Behavior-Based Pre and Post Merger Integration

Statistically speaking, 75 percent of mergers and acquisitions fail. When considering the challenges of integrating any two corporate cultures, this is not terribly surprising. For this reason, leading well and managing behaviors effectively through a merger is of utmost importance.

Any merger situation presents difficult challenges that affect everyone in your organization. It can be a period of distraction and worry for your staff, who rightly wonder about their job security and how their current positions may change. On top of this, there is likely great apprehension about what the new structure and culture of the company will look like.

Good Communication is Key

To successfully navigate the rough waters of a merger, effective leadership and communication are essential. This can be a tremendous challenge because, not only do you need to be on the offensive with your key customers and stakeholders while implementing the change, but you also need to be upfront and visible with your employees to allay fears and properly align cultures. You must have a plan to execute focused, accurate and consistent communication between your corporate leaders and their team members.

Shaping the New Culture

When striving to meld two diverse cultures into one productive, profitable company, CLG helps you to overcome challenges like corporate culture clash, undesired turnover, and crippled economic performance. Culture, simply put, is about patterns of behavior. Our behavior-based approach has been tested and proven time and again in some of the world’s largest mergers and acquisitions. We help your leaders create a new culture and shape new ways of working by aligning vision statements and expectations with desired behaviors, and ensuring that leadership feedback and coaching actively encourages those behaviors.

Ensuring Success

In the throes of a complicated merger process, it’s easy to understand how companies often overlook the importance of effective leadership and development of a new corporate culture. In truth, leadership is one of the most powerful influences in how your organization performs. To that end, CLG has identified four key actions aimed at ensuring a successful integration:

1. Get the right people in the right roles, with clarity on business objectives, roles, developmental needs and measures of success. Take great care with your selection decisions and assignments.
2. Invest leadership time to coach and deliver feedback on key behaviors needed to achieve those results. Encourage behaviors that are critical to the success of the organization.
3. Steward business plans with oversight of performance-versus-plan. This is the time to track progress, reinforce success, remove barriers and take corrective action.
4. Make certain that consequence systems are aligned with the new behaviors required for business success and culture development. Leaders need to actively coach and encourage desired behaviors and reward them.

Taking the time to create a new culture and shape new behaviors is a critical element of any successful merger. With CLG as your partner, you will be able to overcome these complex integration challenges to forge a new organization that is more productive and more profitable than before.

To learn more, explore our case study, Transitioning with Excellence: The Impact of Behavior on a Divestiture Acquisition, and fact sheet, Facilitating a Merger for an Energy Company.