Shift Mindsets: Embrace a learning mindset. This means shifting from a failure to a learning perspective is crucial for success. Learn from mistakes, innovate, and pivot.

Promote Curiosity: Your team needs you to create environments where experimentation is encouraged early on. This allows teams to test scenarios and discover innovative solutions without the pressure of immediate consequences.

Build Psychological Safety: A psychologically safe environment fosters trust and curiosity, key elements in driving innovation. For example capability centers offer risk-free environments where teams can fail fast and learn quickly.

Invest in Capabilities: Help your team by building critical skills in problem-solving, product design, and digital technologies to raise the bar as a team and stay competitive.

Overcome Resistance: Executives must identify and empower the right team members who are willing to drive the move forward, ensuring alignment across the organization.

Celebrate success & failure: Recognizing and celebrating small wins can boost motivation and drive continuous improvement. Celebrating failures will encourage the team to experiment.

By adopting these strategies, organizations can turn the fear of failure into a powerful catalyst for innovation and long-term success.

Would you like to discuss how this applies to your business?

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I recently worked with a client where the marketing and eCommerce teams struggled with role clarity. Team members flagged early on that unclear responsibilities were causing bottlenecks.

Why did this happen? Business targets weren’t met, and talents left, leaving roles unfilled. Instead of redefining the structure, the team divided responsibilities informally, taking on work that needed doing. As a consequence, accountability blurred, making execution slow and frustrating.

When Organisational Design Fails

This situation can also occur when businesses and organisations grow organically. Teams aren’t structured to align with business goals and strategies. The result?

• Projects took longer than necessary

• The same deliverable is worked by different teams

• Multiple people are needed even for simple tasks

• The team lacked focus and ownership

If your team is reinventing processes or is struggling with execution, it may be a sign that the organisational design may not be working.

Fixing the Problem: A Strategic Approach

To address these challenges, we mapped the existing structure, visualising who was responsible for what. Seeing the spread on paper made the problem undeniable. The team needed a structure that reflected:

1. The business goals, priorities and the business model

2. The strategies to achieve them (consumer-centricity, brand-building, innovation, eCommerce excellence, and competitive pricing & promotions)

We assessed two different ways to organise the team, benchmarking against comparable businesses. Two organisational principles stood out:

1. Consumer-Centric Structure – Aligning roles with key consumer needs or groups

2. Lifecycle-Based Structure – Structuring teams around different stages of the customer journey

Given the company’s business model and go-to-market strategy, we implemented a lifecycle-based approach.

The New Organisational Model

The team was restructured into five key roles:

1. Brand Awareness – Content & communication

2. Performance Marketing –Paid media, digital campaigns, retargeting & CRO support

3. Demand & Ecom – Ensuring strong eCommerce fundamentals and optimising the purchase experience

4. Retention & Advocacy– Strengthening customer loyalty and driving repeat purchases

5. Product Management & Innovation – Leading product launches and optimising existing product portfolio

If your team is not achieving the business goals and facing execution bottlenecks, it might be an organisational design challenge.

Would you like to discuss how this applies to your business?

 Let’s connect

After 12 years working for Procter & Gamble, I was offered an amazing opportunity: to become Brand General Manager of KIKO MILANO, a family-owned monobrand cosmetics retailer based in Bergamo. So, I jumped from this big blue chip and changed all vectors at once: country, firm, category, and level. It’s been a wonderful hell of a ride, delivering the #businessturnaround and shaping an organization, here is what I learned on this journey:

1. Passion and willpower are unbeatable trumps

   When I joined, the company was in a challenging financial situation. From day one, my team demonstrated an incredible passion and love for the business, and the brand, an openness to learn, and a willingness to do what it takes to deliver the business turnaround. This allowed us to build new capabilities, amongst others: consumer understanding, a brand strategy and positioning, 360° marketing campaigns, and new ways of working – multi-functionally and with the local teams – within less than a year.

2. Strategy is gold, execution rules

   Clear strategic thinking and choices were vital for the business turnaround. Being entrepreneurial and open to learning from executions allowed us to improve speedily. Testing elements of the brand positioning in execution on social media enabled us to receive direct consumer feedback swiftly. We learned fast how to bring the brand to life – and how not to.

3. Having a real impact is incredibly rewarding

   Being part of the executive leadership team allowed me to shape the business, brand, culture, and organization. It also allowed me to be the final decision-maker. Having real responsibility filled me with pride and was for sure motivating.

4. Magic happens when you work together

   In my previous roles, I had been taught to lead people by an objective and to let the team come up with a solution. However sometimes, especially if talents are asked to do something for the first time, people can feel in need of support or orientation, so working together with the team is the better way.

5. The fundamentals stay the same

   Whether you are working in a big or a small firm, the success drivers are the same – just to name a few: having the right talents, customer orientation, fostering a learning culture, a clear and databased vision and strategy, a winning proposition and relevant & 360° marketing communication.