In this episode, Jenni tackles mergers and acquisitions, the differences between the two, the risks of combining the two terms and, when it comes to communication and culture, how easily organisations can spiral into chaos.
Jenni looks at what this chaos can look like, where things can go wrong, and shares five key pieces of advice to help you create calm when surrounded by so much change.
Things that will help you go from chaos to calm:
The Art of Resilience by Ross Edgley
Hierarchy of Needs: A Theory of Human Motivation by Abraham H. Maslow
Blog: Aligning needs to employee engagement – how we can easily get it wrong with the best intentions
Blog: What is internal communication?
You can continue the conversation with Jenni on Twitter and LinkedI
Hi and welcome to this episode of Redefining Comms with me, Jenni Field. Today, I’m going to be talking about mergers and acquisitions. It’s something I’ve talked about a lot in the last few months because it’s a topic that keeps coming up, possibly on the back of the COVID-19 pandemic, but it’s also something that seems to be asked quite a lot for those leading organisations and those working in communications. It’s a topic I cover in my book, Influential Internal Communication, where I talk about how you can understand, diagnose and fix things when you’re going through a merger or an acquisition.
Transcript for this podcast:
Now, you’ll notice there I talked about a merger or an acquisition and that’s where I really want to start, which is around this risk of lumping these two things together. We talk about M&As or mergers and acquisitions quite a lot as being sort of one.
And the same thing, but they’re quite different, and we need to be very clear about which one you’re working with. Are you merging with another organisation? Are you being acquired? Or are you acquiring somebody? They all need slightly different treatments, if you like, because the differences in power that come from those sorts of changes.
If you are acquiring somebody, then talking about the fact that you’re in a partnership is going to be something that you’re going to have to unravel or unpick at a later date. And that’s sometimes what I’ve seen happen, where we don’t lean into that reality of that distinction. We talk about partnerships when actually it is an acquisition, a company is taking over another, but we’ve tried to sort of soften that for people. And that just leads to real chaos in organisations when you’re trying to unravel that.
So, in this episode, I’m going to talk about the different ways chaos can manifest when you’re working through these sorts of changes, where things can go wrong. And then we’re going to delve into five things you can do to bring calm to the organisation.
So what does chaos look like when you’re merging, acquiring or changing ownership?
Well, there’s often confusion about direction. And that’s partly, you know, quite often because things are kept behind closed doors. When you’re working through these sorts of organisational changes, a lot of things have to be kept confidential for very valid reasons. And that just makes it a little bit confusing for people because they’re not really sure what’s happening. Certainly in my experience, where I’ve worked in organisations that have been acquired and merged and also changed ownership, people just are left in a bit of a state of confusion while there’s lots of things going on behind the scenes that you don’t know about.
So, that confusion can often lead to people, you know, being in some sort of states of chaos. You know, they don’t know why they’re doing what they’re doing, things might be put on hold, budgets are changing. There’s kind of a lot of stuff going on that just leads people to feeling a bit confused.
Job security is one that often comes up, you know, that’s really always inevitable due to the fact that you’re bringing together a couple of organisations and quite often support functions or professional services will look to be streamlined as you bring some of those teams together. So, that’s always a concern.
We also have culture chaos, you know, that leaves people confused about who’s in charge. If there are leadership changes that come with mergers and acquisitions, that makes it hard for people to work out where their identity is. And there’s so much changing. So who do I listen to? Who’s in charge? This was my boss before? Is it still my boss now? There’s lots of confusion there that all really links into some of the culture about how things happen in the organisation.
And the final piece of chaos can often be the mixed messages from leaders. And this can often happen because things change at pace, you know, things happen quite quickly. And sometimes organisations don’t integrate the business that they’ve acquired. And that can just raise lots of questions. So, the mixed messaging piece is often a trap we can fall into. Now, I mentioned that sometimes when you’re going through an M&A, it’s a surprise to people because of the nature of the confidentiality of what you’re doing.
