cameron and green making-sense-of-change-management

Mergers and acquisitionsNew culture – what did they need:• role clarity;• adaptability;• high standards;• customer focus;• responsiveness;• enjoyment;• team work.What might be the difficult areas:• Balancing clarity of roles with adaptability – culture clash?• Achieving high standards without getting too formal.• Being responsive while keeping to high standards.• Working as one team, rather than two teams.Action plan:1. Define flexible roles for all management team. Must be half page long.2. Highlight areas where standards need to be reviewed.3. Audit customer responsiveness and set targets.4. Tackle each of the above by creating small task force with membersfrom both companies.Output from a management team meeting focusing on building anew cultureCultural differences can be looked at using a simple cultural model such asthe one offered in Riding the Waves of Culture: Understanding cultural diversityin business by Fons Trompenaars and Charles Hampden-Turner (1997). SeeFigure 6.1 for our representation of the various scales. People from eachmerger partner mark themselves on these scales and openly compare scores.In the workshop it is useful to ask the team to predict what kind of difficultiesthey might have as they start to work together, and to make an actionplan to address these. We have run several such workshops, and in these westrongly encourage people to try to work together to define the new culture.This can be challenging work, especially if the acquisition or merger isperceived as hostile, but necessary work if any sort of integration is desired.237