You can choose which research to believe, but studies reveal that somewhere between 50 and 90% of mergers produce a negative return on investment. A recurring theme underlying these failures is the inability to turn two company cultures into one.
Our CulturalFusion Merger solution gives you the capability to methodically unite two company cultures across the pre-merger, integration and post-integration phases of the merger process.
Most importantly, you can measure how each culture is performing across every organizational level and function, simulate what will happen when two functional organizations come together, and hold your leaders and teams accountable for creating a performance enhancing culture that outperforms your original culture.
Step 1: Pre-Merger Readiness – Positioning for the Win
Our cloud-based solution and advisory services enable your executives, leaders and people to become intimately familiar with their existing culture, so your organization is actually ready to effectively integrate another culture into it. Because our solution measures every human dimension of your culture, including what holds your people back, and where your people excel, every leader will understand their culture, learn their current level of organizational productivity as well as their current return on human capital.
Most importantly, we provide the tools and training they need to methodically improve their culture and begin more effectively using their people’s talents. This is an essential business capability. And, for most leaders and teams, it is a new, and very human skill. If they don’t build this vitally important skill, they will be unable to effectively integrate another culture into theirs.
If you don’t do this, you are not ready. It’s just that simple.
Throughout this readiness process, we provide the communication you need to keep everyone on the same page, and keep them rowing in the same direction. Merger success starts with you!
Step 2: Cultural Integration: Skillfully Bringing People Together
Once you have closed the deal, the real integration work begins. Because you have already built deeply human skills, your leaders and people are ready to build an inclusive culture where the new people are welcomed and put down roots. This is a human process that will not happen by accident, and never has. That is why human capital integration fails all too often.
Moreover, there are normally staff members who will not remain with the combined company for long. So, the ability to build a healing culture that creates passionate survivors is another vitally important element in creating a productive outcome.
To ensure your success, our solution empowers you to preview how the combined culture looks across your company. This powerful insight enables your leaders and people to understand one another better and cascade the integration conversations downwards through the organization in preparation for the day integration happens in their area.
We offer a very powerful suite of tools that will help you create integration success.
Step 3: Post-Integration: Turning 1 + 1 Into 3
Even though the integration is complete, your performance improvement process is really just beginning because you have built a new business capability. You now have the tools, processes and skills required to continuously improve your culture and create a workplace where your people are motivated and able to give their collective best.
By building the human skill to merge and improve your culture, you now reap on-going returns on the investment you made. The merger has provided you with a new business capability that you will use to continuously take your combined culture to higher and higher levels of performance. Every manager will continue to grow their skills to create deeper collaboration, increasing passion, meaningful collaboration, self-aware leadership, and remove the roadblocks to productivity that mergers produce.
And, most importantly of all, you are already prepared to make your next M&A deal a huge success.
Conclusion
People are the most important tool of this digital age, and the human experience they feel will ultimately determine your returns on human capital integration, and your performance in the marketplace. You can now proactively avoid one of the greatest threats to merger success: a failed people merger. Please contact us now to learn how you can ensure your M&A efforts are an on-going success.
