The Myth of the One Great Leader

But communication failures are foolish when a little forethought would fix your formula for telling your acquisition and integration tale. Use this Five-Part Framework for fabricating fool-proof M&A messaging. ------------------ PART 1 | Your Initial Integration Communication During due diligence, your people will know "something is going on." No matter how cleverly you name your project, there will be strangers in the building, more closed-door meetings than usual, and sentences awkwardly cut off when the uninitiated walk into the room. Before you know it, your employees' psychological safety has begun to erode. THEN you announce the acquisition. Your instinct is to tell both 'your people' and the acquired company's people that they are 'safe.' BUT ARE THEY? Be careful what you say here. There are likely redundancies that must be addressed to maximize the deal's value. COMMUNICATIONS FAILURE #1: Leaders who promise 'safety' then back down on their word not only see psychological safety evaporate, but they also have likely taken a mighty bite out of their own people's Trust. INSTEAD TRY CAREFULLY CRAFTING A CULTURE-BASED COMMUNICATION PLAN CULTURE-BASED COMMUNICATION PLANS consider all audiences (current and acquired employees, customers, partners, suppliers, the media, investors, and other interested stakeholders), balancing the desired transparency and not triggering each constituent's most closely held concerns and beliefs. At a minimum, make sure your audience members know you understand that change is hard. While you cannot promise that there will not be changes, you are determined to be transparent about your decision-making and to do your best to minimize the adverse impacts on them and the business. Assure your new employees that you desire to retain the value, the high performance, the brand reputation, and the cultures that made the two firms seem like such a good fit for each other -- and that to do so means to hold onto to critical aspects of both cultures and the people who make up both great teams, while still making the sometimes tricky business decisions that come with the fiduciary responsibility and stewardship of your role as a leader. This will also be a good place to foreshadow the humanity of your general approach to mergers and the empathy baked into your governing philosophy on the topic of Right Sizing -- using language that reflects both cultures -- and staying true to the spirit of the cultures as well as their expressed spoken words . PARTS 2, 3 and 4 | Right Sizing Done Right Three distinct types of change are part of nearly every M&A integration, sure to put your people on edge. The associated communication failures include: ● FAILURE #2 - Leadership Changes without considering culture and connections ● FAILURE #3 - Roughshod Reorganizations and Team Integrations ● FAILURE #4—Workforce Reductions / 'Right Sizing' messages that imply someone was 'WRONG' and are delivered in a cold and impersonal way. There is one word that can get you through the announcement of all three types of change without violating your values, culture and shared sense of community, undermining your people's trust and confidence, or squandering the goodwill your new employees are willing to extend to you -- and that word is EMPATHY . As you make your selections of who will stay and who will go, remember that each decision will bring with it history, loyalty, and friendships that will directly impact the people who remain. Your new employees will judge the kind of leader you are, how much you value people, and how they can expect you to treat them in your chosen words and actions. Their sense of psychological safety -- and their LOYALTY -- will remain strong (or plummet) depending on how you navigate these changes. Make sure you've carefully considered your messaging regarding WHY you've made the leadership and staffing decisions you've made. In all instances, the decisions must be framed as being about the best long-term interest of the business—never about the people. Keep the dignity of those chosen for layoffs intact and do everything in your power to make the landing of those leaving you as soft as possible. As the newly combined teams come together under new leaders, arm these leaders with tools and talking points to help them inspire confidence in the newly integrated company. Consider team-building tools like Everything DiSC, Strength Finders, or the Enneagram to fast-track team connection. Train your leaders to articulate the company's growth strategy and how their team fits into the future vision. Your employees—both long-term and newly acquired—will assess their words and actions to determine if they can trust their leaders and whether they feel safe, secure, and optimistic about the newly integrated organization, where it is going, and their place within it. PART 5 | Coming Together under a Common Culture As the most challenging stages of post-acquisition change communications come to a close, you can heal some wounds that the change may have caused by executing a deliberately inclusive cultural integration effort that includes listening closely to your newly integrated team. Culture is very personal for most people. Often, culture is a big reason why people come to an organization (it is the essence of the employee value proposition) -- and why they stay. You often hear that people leave organizations because of their leaders' behaviors...But what is culture, after all, but the sum of the behaviors that are encouraged and rewarded within the organization? FAILURE #5 occurs when leaders fail to include their people in deliberately shaping their organization's culture. ----------------------  INTRODUCING THE POWER OF LISTENING— One of the most powerful engagement tools is listening to your people as you strive to select the right behaviors to carry forward in your culture. Proactive Employee Listening serves several purposes, such as: ● determining the level of engagement and trust in leadership as the hardest felt aspects of integration are past. ● understanding what was working well for people within the cultures of both organizations ...and what was missing. ● kicking the tires and assessing how new cultural behaviors you would like to instill are likely to be received. By simply including your people in shaping the future culture of the organization, you signal that what they think, and feel is critically important to you as a leader. With thoughtful input from your leadership team and employees across the company regarding the go-forward culture tenets that will help your company succeed, it is time to execute an extended Culture-based Communications Campaign to embed the new culture across the organization. Reinforce your commitment to cultural behaviors by aligning performance metrics, leadership competencies, rewards, and recognition programs and engaging leaders to introduce the themes into their meetings and the stories they share with their teams. Employing tactics such as gamification can grab people's attention and encourage leaders to tell their personal stories broadly to help bring the new culture to life. In addition to stand-alone cultural messaging, the campaign themes can also be embedded in other communications efforts that reinforce the message and demonstrate how the culture fits with other activities across the company. For example, messaging about 'valuing our people' can be embedded into annual benefits enrollment, literature promoting employee development programs, etc. # # # # # As I’ve said before, we all benefit from sharing stories of doing hard things and delivering tough messages in our business journeys. To navigate BIG CHANGE without losing your people's hearts and minds, you must be planful, strategic, and, most of all, empathic. What mistakes have you seen leaders make when navigating a merger or acquisition? How has it landed with the people? How long did it take for the culture to recover? What might you do differently next time you’re involved in communicating this type of change?

