The Merger Dividend - July/August 2011

The Merger Dividend talks about the opportunities that M&A presents to Human Resource development, especially leader development. But in taking advantage of these opportunities, there are 3 things that need to take note of during the M&A process and they are:

1) Getting everyone on the same page.
Creating a strategy and communicating that strategy should be done with small room for interpretation. There is a need to develop a vision, the "merger intent". Documenting the "merger intent" outlines the expectation and hold people accountable to meeting these goals. During the integration process companies should discourage employees from withholding back ideas for fear of repercussion. Hiring of an external vendor could help to consolidate and then submit a report of feedback gathered. The negative feedback are then debated openly with employees to give transparency.

2) Executing with Discipline
Using the M&A process gives an opportunity to train potential leaders in execution. Give these new leaders opportunities to shine, understand different parts of the companies and manage different types of people. Given the tight timelines, the tasks stretches these potential leaders.

3) Building an A-Team
M&A gives opportunities to potential leaders to build the team that they want but such tasks currently are left to the HR to decide who to go and also the assignment of job roles. Potential leaders should take the opportunities to assess the skills sets that they think are critical and build an A-Team for themselves. From the selection and given some time, they are then able to see the results of their choices and with the experience, make better decision better in terms of identifying, hiring and retaining talents.