When Is Your VP of Operations the Problem, and Not the Solution?
- Philip Lamb
- 7 days ago
- 7 min read
Your VP of Operations is the problem, and not the solution, when a clear-eyed diagnosis shows the failure is theirs and not the system's, when the KPIs are sliding on factors within their control, and when they are protecting stability while the business needs them to drive growth, but you cannot know any of that until you run the diagnosis, because operations problems are caused by a broken system at least as often as by a broken leader. The instinct when the plant is missing numbers is to look at the person running it. Sometimes that's right. Just as often, you are about to fire the one person holding a broken system together.
This matters more in operations than almost anywhere else, because operational decline is quiet and cumulative. It rarely announces itself. It starts with one metric slipping, then another, and by the time the problem is undeniable, months and margin are already gone. The temptation is to grab the most visible lever, the VP, and pull it, before anyone has actually diagnosed what's wrong.
PRL International is a retained executive search firm serving Pittsburgh and Western Pennsylvania, specializing in senior-level placements in energy, manufacturing, and mid-market companies. In more than 30 years of placing operations leaders, we have found that a meaningful share of the VPs of Operations companies want to fire were inheriting a broken system, a misaligned strategy, or a capacity problem that no leader could have solved alone. This post is how you tell the difference before you act.
Is It Your VP of Operations, or Is It the System They're Running?
The first question to ask before concluding your VP of Operations is the problem is whether the failure belongs to the leader or to the system they are running, because a structurally broken operation, wrong layout, aging equipment, a misaligned strategy, will sink even an excellent operations leader, and replacing them does nothing to fix the structure. This is the diagnosis most companies skip, and skipping it is how they cycle through two or three operations VPs without ever fixing the actual problem.
The discipline here comes straight from manufacturing's own quality tradition. A systems diagnosis, the approach W. Edwards Deming pioneered, exists precisely because performance problems are usually system problems wearing a person's face. The danger is looking too narrowly. A single leader, unless they are the CEO, rarely owns the complete end-to-end process, so they account for what they personally oversee and downplay what peers in other departments control. If you diagnose the operation by accepting one person's account, the VP's or anyone's, you will get a distorted picture. The frontline often knows the real root cause better than the executives do, if anyone bothers to ask them.
"A bad system will beat a good person every time."
Deming's line is the entire diagnosis in eight words. If your operation has a bad system, a strong VP of Operations will still miss the numbers, because the system beats the person. Fire that VP and the numbers do not improve, because the system is still there, now being run by someone newer and less familiar with it. We made the parallel argument about sales leadership in the post on why you should ask these questions before you replace your VP of Sales, and the logic holds even harder in operations, where the systems are physical, expensive, and slow to change.
So the honest first question is not "is my VP good." It is "did my VP inherit a healthy operation and break it, or inherit a broken one and fail to fix it fast enough?" Those are different failures, and only one of them is solved by a new hire.
What KPIs Actually Tell You Whether Operations Is Failing?
The KPIs that tell you whether operations is genuinely failing are the operational vital signs, throughput, OEE, equipment utilization, delivery performance, margin, and employee turnover, read together and over time, because any one of them in isolation can mislead, and the pattern across them is what reveals whether the problem is real, where it lives, and how long it has been building. Numbers, not impressions, are how you take operations out of the realm of gut feel.
Read the leading indicators first. A drop in throughput, a dip in overall equipment effectiveness, or a lag in delivery performance are early warning signals, not minor blips. Equipment utilization stuck below 60 percent when the demand is there is a particularly loud red flag, it means you are underperforming with tools you already own, which points to planning, downtime, or demand misalignment. Declining profit margins are both a symptom and an accelerant, as margins fall there is less to reinvest, which degrades quality and output further. And watch employee turnover closely, in a plant, rising turnover is one of the most reliable early signals that something is wrong, because the people doing the work feel the dysfunction long before it shows up in the financials.
Here is the trap, and it is the most common mistake manufacturers make: waiting too long. The decline gets labeled seasonal or temporary, the hope is that it self-corrects, and it almost never does. It starts quietly with one metric down, then another, quality slips, schedules tighten, morale sags, and by the time the board notices, six months and real margin are gone. The KPIs were flashing the whole time. The failure was not reading them early and honestly.
