Merging teams – friendly acquisition or hostile takeover?

Originally published in The Mandarin

How do you reach the intended win-win in a merger? (New Africa/Adobe)

In practice, it can be unsettling or difficult for those involved. It can feel like a hostile takeover, or a defeat if you’re on the smaller team, or an invasion or intrusion if you’re on the dominant team.

Dominant status can come from several places, such as building, branding or systems ownership, where the other team members need to come to your way of working.

Or it could come from a hierarchical status where there is any combination of moves between parent departments and their agencies, central and non-central departments and then the worst case scenario where teams working in a high-status department are merged with a lower-status department’s least prominent agency. (Very Canberra!)

Then there are the relative sizes of the merging teams — which you can add as an extra layer of complexity over the situations described above — or where more than two teams are being merged.

No matter the situation, it often feels like a win-lose or lose-lose situation to those impacted. So how can a leader turn this into the win-win it was meant to be?

Culture, culture, did I mention culture?

As soon as the announcement is made (or earlier if you know about it in confidence) you will need to consciously define and describe the culture you will need to deliver to your strategy, and then apply the desired mindset and model the desired behaviours, in the way you manage the merger. You will be building your new team’s culture from the very first point of contact. You will also be connecting them and giving them a sense of belonging to something new, all as equal parties.

Often the cultural aspect of a merger is left until the team has transitioned into its new structure, with the focus up until this point lying solidly on operational considerations. I’m not suggesting an either-or situation here though – this is ‘operations and’. Although culture does have to come first because the way you plan and implement your transition really has to express your desired culture. If your team needs to become outcomes focused, collaborative, accountable, communicative, innovative, take a risk-based approach or highly consultative, and proactive — then that’s how you need to manage the merger.

So what does this look like on the ground?

Your first contact with all members of your new team would take place within hours of the announcement (including those you already lead), where you would express your positivity around the changes ahead and what you can achieve together, how this merger brings the best of both or all together for your greater purpose, and then describe the consultative and collaborative process you will run to ensure that all team members are able to influence the way the new team will work.

Then you’ll follow through and model the level of accountability, transparency and communication that you will need from them, at every interaction.

By the time your new teams come together for their ‘Day 1′, they will ideally be aware of how you expect them to work together, and the mindset you need them to apply when delivering your strategy — because they will have experienced a taste of it in their proactive, collaborative preparation for the merger. They will also understand your purpose and how their role will contribute to it.

During Month 1 you’d prioritise activities that build your team’s positive dynamics, collectively identify the diversity and strength across the team, ensure that roles, responsibilities and accountabilities are clear and widely understood, create environments that foster the development of collective and connected thinking around your strategy,  and welcome fresh perspectives. Your enemy during this month are words like ‘that’s not how we do it here’ or ‘we tried this before’.

Does any of that sound familiar? Probably not. In most cases, we are asked to help a team with their culture a few months after a merger, when the operational side of the transition is starting to settle, with people and systems functioning either in their former silos, to the level they did before, but peaceably, or in a transactional way with their new team members, without any leveraging of communal strengths, and with separate former cultures still battling it out — with ‘ways of working’ is a big part of the battle. Any cracks are starting to show signs of a crevasse, which is often the trigger to give us a call. (Those are not the worst-case scenarios.)

Mergers are creative spaces, full of opportunities to do things better if you can set the tone from Day Zero – the day of an announcement – and start to build the culture you want and need, immediately.

One thing we are sure of – if you don’t proactively and collaboratively build your new team’s culture, it will build itself — with a low likelihood that it is the one you need to deliver on your strategy.

So hop onto that front foot and lead them to the one you do need. It will set you up for a win-win.

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