High performing team
Per our earlier article on A Merger & Acquisition Leader’s Playbook For Success, avoid the traps of 1) poor strategic focus, 2) poor cultural integration and/or 3) poor delivery of synergies by leveraging the full playbook and its seven sub-playbooks: Strategic, commercial, operational, financial, governance, organizational, change management.
This article focuses on The Organizational Playbook and its components of culture, incentives, leadership, people, and politics.
Organizational Culture
Choose the behaviors, relationships, attitudes, values, and environment that will make up your new culture. Invite people into the new culture, noting who accepts your invitation in what they say, do, and believe.
Given enough time and money, your competitors can duplicate almost everything you’ve got working for you. They can hire away some of your best people. They can reverse engineer your processes. They can match your service levels. Even innovation, unless embedded in the culture, can be matched. The only thing they can’t duplicate is your culture.
In sustainable, championship cultures, behaviors (the way we do things here) are inextricably linked to relationships, informed by attitudes, built on a rock-solid base of values, and completely appropriate for the environment in which the organization chooses to operate. As Simon Sinek famously pointed out, most organizations think what–how–why. Great leaders and great organizations start with why (environment and values), then look at how (attitudes and relationships) before getting to what (behaviors).
It’s the context that makes it so hard to duplicate a championship culture. Because every organization’s environment is different, matching someone else’s behaviors, relationships, attitudes, and values will not produce the same culture.
Organizational Incentives
Michael Brown’s ABCs of behavior modification provide a framework worth following. ABC stands for antecedent, behavior, consequence. People do things because an antecedent prompts that behavior. They do it again because of the balance of consequences: rewarding or punishing desirable or undesirable behavior with various forms of incentives and disincentives.
It’s often hard to modify existing patterns of behavior because those habits have been reinforced by a poor balance of consequences. It’s almost guaranteed that people in your organization who persist in doing things you don’t want them to do are having their behavior positively reinforced.
If, as an example, employees habitually show up late for meetings, that behavior is likely positively reinforced by avoiding the negative consequence of wasting time for the few that do show up on time.
If you want to change undesirable behavior habits, change the balance of consequences. Make sure you are:
- Positively reinforcing desired behavior
- Discouraging undesirable behavior
If you are not doing this, then change the way you:
- Positively reinforce undesirable behavior
- Discouraging desired behavior
Organizational Leadership
The only thing you can do all by yourself is fail. Successful mergers and acquisitions require an interdependent team with its members all paddling in the same direction.
Select “new” management team members based on the alignment of their motivations, strengths, and personal preferences with your vision for the new combined entity.
There are only three job interview questions. In the vast majority of cases each of the candidates for your leadership team has the strengths required to do the job. And while the main reason people fail in new leadership roles is poor fit, that’s relatively difficult to assess up front. This leaves motivation as the most important criteria for selection. Be ready to probe all three interview questions, but lead with motivation
People Organization
When it comes to sorting people and roles on your team, work with a short-term, mid-term, and a long-term framework. Initially, determine whether any short-term moves should be made before or at the start, and any mid-term moves should be made in the first 100 days. Then, continue to develop teams over time.
Organizational Politics
Can we talk about politics? Do we have to talk about politics? Politics is inevitable in any organization of more than one person. Even if you’d like to pretend your organization is politics-free, it isn’t. Even if you’d like to ignore the politics and get on with the real work, you can’t. On the other hand, those who make playing politics their first priority often fail to get beyond it.
Click here to request a free executive summary of The M&A Leader’s Playbook book.
Click here for a list of my Forbes articles (of which this is #781) and a summary of my book on executive onboarding: The New Leader’s 100-Day Action Plan.
