Change Management.

We resist change at work because we fear loss – specifically, loss of competence. It’s justified. One day we’re good at our jobs and feeling safe and sound. The next day some benign-sounding initiative ending with “transformation,” “migration” or (heaven forbid) “rationalization” shows up and shuffles the deck. Suddenly, we realize that so much will be different: how we work, how we fit into our teams, how we’re evaluated and rewarded, how we get to that feeling of personal strength and success.

Resistance based on fear and uncertainty is natural and it’s going to happen. A leader’s role is to position change so our teams see the path forward – so they understand how to move past the trauma and recapture their confidence.

Change Management Positioning Techniques

The Monster in the Closet

When my son was four, we moved into a new house and he moved into a new bedroom. On the first night, he woke up and screamed at the top of his lungs that there was a monster in his closet.

I sprang into action with the time-tested Monster Consolation Protocol: turn on the light, present the monster-less closet, give the “no such thing as monsters” speech, and lie down with him until he falls back to sleep.

I was on the last step of the process – he was just about to doze off – when something completely unexpected happened. (No, there wasn’t actually a monster in the closet.) My wife, back in our bedroom, began frantically screaming, “There’s a ghost in the bed!” Don’t judge; my wife grew up in a part of the world where people often believe in ghosts. That part wasn’t up for debate. To be fair, we did discover that the previous owner had died in the house.

Now I had a terrified four-year old and a screaming wife! I jumped up, looked at my son and asked him whether he wanted to come with me to check on his mom. He looked at me like I was completely out of my mind and yelled, “No way!” I could see his point – “I might have a monster in my closet, but somebody in the other room has a ghost in her bed! I’ll stay put and take my chances.”

So what’s the lesson? If our change project is a monster in the closet, then we need to position the status quo as a ghost in the bed. What we are moving away from must be scarier than what we are moving toward.

Tell people that the change is happening for a reason. Sticking with the current way of doing business will have dire consequences. Describe those consequences early on, and in vivid terms. For example, “We’re migrating to a shared services model because, if we don’t, we’ll have to shut down entire business units. We might even go out of business altogether. We must do this and do it now.”

Sugarcoating or avoiding negative consequences of the status quo stymies the change.

Burning Bridges

The phrase has negative connotations today. When it was originally coined by the Romans, it symbolized strength and commitment. When invading foreign lands, it was common practice for the Roman army to burn the bridges behind them so that retreat was impossible. They had to fight or die. It was a harsh but effective strategy – the Romans didn’t lose many battles.

Fortunately, most of our projects aren’t matters of life and death, but the principle still works: the path forward is easier to follow when all other options have been removed.

One way to do this is to make your desired outcome the default. Think of the many ways this works in our day-to-day lives. When we subscribe to a cable TV package, we don’t get to pick and choose every channel we want. We can purchase Package A, Package B, or Package C. Like the cable company, we must lay out the “givens” of the change and the choices people have within that framework.

An even faster path to transformation is to take a switch-over approach, where the choice is binary: change and move forward or come to a full stop. There are lots of ways to learn a new language, but most people agree that immersion is fastest. When we put ourselves in a place where nobody speaks our language, there is no alternative but to learn theirs…and so we do. For our change projects, this means shutting off the old system or making the old way working impossible. Switchover Approach Safety Tip: the new system or process must be 100% reliable! Make sure you thoroughly pilot, test, and then test again.

Positioning change is about reducing the psychological barriers that prevent teams from moving forward. Changing behavior often requires us to both push and pull: Push the team away from a comfortable, yet failing, current state while pulling them towards a clear and unobstructed view of the goal. When we do it right, we use a balanced and thoughtful process. We can present a stark view of the present, as long as we also provide an optimistic and obtainable future.

Years ago, I met a surly executive, whose staff actually lit his cigar and handed him scotch whiskey as he entered the hotel lobby for our meeting. He greeted me with, “So, you’re the touchy-feely person.” That’s a change consultant. Touchy feely. Soft and emotional. That perception creates two problems. First, it attracts people who don’t have the disciplined background to be effective. I once facilitated a panel for a well-regarded professional organization. One of the panelists had a website promoting both her change practice…and her massage therapy business.

