The first time I had to restructure a marketing team, I thought it was fundamentally a resourcing question. Who do we need, what can we afford, what do we stop doing.

It took me longer than I'd like to admit to realise that restructuring is almost never a resourcing question. It's a culture question wearing a spreadsheet.

The people in a marketing team know, often before the leader does, whether a transformation is real or performative. They've seen the deck before. They've heard the language about investment and capability building for growth. What they're watching for is whether the behaviour changes, whether decisions get made differently, whether the things that used to take six weeks of approval suddenly move, whether the conversations about what marketing is actually for shift in dynamic, and whether they are still pushed to deliver on the same measures as before.

What I've learned through experience and confirmed in numerous peer conversations, is that the structural change is actually the easy part. The hard part is the culture and permission structure that sits underneath it.

Most marketing functions operate with an implicit permission structure that nobody talks about. Who can push back and on what. Whose instincts get trusted. Which decisions actually need sign-off and which are escalated for approval out of habit. A restructure that doesn't disturb the permission structure doesn't change anything that matters.

A pattern I see repeatedly makes this harder: significant organisational change gets agreed at the top, but the communication and workflow of that change downward to leaders and teams is poorly handled.

Trilliad’s Sustainable Growth Study found 44% of B2B leaders see poor coordination across internal teams - not economics, competitors, or technology - as the biggest barrier to scaling their business.

Strategy gets the attention. The human journey through it doesn't. While ownership of the change narrative gets debated, the actual work of helping teams shift, course-correct and build new ways of working goes largely unaddressed.

A conversation I had recently crystallised something I’d been observing for years: What's usually missing is a thread-holder - someone who can guide, coach and connect people through transformation, bridging the gap between strategic intent and team reality. Without that, the permission structure never changes, whatever the org chart says.

Honestly appraising the structure is uncomfortable work. It requires looking at your own relationship with budget and peers, and whether your team is genuinely showing up as a commercial discipline, not just a marketing function.

And that reframing starts with the leader. Marketing attracts people who care about the craft, who have views on the work, and who are creative and innovative thinkers. Asking them to think commercially first isn't a demotion of that, but not supporting the ask with permission or space to explore beyond the execution and ROI of specific tactics can feel like one.

The other thing I've learned is that transformation is fragile for longer than you expect. You don't get to declare it done. The organisations that actually change are the ones that treat it as a constant practice - looking for the 1–2% adjustments that accumulate into something real, rather than waiting for the moment of clean reinvention that almost never arrives.

What has worked for me is going deeper than the transformation ask - engaging teams directly to surface what's broken, not just what's working. Taking time early to explore team strengths and internal barriers to success does two things: it focuses attention on the real underlying issues rather than the symptoms, and it builds the culture of collaboration and trust that makes change stick. That requires psychological safety, usually forged by a leadership team that visibly takes responsibility for what went wrong, not just credit for what worked.

I've been in rooms where that culture exists, and rooms where it absolutely doesn't. The difference in team engagement and motivation to contribute to positive change is marked. The difference in the quality of thinking, and ultimately in commercial output, is significant.

If you're leading a marketing transformation and want to think through the organisational and cultural design questions that don't show up in the strategy deck, I'm always open to a conversation.

Authentec Advisory | Marketing with impact. Leadership that lasts.