Stories from our work · 4 min read
Whose company is it now?
The day after a big acquisition, people on both sides start asking themselves the same quiet question. Whose company is this now?
Mergers and acquisitions · Integration · Values · Leadership selection
A global consumer goods company had just bought one of its major competitors. On paper, the logic was clear. In practice, the leaders could see the hard part coming, and they felt the urgency early. Two sets of teams and operations had to come together quickly. And the combined business was not going to be the two old companies stapled together. Its whole structure was being transformed at the same time.
So people were being asked to join a new organisation and learn a new way of working in the same breath. That is a lot to ask of anyone, let alone people who used to compete with each other.
Drawing the route
We sat down with the CEO and the CHRO and mapped out how the integration would run. The commercial and operational side of a deal tends to set the pace. The people side has to keep up, or it gets left with the consequences. Having one route, agreed at the top, meant the people work moved with the deal rather than trailing behind it.
The first message
The first real test came early: who would lead.
Leaders had to be chosen for the new executive team and for each business unit team. In an acquisition, these choices carry a weight far beyond the roles themselves. Everyone reads them. People from the bought company look for signs that they still have a future. People from the buyer look for signs that nothing will change. Every appointment answers one of those questions, whether anyone means it to or not.
A shared language
A combined org chart does not make a combined company. People need to know what good looks like in the new place, and they need both sides to be held to the same picture.
So, with the leadership, we designed a shared set of company values and a leadership model. For the first time, a leader from either side could be judged by the same description of what the organisation expected.
The thank-you test
Then there was the part that sounds like a detail.
Both companies had their own global recognition programmes, each with its own way of saying thank you. We brought them together into one.
It is easy to leave this kind of thing until later. We think that is a mistake. How people are thanked is one of the clearest signals of whether they really belong to the same organisation. If the colleague at the next desk is recognised differently, the merger is not finished, whatever the org chart says.
What happened next
The two companies became one organisation. Engagement results improved, and the integration laid the foundation for a sustained period of growth, during which the share price also rose. Many things drive growth after a major deal, so we see our part as the foundation those results stood on.
Why we tell this one
The big decisions in an integration are rarely a surprise. It is the smaller signals, like who gets the job and how people are thanked, that tell people whose company it is now.