Second, this perception creates chaos for those trying to buy credible change services. Who should we trust? Our IT implementer? A noted author? An academic? Someone who is certified? Certified by whom?

The result? Wasted time, money, and credibility. Another project implodes because the employee side of the system/change was handled poorly, and the organization learns once again that failure is acceptable.

We know the required questions to ask a change consultant: What is your experience? Who are your references? How long have you been in the field? Are you the one who will actually do the work? But these questions do not separate the best from the rest.

What to Ask to Find an Effective Change Consultant

1. Are you (the IT partner) willing to “throw in” the change work for free or at a high discount? A “yes” tells you the company sees the people side of the work as secondary – as a commodity – not a strategic imperative. This perspective affects who they hire, how they train, their retention, etc. In other words, you won’t get a strong change management team. In fact, many IT implementation firms have a habit of dismantling their people practice and associated training programs then rebooting them when the market notices. Ask how long each proposed change team member has been with the company, and in what divisions – that should give you an idea of when the company last revived their change management practice.
2. Are your change practitioners full-time employees or a network of affiliated consultants? This speaks to the vendor’s commitment to the field and their investment in developing their people and solutions from one project to the next. Beware also of companies with a large rolodex of talent – a wide net shifts the screening process from the vendor to you.
3. What am I buying from you, exactly? Are they methodology wonks, who love to show detailed processes and models? Far from being an assurance of effectiveness, this means you are buying activity rather than outcomes – usually slide decks, documentation, and “deliverables.” Your consultant should be talking about your business outcomes, not training plans and communications vehicles. The consultants with degrees in communications, learning, marketing, psychology or economics – the fields devoted to human behavior – are best equipped to focus on the behaviors that deliver the results you want.
4. Do you do strategy, implementation or both? Beware the firms that do strategy only. Those who implement their strategy learn what works and what doesn’t. Companies that focus exclusively on strategy wash their hands of accountability. They tend to blame poor outcomes on bad execution. If you want results, focus on change management partners who take ownership for your success.
5. Will you tell us about the outcomes we will see? You are not hiring a company to do change management; you are hiring them to deliver a promise someone made about your initiative. That usually looks like faster implementation, people using the system, increased revenue, undisrupted customer service…real benefits, clearly stated, with metrics attached. Having a laser focus on your outcomes matters. Your new partner should be able to express that clearly, in plain language, and help you stay on-message to your organization. In the midst of a difficult implementation, words like “pivot,” “unpack” and “value-add” will drive you and your organization crazy.

Answering these five questions will get you better results and some peace of mind. That leads me to the last tip. Any big initiative is stressful, so the most important question is: do you like the people you are meeting? If so, you’ve given yourself a gift – someone who makes the inevitable tough times lighter.

Have you noticed more “For Lease” signs in your neighborhood? Small businesses I used to visit while walking my dog are closing their doors because customer shopping habits are evolving. It’s not breaking news: traditional brick and mortar stores are less appealing to an increasingly technology-savvy consumer base. The industry is changing…right?

Yes, but It’s a complex landscape. On one hand, The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports the industry has grown by1.5 million jobs in 2010. In April of this year, there were more than 570,000 retail job openings in the United States. Yet, advances in technology are changing the way customers shop. The National Retail Federation (NRF) has observed online sales gaining ground against in-store purchases.

We’ve talked about the changing retail industry before. Our VP, Christian Hasenoehrl, described a change management plan to ready your business for the new retail landscape. He focused on tactics for leadership teams, not on stores, managers, cashiers, salespeople – how do they fit into a retail change management strategy?

An Industry Opportunity

Retailers have an opportunity to turn the traditional associate of yesterday into the company advocate of tomorrow. Technology like self-service check-out will replace the need for physical cashiers, creating space for retail employees to focus on the consumer experience. The NRF offers credential programs targeted to entry-level employees. Retailers looking to turn their sales staff into brand ambassadors (think Apple Store associates) can get training from the NRF. Programs created by the NRF are supported by large retailers, but operate independently.

