Restructuring from the Inside Out: A Marketing Organization Transformation

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A VP of Marketing running a 15-person team in service of 700 people who relied on marketing services reached out to Cadre with a clear mandate: help her find the breakthroughs her group needed. She had hunches about restructuring, had heard the whispers, and sensed the need for change. What she wanted was an outside perspective to either validate those instincts or challenge them with real data.

Challenge

The math of the situation was demanding. Fifteen people serving 700 left no room for inefficiency, misaligned roles, or internal friction that went unaddressed. The VP knew her organization well enough to know something needed to change, but internal leaders are rarely positioned to surface the full picture on their own. People say different things to their boss than they say to a neutral outside party, and some things don't get said at all until someone creates the conditions for honesty.

The team had frustrations that hadn't been voiced. There were tensions between team members and between the team and leadership that had settled into the background rather than being worked through. And of the 3,000 people in the broader organization, roughly 700 were meaningfully interacting with marketing services on a regular basis — each with their own experiences and pain points that no one had formally gathered.

Strategy and Solution

Cadre opened the engagement with a fully anonymous, in-person Voice of Employee exercise, interviewing all 15 members of the marketing team individually. The anonymity was deliberate. It created the conditions for people to say what they actually thought about leadership, about internal processes, about how the work was getting done, and about what was working well and worth protecting. Clear themes emerged across the interviews: real frustrations, but also genuine strengths the organization had every reason to build on.

Cadre then ran two quantitative surveys in parallel. One went to approximately 60 stakeholders outside the marketing group who interact regularly with marketing processes, capturing the external experience of how the team shows up to the broader organization. The other went to the marketing team itself, adding a quantitative layer on top of the qualitative interviews and sharpening the picture of where the priorities were.

With all three data sources in hand, Cadre facilitated a full-day working session with the marketing group. The session walked through the findings across all surveys, created space for the team to engage with the data honestly, and produced breakthrough conversations that hadn't happened before. Barriers came down between team members and between the team and their leader. Problems that had lived in the background were named, discussed, and worked through in a structured setting. The energy coming out of the day was markedly different from what had walked in the door that morning.

From there, Cadre developed a new organizational design built on the findings. The data made a clear case that the team was understaffed in specific areas, and Cadre used that empirical evidence to support the business case for creating new roles. The restructuring addressed both how the team was organized and where it needed to grow, giving the VP the grounded justification needed to bring those requests to leadership with confidence. Cadre also identified and drove a set of process improvement opportunities surfaced during the engagement, then stayed on in a project management capacity for four to six months to make sure the changes actually took hold.

Impact and Results

• All 15 marketing team members interviewed anonymously, surfacing honest themes leadership could not have gathered on their own
• 60 external stakeholders from the 700-person user base surveyed, adding the outside-in perspective on how the marketing team was experienced
• Empirical evidence used to build the business case for new role creation, giving the VP grounded justification to bring headcount requests to leadership
• Full-day working session produced breakthrough conversations and broke down barriers between team members and with leadership
• New organizational design developed and implemented, built to better serve the 700 key stakeholders and operate more effectively within the broader 3,000-person organization
• Process improvement opportunities identified and driven to completion
• Cadre personnel embedded for four to six months post-summit to sustain momentum and see the changes through

Going Forward

The marketing team entered the engagement feeling the weight of an organization that had outgrown its structure. They left with a redesigned team, a clearer set of processes, and a set of relationships that had been repaired in ways that mattered for the work. The VP's instincts were right. What Cadre added was the rigor to prove it, the facilitation to surface what had gone unsaid, and the staying power to see the implementation through.

When a leader senses that something needs to change but needs more than a hunch to act on, Cadre is built for exactly that conversation.