Two commercial teams, one leader, eleven months

The situation

The acquirer had bought a competitor roughly two-thirds its size with a genuinely better field organisation and a materially worse margin structure. The integration plan was thorough on systems, warehouses and headcount, and silent on how the combined leadership team would decide anything.

The SVP appointed to run the combined organisation had come from the acquiring side. She had, by her own account, spent four months being scrupulously even-handed, which both groups had read as having no view at all.

The work

The Stakeholder Read

Twelve interviews, deliberately balanced six and six across the two heritages, plus the CEO and one board member. The themes were uncomfortable and consistent: decisive on commercial questions, conspicuously absent on questions of authority, and — from the acquired side — "still one of them, obviously".

The contract

Two shifts went on the Behaviour Ledger. First: state a decision and its owner in the room, in the meeting, rather than following up afterwards. Second: stop pre-socialising every difficult call with the acquiring-side leaders first, which everyone on the other side had noticed and nobody had mentioned.

The team engagement

From month three the combined leadership team ran a parallel six-month engagement with a second coach: two observed meetings, a written decision-rights map, and a team operating agreement the team drafted itself.

Where it ended

• By month eight the leadership meeting had a published decision-rights map and a standing item at the end naming what had been decided and by whom.
• Voluntary regretted attrition among the acquired side's directors, running at four in the first two quarters, was one in the following three.
• The SVP's closing stakeholder pulse was, in her coach's summary, "notable mostly because both groups now complained about the same things".

We budgeted for systems integration and treated the leadership problem as something that would resolve itself. It would not have. The coaching was about four per cent of the integration budget and it is the line I would cut last.
Chief Human Resources Officer, the acquiring group