And that’s really important to remember. So, whenever I’m advising clients who have been through a merger and acquisition, or they’ve changed ownership, whatever it might be, we have to remember that you’ve been in it for a while, you know, as a leader of an organisation, you’ve been working on this for months. And you might want to celebrate this, and it might be really exciting and the relief that you’re out the other side. But we have to remember that for a lot of people, this is brand new.
So, we just have to have that moment of awareness, really, that there’s that sort of change and that shift in terms of how we’re all feeling about what’s happening.
Where can it go wrong when using mergers or acquisitions?
1. No data to use when communicating
Now, I said I’d talk about where things can go wrong. And this is some of my experience where things might not have been handled in necessarily the right way. The first is where there just isn’t any data gathered around the people. So we have no insights into the organisation that’s shared with the people communicating or managing the change. And this is important because a lot of that information might be shared at a very senior level, but it doesn’t always make its way all the way through the organisation to the people that are communicating.
So if we don’t have the data, or if we do have it, we don’t share it, it just makes things very difficult when you’re communicating such huge organisational change.
2. No foundational support
The other thing where things can go wrong is not having the basics in place as foundations. So some of this is things around job descriptions, it’s around IT connectivity, when that sort of switch happens, and you’re now merged, or you’re now acquired, or whatever it might be. These are the real hygiene factors that we need to be able to do our job. So, really important to get those basics right.
3. Miscommunicating during campaigns
And the final one that I’ve seen where things can go wrong is really big campaigns to bring people together, which reflects maybe more one culture than the other. And that’s when I often talk about rushing to fix. And that’s where things go wrong for me when we’re doing mergers and acquisitions. We’re rushing to fix something, we’re not allowing for time to bring together alignment. And therefore we’re doing big campaigns and big investments to get people behind something that they maybe haven’t been part of creating. And that’s where things can start to go wrong.
So how do we create calm when there is so much change and so much unknown?
1. Have a purpose & narrative
Well, firstly, we have to have a plan with timescales. And really, that’s where we have to start. So. The first of the five things I’d recommend is around having a purpose and a narrative. So. The first is to find the story. You know, there will be a reason for the merger, the change of ownership, the acquisition, and this story has to be told with honesty and integrity. You know, we can’t make up a story about why it’s happening. If the organisation isn’t doing very well, and that’s why it’s been acquired, or that’s why it’s merged, we need to tell that story.
You know, people need that honesty, they need that detail about the change, about what that change is about, you know, and why we need to change as an organisation. And this also has to be joined up between the two organisations. So, if something’s being communicated in one place, and it’s a different message going to another, then we get into all sorts of trouble.
So, we’ve got to make sure that the messaging is aligned between the two different organisations as well. So, making sure that you’ve got those connections with leaders, with the communications teams, with the HR teams, that we’ve got that consistency of message. And that goes for all stakeholders, really, not just for employees. It’s got to be the same for all the different stakeholder groups.
2. Culture and integration depth
The second is that we have to make some decisions around culture and integration depth. Now, I talk about this because not every organisation that acquires other organisations wants to integrate them into the organisation or brand. So, we have to ask questions like, is this becoming one new organisation? Are the acquired company being absorbed into an established brand? Is there no integration at all? And it’s purely a financial or ownership relationship?
You know, there’s lots of different ways companies change. So, we have to know that detail to help to tell the story. And it’s this detail around the implementation of change that’s really important for employees. You know, how is this going to work? How does this directly impact me? And how is this really going to work? It’s an important part of taking people through change.
3. Be clear who your stakeholders are
The third is around getting specific with stakeholders. So, making sure that you’re really clear about who your stakeholders are. And this means that employees are not your stakeholders. You know, they are, but that’s far too broad as a group. We’ve got to get really narrow and segment employees by role or location, so that we can really make sure that the messaging is relevant to them.