These courses fill a need well for many employers, but we suggest you think about custom learning. The company itself knows where it’s heading and can anticipate the skills and behaviors it will need in the future. Company leadership also knows its own workforce – not all retail employees are alike, nor do they come into training from the same context. So our strong recommendation is to identify the employee behaviors that drive your business strategy, then let custom training take your employees from where they are to where you need them to be. You’ll be building your future company from the bottom up.

Consider what’s working well at Walmart. They created an academy to train their retail workforce in more advanced skills. Over the past two years, trainers have taught nearly half a million workers. And they’re looking to partner with other big retailers to create industry-wide training standards to position both companies and their workers for the future.

This is the kind of investment and proactive thinking that will pay off for retailers, employees, communities and customers as society evolves.

I admit that I only started paying attention to the Golden State Warriors two years ago. But I was glued to the TV this basketball season. KD! Steph! Klay! Draymond! And my favorite, swing man Iggie —Andre Iguodala. But my real hero is their coach, Steve Kerr. Thank you Joe Lacob, Peter Guber, and Bob Myers in the front office for funding this super team, but Kerr built and fostered the winning culture.

When interviewed, every player talks about teamwork and playing with joy. It’s no wonder that they led the league in most assists per game. And even though Kerr is too humble to take credit, most sports pundits attribute the winning culture to him. Another franchise could put great players on one team but would the team be as strong as the Warriors without the special culture? Nah.

We know that creating or shifting a culture is often difficult, if not impossible. Here are some change management concepts Coach Kerr used probably without even knowing it:

• Led by example by sharing the spotlight. Kerr consistently focused on his team, not himself. For example, when Kerr was too ill to coach and assistant coaches Luke Walton (2016) and Mike Brown (2017) had to step in, he gave them full credit for their decision-making and the wins.
• Used early adopters by showcasing selfless players like Steph Curry and Klay Thompson. Yes, they’re talented players but they’re not showboats; they’re living testimonials to Kerr’s emphasis on teamwork. The “Splash Brothers” were part of the recruiting posse that convinced Kevin Durant to join the Warriors this season.
• Celebrated small wins by giving opportunities to younger players and patting them on the back for their efforts (even if they screwed up occasionally).
• Accepted diversity by managing the very passionate, soon to be crowned Defensive Player of the Year, Draymond Green. Not everyone has to fit the culture to the nth degree. Some dissention and variety are healthy.
• Created a movement by living the Warriors’ tagline “Strength in Numbers.” He optimized the team and kept everyone ready to contribute. When KD was out for 19 games, others – including the bench – jumped in to fill the void. During this period the Warriors still won 15 of 19 games. “Strength in Numbers” also applies to the fans. People could “hear us roar” from all parts of the San Francisco Bay Area.

A recent Harvard Business Review article* says, “…culture…has to live in the collective hearts and habits of people and their shared perception of ‘how things are done around here.’”

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how the Golden State Warriors won their second NBA title in three years.

*Changing Company Culture Requires a Movement, Not a Mandate by Bryan Walker and Sarah A. Soule, June 20, 2017

What’s our problem? And by “our” I mean people whose job it is to achieve success by changing behavior toward a greater goal. Our problem is that, historically, we rely on the Telling People Stuff Model.

We’ve all experienced this – whether we are the teller or the “tellee.” Simply tell people what they should do differently, and they’ll fall in line. Sadly, we know that full compliance with this approach is pretty low.

Telling people stuff is the “what.” We learning and change professionals have long since moved on to the “how” — provide realistic, hands-on practice in a new behavior or skill, and you’ve really upped the chances of adoption. (And the chances of reaching the business objective you want.)

The best of us have integrated “why” with the “what” and “how.” The “why” element is about motivation. Real behavior change comes only to people who bring high levels of motivation to master new behaviors.

