Marketing Structure? Or Marketing Rupture?
How to ensure the evolution of your marketing function works in practice- not just on paper.
Since @Wingmaven first took flight, one of our most common customer requests has been to figure out why a new or updated marketing org design isn’t landing like the leadership had envisioned . Leaders have thought long and hard about evolving their function, and often structure changes have been up to 6 months in the making- so why aren’t they hitting the mark when it comes to team engagement and performance?
Much as we love the challenge of helping marketing leaders remedy the situation and get the train back on the tracks- we’d love to see org designs land the first time. Here’s a few common trip-hazards we’re observing, that if avoided can greatly improve your chances of a future-fit org design- rather than org decline.
Trying to emulate ‘best practice’
Spoiler alert. There’s no perfect marketing org design model. Certainly not one that fits all businesses, at all points of their lifestage and marketing maturity. It’s critical to figure out what the role of marketing is in your business, right now- and also how it can best support business ambitions going forward. If you start out using someone else’s design as the north star, because it’s been touted as ‘best practice’... you’re already behind the eight ball.
Addressing symptoms rather than root cause
Even after a discovery process has been run, we’ve seen multiple cases where org design has been kicked off immediately following, without going deeper to look beyond the symptoms to find the root cause. This can result in a ‘bandaid structure’, where lots of small changes are applied causing a tonne of disruption, but providing only short term relief. Pausing to zoom out and identify the handful of systemic issues that are at the heart of 80% of the structural challenge, and using these to guide your next steps is essential if you want to ensure every change you make delivers lasting benefit.
Designing in a vacuum
Marketing is not an island. To be effective, it needs to operate within the business ecosystem that surrounds it, so considering what this looks like today (as well as any imminent changes) is critical. Engaging stakeholders on where they see opportunities for improvement in the ways your teams intersect (though try to avoid asking what they think the solution is!) is hugely important to its success in practice.
And while we’re at it, note that the org structure is only the first 10% of the challenge. If you don’t address the operating model- how works flows between teams with accountabilities as mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive as humanly possible- you’ll almost certainly end up with something that generates more outrage than outcomes.
Short-changing change management
The best-designed structures can all crumble in implementation if you don’t start the change process from day one. And we don’t mean day one of implementation. We mean day one of discovery. Being upfront with your team that a review process is about to commence, and providing clarity on why it’s necessary- and what’s in it for them, the function and the business- is fundamental. As is providing a timeline, guidance on how they will be proactively engaged and can give feedback/ask questions, and how you will communicate with them along the way.
We know there will be people that baulk at this- ‘we don’t want to upset the applecart prematurely’. But we’ve seen what happens when these things happen under cover of darkness and then a new structure is suddenly revealed before plunging headlong into formal consultation. It ain’t pretty. And the odds of losing your best talent as a result of broken trust go through the roof.
Engaging the ‘experts’
We’re not going to name names (but if we did they’d mostly be acronyms). But time and again we are bamboozled as to why leaders are talked into forking out their hard-earned budget to generalist career consultants who have never worked within a marketing team, let alone led one. It’s like choosing a mechanic who has never actually touched a car, just read lots of manuals. The amount of theoretical guff we’ve encountered (the rise of the ‘fat t-shaped marketer’ being just one!) is astounding. We're not saying engaging external help isn’t valuable- there’s definitely a lot to be said for bringing in dedicated capacity as well as perspective/objectivity. But the wrong guidance is absolutely worse than no guidance at all.
It’s a lot to take in, we know! Especially when you’re trying to evolve your function AND run your function day to day. But this is 100% a case of you get out what you put in.
With decades of marketing leadership and in-house transformation under our belts, we’ve got lots of ‘real world’ experience and lessons learned we’re happy to share. As well as more than a few pointers on how to realise your org design ambitions. So if you’d like to chat more about how to avoid common pitfalls and ensure you’re creating a pragmatic and high-performing functional evolution, feel free to drop us a line!
