Chief supply chain officer skills: what companies look for, and what candidates get wrong, by Radu Palamariu

About Radu Palamariu

Group CEO of Alcott Global, an executive search firm for supply chain, logistics and operations leadership, and co-author with Knut Alicke of From Source to Sold. A psychologist by training, he moved from management consulting to executive search in Singapore and has placed C-level supply chain leaders across Europe and Asia for 15 years. Listen to the episode.

Three things, in this order

Ask a headhunter who has filled chief supply chain officer roles for 15 years what companies look for, and the answer comes in three parts, and the order matters.

"Hard skills, soft skills, tech," says Radu Palamariu. "You need all three."

The hard skills are the baseline: exposure across plan, procure, make and deliver. "If you want to be a chief supply chain officer, chief operations officer, you should have had exposure to the different facets of supply chain." The soft skills are what decide between candidates who all have that. And the third element is newer: "Do you understand what technology can do for you, and do you know how to find and surround yourself with people that can help you deploy that technology?"

Here is what he said about each, what the best leaders he has placed have in common, what candidates get wrong in the room, and what companies get wrong when they hire.

The soft skills have a name: CHAIN

From Source to Sold distilled the profile of a top chief supply chain officer into five attributes. "C is for collaboration, H is for holistic, A is for adaptable, I for influence and N for narrative." All five sit on the soft-skill side.

Radu's point is that the pace of change makes them more important, not less. "Change has been fastest than it has ever been. It's probably going to be the slowest it has ever been at the same time." A leader who can collaborate, see the whole chain, adapt, influence and tell the story is the one who can carry an organisation through that.

What the most successful leaders have in common

Radu gives four practical patterns from the people who made it to the top.

First, they network, inside and outside the company. His example is a C-level executive who asked him: "You get to see a lot of candidates for CSCOs, how do I fare against some of the best ones? What do I need to do to be even better?" One question that showed both networking and constant improvement. "You need to know the different people and stakeholders in the organisation that can fast track your career."

Second, international experience. "If you want to make it in a C-level, in a global company, you should have international exposure, and that typically I would define by having worked on at least two continents."

Third, mentors, plural. "A mentor can fast track your career by a lot. It's like a personal trainer: they can see things that you can't see." His advice is to be bold about asking. "Say, look, I'm aspiring to be a chief supply chain officer myself. What do I need to do to one day follow in your footsteps?"

Fourth, they talk business. More on that below, because it is also the profession's biggest weakness.

Results are the hygiene factor. How you present them is the skill

Wim asked why results didn't make the list. They do, Radu says, but as the entry ticket. "You can't demonstrate results if you don't have them. But the key part is how you present your results. Companies don't care about all the things you have done. They care about the things you have done that are linked to the pain points they need to fix."

The story that changed how he briefs candidates is 12 years old. A C-level candidate with "excellent pedigree, excellent results" came out of the interview sure he had aced it. "I told them all that I have done." The client's feedback: "He could not stop talking, Radu. He is not for us."

Since then, every candidate gets the same briefing before every interview, however senior. "Ask what are the key challenges about this role? What are the key objectives? How will you measure success in 18 to 36 months?" Listen first, then show the results that match. "I thought most people would do this. I could not be more wrong. Common sense is not common practice."

Own your narrative, or someone else will

Supply chain leaders tend to be technical and introverted, Ben observed. Does that work against them? "If you don't tell your own narrative of how you bring value to the organisation, for sure somebody else will, and you may not like it."

Everyone in a company has an opinion about what supply chain should do, Radu says, in a way they don't about finance. "If the CFO or the sales or whoever tells your narrative, then they'll dictate how much budget you have, how much influence you have, how much scope you have."

His example is a friend who became chief supply chain officer and spent his first six months "nonstop networking" internally: first agreeing one narrative of how supply chain brings value with his own team, then telling it to finance, sales, marketing and the CEO. Three years later he is chief supply chain and transformation officer with the ear of the CEO. "He worked on it and he was very intentional about it."

The profession's biggest weakness

Radu is direct about where supply chain executives lose the board. "A big chunk of chief supply chain officers think that technical expertise, and they're too in love with their jargon and their supply chain acronyms. When you go to a board, nobody cares if you start presenting network utilisation. They care about: did you help us increase the business, did you save cost. Talk business."

The cautionary tale is a friend called into a non-executive board meeting during a disruption. "I went into the call and I couldn't stop talking about warehouse here, fill rate there, how much we use of the network. I could see the rest of the room falling asleep." He was not invited to the next one.

Before you take the job, check the company

An interview is also a sales process from the company's side, so Radu's one question for every candidate is: what happened to the last person, and why is this role open? "You don't want to be entering a building on fire. Unless you want that."

Then do what the company does to you: a reference check. "Just like the company will do background checks on you, talk to some people within the company or that know the company, maybe it's a vendor, and get a sense of what's going on." He has seen a candidate join and discover from the books that the company would be bust in six months. "That's what can prevent a very costly career decision."

What companies get wrong

"A lot of times it's more of the same. The missing part is courage." The typical brief is to look at the competitors and find the best. Alcott pushes back: look at one or two profiles from an adjacent industry with the same complexity. For a medical devices head of logistics, that meant electronics, automotive and semiconductor equipment. In medical devices more broadly, "we've had very good success placing FMCG people, used to lower margins, high competition, fast velocity. By and large all of the candidates we placed have made a significant difference."

The second mistake is hiring for change and then not allowing it. "No good to bring somebody from Amazon and then not allow them to do anything. The person will leave frustrated in six to 12 months."

And the profile that is hardest to find today is not someone to run the old organisation well. In a global search for a procurement leader at a company with more than 40 billion in spend, briefed to transform buying with AI, the number of candidates who had actually done it, not planned it, was one. "You can say it's unicorn hunting."

Your next steps

• Before your next interview, write down the three questions and ask them: what are the key challenges of the role, what are the objectives, how will success be measured in 18 to 36 months. Then match your results to the answers.
• Write your own one-paragraph narrative of how supply chain brings value to your business, agree it with your team, and tell it to finance, sales and the CEO before they tell theirs.
• Strip the jargon from your next board slide. If a line doesn't say growth, cost, cash or risk, rewrite it.
• Ask two people to be your mentors this quarter, and say what you are aiming for.
• Spend five to ten percent of your time at small, closed-door events with peers from other industries, not the big stages.
• If you are hiring: add one cross-industry profile to every shortlist, and decide before the offer what the new leader will be allowed to change.

Radu's own summary of the three requirements is the shortest version of the episode: "Hard skills, soft skills, tech. If you only know technology and you don't have the influencing skills and the people skills, you can't implement it."