Recent work on purpose – the study of intrinsic motivation – suggests ways to increase motivation. Read this article, published in Training Industry Magazine; Emerson’s own Ceil Tilney describes the elements of purpose. She also illuminates the concept with ideas for adapting employee onboarding programs to a motivation-centered model

A while back, I started a project at a mammoth global client. They had just gone through a merger. Ok, not “just.” It had been five years – but you’d never have known it. The us/them dynamic between the two original companies was alive and well. Resistance to more change was rampant.

To make things more interesting, they were in the middle of a full SAP implementation. Anyone who has been through a big ERP project knows that it’s a huge change management effort, touching process, technology and people. No one looked ready. Management didn’t walk in the hallways; they ran. Everyone seemed breathless and unsure.

My team and I had been brought in to conduct a straightforward needs assessment workshop. Given the environment we encountered, I realized we had to change our plan. Soon after we started the first session, we put our agenda aside and listened. By the end of the session, they were in a more productive place. Here’s why.

They got it out.

The group was made up of employees from both original companies. They all had issues with the merger and with the imminent ERP. But it became clear that each person had vented only to those on “their own side.” For the first time in five years, the enemies looked at each other and spoke about the issues that had been troubling them. They had to say “you” instead of “they.” And after one perspective had been expressed, those on the other side had a chance to listen and respond.

They were able to focus on the differences that mattered.

By talking directly to each other, they were able to define their many differences. But then they saw that some of those differences weren’t relevant to what they wanted for the future.

They confessed. 

At one point, someone mentioned that when he tested the new SAP system, he found what he considered to be glitches. He proudly described an intricate workaround he had put in place. His confession opened up a conversation; many others revealed that they had also constructed ways to get around SAP transactions and processes. This created a bond between the two sides. It also started an honest conversation about why workarounds would ultimately fail and keep them from what they wanted.

They had an epiphany.

They realized it couldn’t get any worse. The suffering of these two groups was real. They were working in a state of chaos, confusion and stress. I wondered aloud if maybe participating in the needs assessment and contributing to a good implementation might actually help. “Well, I guess it couldn’t make things worse,” said one participant. Another said, “Yeah. Let’s get this over with.”

Score!

While I can’t pretend they were enthusiastic about the big change ahead, there was a clear shift: from active resistance to reluctant positive movement. We hadn’t yet touched our agenda, but we felt we had accomplished a lot.

A wise person once said, there are no statues of committees. But what if there were. Would your executive team get one? Executive teams provide strategy and leadership to drive performance. But good teams aren’t simply the right people with the right organization design. “Executive alignment” isn’t just a business buzz-word. It’s essential. When executives are not aligned, they can wreak havoc on an organization. The effects range from lack of coordination between functions to the emergence of warring factions. At a minimum, we see unnecessary competition for resources, hoarding of information, inefficiency, waste, and missed business objectives. The outcome is a decline in performance and organizational effectiveness.

The solution: executive teams must determine their values. These values provide framework – a set of shared ideas to guide the organization. Leadership values are like the organization’s soul. They answer questions like: Who are we as a business? Are we innovative, eco-friendly, or safety-focused? How do we get things done, through process or people? How do we treat each other; are we supportive or competitive? Values provide consistency – a foundation for the organization.

There are several steps teams must take to reap the benefits of a values-based organization. Here’s how to get started:

Determine Your Values

The leadership team must discuss and agree on their values. Start by brainstorming, then remove anything that’s not a value, but instead a strategy, tactic, or initiative. If you end up with a long list of values, distill it to the essentials – discarding the weaker suggestions and combining values that are similar. Shoot for a list short enough that everyone can remember it – no more than eight.

Share, Live and Celebrate Your Values

Use your values at leadership meetings. When making decisions, filter them through your values. Make sure they are understood at every level of the organization. Executives should talk to managers; managers should talk to employees. Use them in company communications. Build them into performance management. Highlight your top performers who demonstrate the values. Reinforce them during company celebrations. Partner with other companies and charitable organizations that share your values.