But here is the crucial part for diagnosing the VP specifically: a good operations leader uses these exact KPIs to tell you what is happening and why. If your VP can show you which metric moved first, trace it to a root cause, and tell you whether it is a system issue or an execution issue, that is a VP doing their job, even if the numbers are bad. If your VP cannot tell you why the numbers are sliding, that absence of diagnosis is itself a data point about the leader. We wrote about how the numbers around the role itself look in the post on what a VP of Operations really makes in a mid-market Pittsburgh company.
When Is the VP of Operations Genuinely the Problem?
The VP of Operations is genuinely the problem when the diagnosis clears the system and the strategy, when they cannot explain or trace the failures in their own numbers, and above all when they are defending stability while the business needs them to enable growth, because that last misalignment is the one that quietly caps a company and is squarely the leader's responsibility. Once you have ruled out the system, these are the signals that point at the person.
The clearest one is strategic misalignment. When a company's growth goals are not connected to its operational capacity, operations defaults to protecting stability, keeping the plant running smoothly as it always has, and that creates drift when the VP's definition of success no longer matches the CEO's. A VP of Operations who is running a clean, stable plant while the company is trying to scale, and who treats every growth initiative as a threat to that stability, is not solving your problem. They are, however unintentionally, becoming it. The right operations leader links capacity planning to the strategy and makes it proactive. The wrong one optimizes for a steady state the business has already outgrown.
The second signal is the absence of diagnostic ownership. A capable operations leader, when the numbers slip, comes to you with the root cause and a plan. A VP who comes to you with excuses, blames other departments without owning the cross-functional coordination, or simply cannot tell you why throughput fell, is showing you they are not on top of the operation. After you have ruled out a genuinely broken system, that inability to diagnose is the leader's failure, not the system's.
And the third is the durable people signal. If turnover is climbing among your best operators and supervisors specifically, and it traces to how the operation is led rather than to pay or market conditions, that is a leadership problem. Good people leave bad bosses faster than they leave bad pay. When the diagnosis points here, a change is genuinely warranted, and the goal becomes finding an operations leader who fixes the system rather than just inheriting it.
If You Do Need to Replace Them, How Do You Find an Operations Leader Who Fixes the System?
If the diagnosis genuinely points to the leader and you need to replace your VP of Operations, you find a replacement who fixes the system, rather than just runs it, through a search that defines the specific operational challenge first and then targets leaders who have solved that exact kind of problem, because the right operations VP for a turnaround is a different profile than the one for a stable plant or a scaling one. Replacing the person without matching them to the actual problem just resets the cycle with a new face.
Define the real challenge before you search. An operations leader who can stabilize a struggling plant is not necessarily the one who can scale a healthy one, and the one who can drive a growth-stage capacity buildout is different again. The KPIs and the diagnosis you just ran tell you which problem you are actually hiring against, and that definition becomes the profile. A search that skips this step and hires a generic "strong operations executive" is how companies end up replacing the same way they replaced before. We walked through that profile-first discipline in the post on what a confidential director of operations search looks like in a mid-market company.
Then reach the right people, who are almost never the ones looking. The operations leaders worth hiring are running plants successfully somewhere else right now and are not on the job market, so finding them takes direct, targeted outreach rather than a posting, the core of how a retained search works. Because operations leadership in manufacturing is a specialized field, sector fit matters enormously, and we covered why in the post on why mid-market manufacturing plants keep getting the leadership hire wrong. For the broader process, our mid-market executive search guide lays it out.
The bottom line: do not fire your VP of Operations until you have run the diagnosis, because the system is the culprit at least as often as the leader. But when the diagnosis clears the system and points at the person, especially when they are guarding stability while you need growth, act, and replace them with a leader matched to the actual problem. The most expensive operations hire is the one that swaps the leader while the broken system stays exactly where it was.
If you are ready to fill a senior role or want to talk through your search, reach out at prlinternational.com/contact
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