Workforce Reductions the most critical of all Moments that Matter ™

Leveraging culture to increase employee engagement

“Good News! No one is being laid off”

What lies beneath the alarming employee disengagement statistics? And what can an individual business do to beat the odds and help employees feel more excited and engaged with their work? The answer lies in you business culture...

Now, I don’t mean to alarm you, but the state of the American workforce is not so good. According to Gallup, the keeper of all engagement-related data, only 30% of employees in the American workforce are currently engaged – down from 33% in 2023. (For context, “ engaged employees” are those who willingly invest their discretionary energy into their work – they approach their work with enthusiasm, are intrigued by the business challenges they face, and look forward to the lessons they will learn along the way. Their positive energy is contagious!) Unfortunately, this downward trend in nationwide employee engagement persists, with a increasing number of employees crossing over from engaged to disengaged with each passing quarter. But hold on – these statistics are at the national level. How do you think your own workforce stacks up? According to the Forbes Human Resource Council, symptoms you can look for to identify whether employees are disengaged include withdrawal, poor communication, breaks from routine, silence, apathy where once there was excitement, absenteeism, complacency, a decline in work quality, missed deadlines, exhaustion, cynicism, inefficiency, lack of participation, naysaying and even rudeness – and ultimately, if unaddressed, regrettable turnover. If the notion that two-thirds of our American workforce is disengaged isn’t alarming enough, consider this: Gallup also reports that 17% of employees fall into the actively disengaged category (otherwise known as ‘quiet quitting’). These individuals expend their discretionary energy searching for new job opportunities while simultaneously spreading negativity among their peers. It’s no wonder that disengagement is often seen as contagious and toxic for company culture. Moreover, employees who attribute their disengagement to burnout and chronic overwork are twice as likely to encourage their colleagues to resign. Shockingly, a recent study by the American Psychological Association reveals that up to 50% of managers — yes, managers! — experience burnout. What lies beneath these depressing statistics? When dealing with disengagement, I find individual employees are rarely to blame. In my work, I have found the strongest contributors to disengagement include: Lack of Inclusion, Trust, and Transparent Communications : When employees feel excluded or unheard, their engagement suffers. Transparent communication fosters trust and a sense of belonging. Insufficient Development and Advancement Opportunities : Without clear paths for growth, employees become disenchanted. Organizations must invest in their employees’ professional development. Lack of Recognition and Support : Recognition fuels motivation. Employees who feel undervalued are more likely to disengage. Overwork and Burnout : The relentless pursuit of productivity can lead to burnout. Striking a balance is crucial. Lack of Autonomy and Empowerment : Micromanagement stifles engagement. Empowering employees to make decisions enhances their commitment. Poor or Uninspiring Organizational Culture : Culture shapes behavior. A positive, purpose-driven culture encourages engagement. Not surprisingly, most of the drivers of disengagement can be traced back to organizational culture. This realization prompted the National Association of Corporate Directors (NACD) to declare that a company’s culture is not only an asset but also a top governance imperative. Regardless of company size or sector, business leaders should actively monitor and measure culture using objective metrics such as unwanted attrition, employee net promoter scores, referrals, hotline reports, productivity, inclusion, diversity, engagement scores, and the strength of the employment brand. What can you do? I see these three factors as a starting point to beat the statistics above: Don’t assume you know what your people are thinking. Trying to remedy a situation without fully understanding what is going on is likely to result in wasted efforts. Different people in different roles are certainly going to be having different experiences – experiences that are different from your own. Which leads us to the next suggestion… Listen to your people. Let your team members tell you how they are feeling about their work environment and their jobs. I often conduct focus groups, spot surveys and broader employee engagement surveys with my clients' teams to get a sense of their engagement and understand what some of the key issues are. We use survey data to broadly understand how people are feeling – and follow up with focus groups in specific areas to get a more nuanced feeling for what changes would improve engagement and morale. NOTE: If trust is an issue, sometimes an impartial moderator can get people to open up about how they are feeling. Communicate. Communicate. Communicate. No matter how high or low your team’s engagement is, improving communications is always a good idea. Communication improves people’s sense of inclusion, helping them to better understand the business and where it is going, allowing them to align their work with the business strategy and see how their efforts are directly tied to business results. This in turn helps them have a greater sense of belonging and trust – two feelings that are directly tied to employee engagement. 

Recruiting and Sales are tough – fortunately, you’re an expert.

Disengaged Employee - n. someone who is unhappy and unproductive at work who is liable to spread negativity to coworkers.