Two international pharmaceutical companies had announced a merger. In addition to the cost savings that the merger promised to generate, senior management was intent on delivering a strong, team-oriented culture, and they wanted this culture to take root immediately, knowing that the typical expectation would be a couple years of “storming” before teams from the separate companies fully integrated. To support this objective, they created a team of managers, The People Team, from across the two heritage companies to strategise and implement an approach for quickly defining and growing this new, integrated culture. They also set aside a significant budget for the ongoing implementation of the new company culture.
The Desired OutcomeIt was clear that for the company to succeed in rapidly integrating employees from the two heritage companies into one cohesive team, The People Team itself needed to integrate rapidly and powerfully in order to work efficiently together as well as to model for the other teams how the integration could succeed. The People Team's hope was to schedule a single kick-off meeting to set the tone for the integration and to build enough trust across the merger lines to be able to work effectively as a unified team to guide the unification of the rest of the company. Research shows that companies that merge are successful faster the more their leaders are integrated with the new culture.
The CPD SolutionFirst we interviewed all of the members of The People Team to get an honest and accurate read of the team’s current state. These interviews confirmed that there was indeed a significant amount of distrust among team members – not only of the people from the other heritage company, but in some cases of colleagues from within the same company. It was clear that we needed to explore the perceptions and issues related to the employees' trust of one another – or lack thereof. These interviews, however, also demonstrated that team members carried high levels of hope for the integration, and the interviews gave the CPD consultants the chance to solidify the commitment of the individual team members to do whatever was in their power to work towards the fulfillment of these hopes. After interviewing the team members and sharing the resulting aggregate themes with The People Team’s co-leaders, we scheduled an intensive off-site meeting to facilitate a customized CPD TeamWorkAbility™ with the objectives of establishing trust and creating a beginning strategy for how the team would work together to accomplish the same throughout the new company.
Over the four days of TeamWorkAbility™ and working session, the CPD facilitators and participants worked together to create a climate of open and honest communication. Participants talked about themselves, their past experiences, their hopes and fears, and most importantly, their commitments and desired outcomes going forward. This sharing helped create the basic foundation of safety for discussing the issues at hand – the team could discuss the different issues and tensions knowing that each and every member was deeply committed to the team’s success and ready to learn, shift, or change as individuals to create that common team direction.
In addition to the open conversations among the team members, each participant took part in coaching sessions in the evening. Additionally, we used a process called Walk and Talks to pair up each team member with every other team member for brief, focused conversations to clear up any misperceptions about each other and to set the stage for every relationship among the team members to be productive. CPD created specific tools to encourage productivity for the participants as they engaged in several different types of conversations during their Walk and Talks.
Once a foundation of trust and partnership was established, we worked with the team through processes allowing them to determine short- and mid-term strategic goals, set action plans, and create operating agreements between the team members.
The ResultsThe team fulfilled and even exceeded their goal of integrating rapidly and establishing trust. By the end of the four days, there was no question that they had resolved their initial concerns, were fully aligned and prepared to take on other challenges as they came up, and had a basic plan in place for guiding team integration across the new company. In fact, the week was so powerful that the people who were part of it remembered it and told stories about it for years afterward.
Afterward, the company invited CPD to partner with The People Team as an external partner to assist in designing and implementing similar programs globally, from the senior teams down through the organisation. The company adopted TeamWorkAbility™ for all new teams experiencing a significant level of mistrust or conflict. CPD designed a two-day off-site New Team Alignment™ for teams that needed to integrate and create plans quickly but did not necessarily have a great deal of mistrust or conflict to work through. Over the next few years, CPD was often thanked and credited for making a significant contribution to the smooth and timely creation of an integrated culture at the new merged company.
CPD has conducted its own research on accelerating the merger-and-acquisition process through leadership integration. If you are interested in talking points from this research, please contact us. We also have available an in-depth study of best practices, and we highly recommend Merger and Acquisitions Integration Excellence published in 2000, which can be found at www.best-in-class.com. The company discussed above is included in this study. Due to confidentiality agreements, we are not at liberty to advertise the company; however, we are free to discuss many of the particulars with you.