Share Your Values with the World

Values are an important part of your brand. Make your values visible in marketing and recruiting. They will strengthen both your customer brand and your employment brand.

Validate Your Values. 

Pressure-test those values during annual strategic planning. Discuss the relevance of each and how it is demonstrated throughout the organization. Does one need more focus from leadership? Any that are no longer relevant? A value that should be added? Change the list thoughtfully, though; values are meant to endure.

Aligning around your values is well worth the effort. Knowing who you are and what you believe in, as an organization, brings incredible clarity, focus and success.

Are you a project sponsor? Are you a good one? Solid change management means identifying the right people to sponsor a project – the right role…the right qualities. Yet, often, those “right” individuals accept the role of sponsor and then sit back and watch the program. They attend a meeting when asked. They take action on an issue when prompted.

If that sounds like you, you are not a good sponsor. Don’t worry, you can be one. You just have to understand that it’s not a passive role. Actually, it’s a very dynamic role, if you’re doing it right. A good sponsor does these things (and more), throughout the lifecycle of the project.

How to be a Stellar Project Sponsor

Identify and Resolve Issues

Don’t wait for your team to uncover issues. Take an active role in identifying and resolving problems. And tackle as many as possible before they become problems – risk mitigation is an essential part of your job.

For example, resources are common roadblocks. Be proactive; leverage your influence to grab the best people in your company for the team. When the team says they are understaffed in an area, listen. Bring in additional resources, as needed. And resources are not just human. Help the team get the facilities, technology, funding and organizational support they need.

Bare Minimum Tip: Review risks and issues once a month.

Communicate

Sponsors should not only receive communication from the project team, they should be active communicators on behalf of the project. Your job is to be on message, keep the company on message, and create the sense of urgency that maintains project momentum.

Before you can communicate a message, you have to have a message. Work with company leadership to make sure all understand the essentials: why is the current state broken, what the solution should be, what action the company is taking, and what the result will be.

Bare Minimum Tip: Contribute at least one key message in monthly project communications sent to all stakeholders.

Acknowledge the Good and the Bad

Good sponsors communicate the positives and negatives of the change. There will be pain points. Good sponsors make tough decisions to move forward…to pause…to change directions…or to stop. As the project team discovers the impacts on stakeholders of those decisions, it’s your job to communicate them.

These are great moments to keep your company’s culture in mind. Have you done a culture assessment? If not, you should. If you use words and examples that resonate well with employees, bad news won’t stall your project.

Bare Minimum Tip: Don’t hesitate when you communicate the “not so positive” news. Sharing the truth before alternate stories circulate earns you trust and credibility with stakeholders.

Review Progress and Support the Project Team

Good sponsors stay on top of project milestones at all times. They review status and understand what the project team needs to be successful.

You are the face of the project to your organization. So if there delays to communicate, new resources needed, or changes to the solution remember that the buck stops with you. Don’t suggest the team has stumbled; keep the company’s eye on the results you all want.

Tip for Sponsors: Once each month, plan to attend a project team status meeting to hear directly from those who are doing the work.

Endorse the Project

Part of your role is cheerleader. Goals and benefits should be on the tip of your tongue, and there’s no substitute for authentic enthusiasm from you.

Think about how to frame the benefits of the project for each audience. Why will employees love the new way of doing business? What speaks clearly to executives? Tell them which project results will deliver for them, in their own terms.

Bare Minimum Tip: Share project progress at regular executive meetings and all-company events.

These steps are easy to remember if you put their first letters together: I C A R E. If you do, this is how you show it.

Organizational communication is deceptive. It seems simple – just writing or speaking a message to managers and employees. Yet it’s often responsible for costly losses. Change in organizations – mergers, reorganization, process change, new IT solutions — is often a big investment. In a 2008 survey of 47 global companies, two of the top three reasons for unsuccessful change initiatives were a) not articulating a “burning need” for the change, and b) poor, untimely, unclear or inconsistent communications.

