We’ve all been there: the all-hands meeting with the leaders of your company seated on the stage next to a set of people who you’ve never seen or heard of before, cheerfully telling you how great your work will be going forward with the investment from an industry rival who has “merged” with your company. Over the following weeks, the all-hands stage hosts fewer and fewer of the leaders that you have worked for over the years… the ones who inspired you and supported your work in good times and then in the bad times. After your fifth “post-merger integration” working session, run by the managers of the “other” company, where the titles on their PPT slides start with “Ways of Working,” you come to the realization that you have been acquired. This was far from a merger of equals.

There are no mergers anymore, are there? There’s only acquisition.

From Intentional Tension, “The acquired company may be made to feel like they have a say in the post-merger integration outcomes, but the power lies fully with the ones taking the risk and making the investment.” This is often evidenced by the elimination of the target leadership team, a sign that” the acquirer believes they are smarter and have more insight than the current leaders.”

What are some of the indicators of an acquisition over a merger? They are found in the organization tension generators that emerge after the integration teams disband and the lunch-n-learn sessions end, including:

• “It has been decided.”
• “You should be happy that we’re even letting you interview for your job.”
• “Why did you do it THAT way?”
• “Send me a one-page justification for keeping you in your current job.”
• “The clients will just have to accept these changes.”

Acquisition represents perhaps the perfect storm of organizational tension generators. Its effects are persistent and pervasive. Sales teams have been working towards their annual objectives, which will suddenly need to accommodate new products, markets, or channels. Marketing knows that they won’t get a budget increase to cover double the outreach, as those extra funds were applied to the deal “synergies.” Engineering will be expected to rationalize and integrate two discordant tech stacks, architectures, and design philosophies, not to mention technology estates that were each a house of cards teetering on collapse.

Underlying all that post-acquisition integration tension is the “organizational inertia” caused by the concept of the deal itself. For the acquiring company comes the question of whether they were just not good enough or smart enough to create a new product line or expand into a new market. Instead, their leadership turned to the innovation of an industry rival or upstart to fuel its growth. The organizational inertia that we spoke about in our last blog, “Addressing Microcultures Starts with Identifying the Symptoms of Organizational Antibodies”, can evolve into outright divisiveness or rejection of the new entity and the deal/integration vision.

For the acquired company, well, the rug just got pulled out from under them, yes? Their career paths are uncertain at best; the products that they worked on for years might not survive the portfolio rationalization process, and some of their long-time clients and channel partners want nothing to do with the company that bought them. With their leaders gone, they don’t know the direction of the combined entity, what they should be doing or not doing, and what, if any, authority they have to make decisions.

The concept of Intentional Tension, along with our unique management tool, Tension Mapping™, was designed not only for value creation but also for value preservation. The strategic gains from an acquisition—the access to domain talent or innovative IP, market share expansion, or operational and scale efficiencies—can easily and unfortunately be lost or diminished due to organizational tensions that are not anticipated and mitigated.

Consider adding Tension Mapping to your pre-deal analysis and due diligence work. Consider the people that you will be trying to “integrate” and how you will communicate a clear, transparent vision for the acquisition and the integration challenges ahead. They know now that there are no mergers, so help them to understand how they can best contribute to the success of the acquisition and hopefully demonstrate their continued value no matter where they end up sitting at this new table that you’ve set for them.