is fundamentally different from domestic operations management—and making investment decisions accordingly.
Global disruption isn't slowing down—it's accelerating. Trade tensions, regulatory complexity, sustainability requirements, and geopolitical instability are permanent features of the modern business environment. The companies that build global supply chain leadership capabilities now will be positioned to thrive in this environment.
Those that continue operating with leadership teams designed for stable, single-market environments will find themselves constantly reacting to challenges they should have anticipated. The choice isn't whether to invest in global leadership capabilities—it's whether to do it proactively or reactively.
Ready to build the global supply chain leadership your organization needs? Contact our team to discuss how we can help you identify and attract leaders who don't just manage operations—they navigate global complexity and turn disruption into competitive advantage.
Want to learn more about supply chain risk management? We explore third-party risk mitigation, vendor lifecycle management, and the compliance challenges that global leaders must navigate in our Procurement Pulse podcast. Subscribe to our channel for insights on building resilient supply chain operations in an increasingly complex regulatory environment.
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