Why do so many communication efforts fall flat? Or, more importantly, why is YOUR communication ineffective?

We can’t know until we examine you. Yes, we treat a communication problem like a doctor treats a patient. There are many things that need to go right, to be healthy. When it comes to communication, five things have to go right; you must understand your audience, leverage organizational culture, have the right message, deliver it the right way, and balance your “push” (pain) information with “pull” (aspirational) information.

But let’s focus on some two common ailments: developing a poor message and delivering it badly.

The Right Message

The best messages are short, simple and easy to remember. They are the 30-second elevator speech — the 30,000-foot view. They are the distillation of everything into simple, compelling, “message points” – single words, each supported by a few phrases, facts or quotes that reinforce that point.

Because most adults are visual learners, you’ll help people remember your message if you associate it with both words and pictures. Imagine drawing a box or a triangle. Now imagine each corner labeled with a major message point. Remember, message points are best if boiled down to one word. That simple visual helps those responsible for telling your story stay “onmessage.”

Successful messages invariably leave some good stuff on the cutting room floor. A message is not a treatise on everything an organization or project does. It is a tool to earn the attention of your target audience and to help align key messengers. When a busy executive meets a colleague in the hall, her ability to recall the three key words and associated facts (without relying on a PowerPoint deck!) increases the chances your audience will hear about the change in a consistent and sincere way.

Think of messages like pieces of meat used to distract the dog guarding the jewels. They are the best arguments you have to grab people’s attention, answer problems, refute weaknesses, highlight strengths – and steal the jewels – whether that is their support, their resources, their business, their financial assistance or their hearts and minds.

The Right Delivery

There is nothing magic about delivering a message in the right way, yet it so often goes wrong. A few things can improve your chances of success.

First, use a personal touch. Tell real stories that support your message. It’s important to include comments and quotes from people who are a lot like your target audience. And, in addition to referencing others like them, use experts. Third-party validation of your change, by trusted sources, is really powerful. Remember, “Four out of five dentists recommend Trident for their patients who chew gum.”

Second: repeat, repeat, repeat. Re-use facts, stories, and information. Studies show the average person must hear, see or read a message seven times before really understanding it. Once you and your team are sick of your message — when it rings in your ears at breakfast like a bad jingle – know that your audience is just starting to hear it for the first time.

Third, maintain message discipline. Each presentation, every article, public remarks, emails, etc…must be on-message. Wandering off-message is easy because your product, project or organization is about much more than the message. But talking about those other things takes you off track. It distracts from the message you’ve been repeating, over and over, to create a shared direction.

Write the Story of Your Success

Companies face many challenges when they approach change. But the right message, delivered in the right way, puts you ahead of the game. Following sound communication practices lets you tell your story – consistently, repeatedly — on your terms.

Originally posted July 26, 2012.

Over half of all mergers and acquisitions fail, and many sources put the failure rate above 80%. Over half of those failures can be attributed to corporate culture clash.* While many deals look great on paper, few organizations pay proper attention to the challenges of combining two cultures. Culture is difficult to shift; combining two organizational cultures is even more challenging.

Over the weekend Kraft Heinz, the consumer goods giant controlled by Brazilian private equity group 3G and Warren Buffett, made and withdrew a $143B takeover approach for the Dutch-Anglo consumer goods group Unilever. The deal would have been the second-largest corporate merger on record.

Though it remains to be seen whether the alluring mega-deal is dead, Kraft Heinz might have been smart to veer away from Unilever in the first place. Since 3G consolidated Kraft and Heinz in 2015, Kraft Heinz has doubled profit margins to 30% and reduced employee headcount by more than 20% (to 42,000). The combined company derives more than 75% of revenue from the US market and operates eight major brands with declining revenues. Kraft Heinz is focused on driving costs out of the business. It does not reinvest substantially in its brands and thus needs an acquisition to grow revenues.