This is because we have to talk about what’s in it for me, you know, what’s in it for me as an individual, and what’s going to change for me as an individual. And to do that, we have to be very specific with the stakeholders we’re talking to.
4. Business modelling and organisational design
The fourth is around organisational design and business modelling, because these have to be in the equation. You know, it will be time to review the strategy, review structures of people, and all of that takes time. So, what’s important here is that people are involved in this change. You know, there’s some collaboration, working with people in the organisation.
You know, we don’t like to be controlled as human beings, so having time and space to work through changes as a whole organisation is really important. So we have to have that two-way dialogue.
Here to understand what the business model and what the organisational design needs to be in order to succeed in the future. So, lots of conversation there, and lots of opportunity to have the voices heard of employees across the organisation.
5. Dedicated channels for change
Now, the fifth and final one is about having dedicated channels for the change. Now, in my experience, I’ve always created a dedicated channel to a change that’s happening. This has usually been done because not everybody will have access to the tools that currently exist. So, where I’ve worked in organisations with a lot of deskless workers, so people not sat at a desk, not with email addresses, having a dedicated channel for them is really important.
Now, that might be a microsite, it might be a PDF newsletter that can be printed. Whatever is appropriate for your audience is what’s important here. But having that dedicated channel helps make sure that there’s one place to go for all the information about what’s happening. And it will help people feel connected, it will help you tell stories, and it’s quite a nice way to make sure that people aren’t missing anything.
Now, those are the five things I would be looking at to go from chaos to Calm. But one of the stories I always come back to when I talk about this kind of alignment, which is often the case here between employees and leaders, is a story from the book, The Art of Resilience by Ross Edgley.
Now, he talks about his swim around the UK. That’s what the book is predominantly about, is his journey and the resilience that it needed to do that. But he shares a story about when he reached 100 days of swimming, and he talks about the fact that somebody had decided to write in the sky, you know, congratulations, you’ve done 100 days, this is amazing. And at that point in time, he was exhausted. And as lovely as that was, he just wanted some bread. And he says in the book, you know, I just wanted some bread, any bread, like white bread, brown bread, don’t care, just want some bread. And it really stayed with me. And he goes on to expand on how it links to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. And I’ve popped a link in the show notes here of a blog post that I wrote about this, because it’s so important in that example, where he was sort of, you know, at the bottom of Maslow’s pyramid around the food needs, the basic needs. I just want some bread.
And the sky writing was this sort of self-actualisation, you know?
Right at the top of the pyramid and the joy and the celebration. But the two were not aligned. And this is what I see in organisations where leaders who have been working on this for a long time really want to celebrate this, really want to do something to be really excited about what change this is going to bring. Whereas everybody else just wants to know if they can connect to the IT system so that they’ve got a job description. And it’s that same principle here. So it’s making sure that we’ve got that alignment in terms of where people are on those kind of different stages of needs from Maslow’s hierarchy.
So, like I said, I’ve popped a link in the show notes, because I think it’s a helpful thing just to be mindful of in terms of where we are, and where our audience or where our stakeholders might be when we’re managing change.
Thank you for listening!
Now, in my next episode, I’m going to be talking about how to listen to employees. Now, I have another podcast called Calm Edged Rebels, which I co-host with two good friends and consultants, Advita Patel and Trudy Lewis. And we discussed listening in organisations on a recent episode, which I will pop the link to in the show notes as well.
I’ve also recently shared an article on LinkedIn around some of my thoughts around this. And the reason I want to talk about it now is because I think in 2020 and in 2021, there was a lot of listening. I’m just not sure that action followed. So, I really want to delve in to some of the core principles of how to listen, why it’s important and sort of the chaos around that topic.
Thank you for listening. You know, as always, I’d love to continue this conversation on Twitter or LinkedIn. So please connect, ask questions, share your thinking with me. And as always, details are in the show notes on how to stay in touch.
