The era of the functional organization of our lifetime is now experiencing a low hours path.
The insolent emergence of the digital world into business has highlighted, among other issues, the obsolescence of the traditional model of functional organization based in silos.
To show this, we need to think about how the organization of marketing teams has changed, in many cases passing from an on/off model, to a model organized by types of customers, and even to the most customer-centric, the matrix, where channel managers or channel coordinators are also responsible for customer projects.
In my experience, the third case is highly recommended in dynamic environments and that need to react quickly to environment developments, typical in markets with a high level of competitiveness.
Besides the advantages that this approach presents to the customer, it is also very advantageous to the organization, and in particular to the most important asset of organizations: people who work in them.
This type of hybrid structure sacrifices control and supervision in favor of the autonomy and decision-making capacity of those teams.
Obviously, this gets more important when there are senior teams, as it is very motivating and enriching to manage projects comprehensively, getting to have full responsibility for the result of it, which obviously gets people to commit much more with those projects they are involved in, since they are the most responsible for the decisions made.
As long as people are involved in the decision-making process in the project, and not only receive precise instructions on what to do, they found a “generous” space where they can develop their full potential and therefore having the opportunity to become visible to the organization.
In recent years, the impact of the big-data in business is being enormous, and it is increasingly common to find people’s profiles trained in statistics, mathematics, etc., profiles which are essential to set up more complex segmentation models and which result in better outcomes for the organization.
This also has made managers have to reconvert themselves to be able to interpret higher and higher amount of data that’s increasingly sophisticated.
 
Author:
Héctor Premuda Conti
CDO, Head of Marketing Spain & Portugal
Cinesa