Unilever could not be more different. Unilever’s CEO abandoned quarterly reporting to concentrate on long term-revenue growth. It operates 13 major brands with 58% of revenue coming from emerging markets. Also, it has only half the profit margin of Kraft Heinz and employs 169,000 people worldwide. Unilever’s most important shareholder is a charitable foundation; their focus is on long term sustainability and profitability, not on cost-cutting for the sake of short term profitability. Unilever believes strongly in investing in its brand to drive organic revenue growth.

To those of us with expertise in corporate culture, these facts suggest very different cultural archetypes.

So Kraft Heinz could undoubtedly improve profit margins at Unilever, but would that equal success? It is doubtful the Unilever brands would continue to flourish under a drastically different management philosophy. The Financial Times reported one Unilever executive’s summary: “The deal made perfect financial and strategic senses for them, but absolutely none for us.”

Before making an offer, Kraft Heinz should have examined culture. Evaluating cultural fit, up-front, is a great investment. It helps companies avoid the high cost of a failed deal or the embarrassment of an open rejection.

What’s a Growth-Minded Organization To Do?

1. Assess your own cultural identity.Culture is made up of the unspoken rules by which people in an organization act, every day. A strong culture is a source of synergy and efficiency. Cultures aren’t better or worse than each other; each successful organization’s culture is, by definition, good. You shouldn’t try to change it. But you should try to figure out what it is, especially if you want to manage an acquisition effectively. Conduct an evaluation to identify your own organization’s dominant culture. Many culture assessments assign the organization an “archetype,” which captures the mind-set and behaviors of leaders and employees.
2. Conduct a culture audit of potential partners. Assessing the culture of the target company should be part of the due diligence process. The acquiring party must look for companies that fit, add to, or extend its own culture. The acquirer might look at qualitative data like mission/purpose, culture, vision, values, goals and future aspirations, and/or quantitative data from workplace assessments. Some companies have done their own culture assessments; in that case, the acquiring company should ask for those results. If, like Kraft Heinz, your culture is consistent with financial agility and tools like cost-cutting, don’t buy an innovator that requires massive, long-term, thoughtful investment to be successful.
3. Define the new organization with culture in mind. Even in the case of a good match, the new combined entity must redefine itself as one organization with a shared mission, values and culture. Smart leaders build plans for culture integration and include them in the approach strategy and offer. And before the organizations become one, management must be aligned around the key strategic and cultural themes for the new organization.

Consider the “Different Works” ad campaign from Alaska Airlines and Mekanism, its branding agency. Alaska Airlines and Virgin Atlantic are both great brands with a loyal consumer following, yet neither customer base was excited about the recent merger. The new ad campaign highlights the fact that while a pairing may seem strange at first, it could be a great fit. In its ads, Mekansim asks us to consider electricity and guitars, labradors and poodles, salty and sweet, comedy and romance, chocolate and bacon, and now Alaska Airlines and Virgin Atlantic.

One gets the sense that management did consider the cultural pitfalls of acquiring an iconic brand. Brad Tilden, CEO of Alaska Airlines said, “Alaska and Virgin are different airlines, but we believe different works. The two airlines may look different, but our core customer and employee focus is very much the same.” Mike Zlatoper, EVP of Mekanism, explained, “What we really wanted to do was lean in and acknowledge the truth. On the surface these airlines are different but underneath there are lots of similarities.” Alaska Airlines has tapped into a fundamental success factor in corporate mergers: once you believe you have a good partner, focus attention on the synergy.

Note that we are talking about focusing attention, not simply communicating. Bringing together two companies creates a whirlwind of information. Employees and other stakeholders will try to filter and make sense of all of it, drawing their own conclusions in the absence of clarity. Unless you focus attention on the right information, uncertainty will reign. Uncertainty is the greatest enemy of sustainable change. Employees need to feel confident and secure during a business combination. Unless leaders and managers focus on the right messages and a clear path forward, any other efforts of the leadership team will be negated.

Managing a business today is hard enough. During a merger the challenges are acute and the stakes are much higher. Culture is one key to success.

*Taken from public sources such as Bloomberg, The Financial Times and The Wall Street Journal