In one of the most diverse and varied marketplaces, senior executives in the Asia Pacific region face complex challenges in developing an efficient organizational structure. Should companies group their business units geographically? By function? How decentralized should decision-making be? In order to gain insight into the unique strategies for confronting these questions, I sought out the expertise of Valmont’s Asia Pacific senior management team, who has successfully navigated a large acquisition to meet growth and profitability targets in Asia. In a recent interview, Vik Bansal, Group President of Asia Pacific, and John Fehon, VP – Finance, shared their best practices for successfully creating a matrix organizational structure in Asia Pacific.
The Valmont APAC executives are firm believers that business unit leaders need to be empowered to run their businesses. However, Valmont is able to maintain control over this decentralization by thinking of their matrix organizational structure uniquely. “Our business is a necklace with individual pearls, the threads that go through all of those pearls are the functions that should be common across each unit”. For Valmont, they selected three key common threads that link each disparate business unit together.
- Standardized financial systems – this is non-negotiable across business units.
- Applying the Valmont way – with a focus on continuous improvement, individual business units are able to apply this concept in the most relevant manner for their market.
- Talent identification and succession planning – In order to ensure a healthy pipeline of future managers, Valmont leadership spend significant time identifying leaders from compatibility and capability perspective.
Multinationals that have their strategic plans jointly owned by both regional executives as well as local teams have an opportunity to promote alignment throughout their organization. Valmont has been able to leverage their internal collaboration into a strong, autonomous, and agile workforce that is capable of succeeding in the diverse and fast-paced Asia Pacific business environment.
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