Peter Baynham, UK Head of M&A consulting at Mercer articulates the costly consequences of making people oriented integration issues secondary. ”Many deals fail to deliver value to acquisitive companies due to lack of timely planning and communication around people and integration, which may lead to poor morale, reduced productivity and leakage of top talent.”
The following updated M&A roadmap can be used in conjunction with current M&A integration strategies to increase merger success, enabling leaders and employees from both firms to focus on delivering results and less on people issues.
Merger is Announced
After legal and financial terms of the deal have been finalized, the rapid data collection process into Talent Analytics’ Advisor™ from both organizations can begin. Business culture information is immediately available to executives and post merger integration teams.
Now it becomes interesting!
CEO’s View from 40,000 feet: Comparing Buyer and Seller Organizational Cultures at a Glance
As talent data is rapidly collected from both firms, real-time ad hoc analyses in Advisor reveal high value talent trends for the CEO of each firm using Talent Meters. For ad hoc data discovery, the IT or Analytics teams do not need to be involved. Advisor has been designed to facilitate real-time ad hoc analyses generated within seconds by business leaders with or without a degree in statistics. Advisor will forecast the following kinds of practical business cultural information.
- Where organizational cultures are similar or vastly different?
- If the gaps forecast a difficult merger?
- Suggestions about easing integration
It is important for executives to have these insights as early as possible in the post merger integration phase.
View from 20,000 feet: Customizing Communication Preferences by Division
After top-level organizational communication strategy(s) has been defined, Advisor allows for a drill down to provide actionable steps at the division or organizational level by identifying characteristics using CROSS Team-at-a-Glance.
Key questions at this level to be answered may include:
- Will greater sales performance come from merging sales teams or leaving them independent?1
- Will the different pacing of the organizational cultures impact results?2
- Is one organization corporate lattice structured while the other is the more traditional ladder structure?3
- Which top performers are most likely leave for competitors at their first opportunity and how will this impact revenue?4
These questions can be asked again by further drilling down to the team level to provide even more customized insights.
By generating dynamic, ad hoc analysis in Advisor, the performance styles and ambitions can be identified to facilitate customized and specific communication planning. As Baynham indicated, this planning is one of the most critical aspects of post merger integration, which can be enhanced by talent analytics technology.
Learn more about applying talent analytics technology to post merger integration
Attend the upcoming M&A webinar on October 5, 2011 at 12pm EST:
Learn How to Preempt Post Merger (M&A) Culture Clash Using Talent Analytics.
Additional M&A Content from Talent Analytics Corp:
1 Visualize Multiple Teams to Make Effective Business Decisions Talent Analytics Blog, June 2011
2 The Soft Things That Make Mergers Hard by Greta Roberts, CEO, Talent Analytics July 12, 2011, Harvard Business Review Blog Network.
3 Working Effectively Across the Lattice Talent Analytics Blog, June 2011
4 Know Your HIPOs Talent Analytics Blog, July 2011
Mike Kennedy is a Technical Evangelist at Talent Analytics Corp. He can be reached via mike@talentanalytics.com
gnaneshps Says:
