GET PEOPLE WORKING ON STUFF TOGETHER
Here’s the simplest formula in the world for integrating two cultures:
Get people working on stuff together.
An important note for mergers/integrations: If at all possible, it’s important to invite players from “both sides” to these sponsorship sessions.
In a recent example of a portfolio company integration, we broke our sponsorship work into two separate sessions. In our first session, multiple members of the executive team (including the CEO) presented a version of our integration narrative map, taking care to share some of their own personal takes on the upcoming integration and what it meant for them personally. Then we broke the group down into smaller clusters and asked for their reactions, focusing on:
What were they most excited about?
What were the risks and blind spots that leaders (and they themselves) should be thinking about over the next few months?
What would be most important to others inside the organization to understand or hear?
We captured these reactions, asked each group to read them out, and then used a simple voting exercise to highlight the most important points of excitement, risks, and messages that the ELT should take away.
The second session was a little more personal. Working with the same group, we asked the managers to share some of the pain points they were dealing with on their teams, but we didn’t simply take notes. Using tools from our leadership development program, we invited other members of the small group to coach one another on identifying the real challenge, surfacing their options, and helping them plan next steps. We gathered feedback after the session, and we were both surprised and exhilarated when we tallied up the results - the single most-used word in responses to our survey was “relieved.”
While it’s easy to default to a rebroadcast of the same message, it’s always better to use these sessions for a deeper, more human purpose: Acknowledging and responding to the real emotions and anxiety that come with bringing two unique teams together. By simply reminding everyone to have situational humility, get curious, and look for opportunities to help one another, stress levels decrease and guards get lowered.
This creates a space that almost automatically nudges people towards working on stuff together - the surest sign that a cultural integration is actually taking place.