Solving the inevitable leadership culture problems that come with mergers and acquisitions.
Our approach brings your company leaders together to have tough conversations and learn new skills that rapidly increase collaboration.
We show executives, directors, and managers at post-M&A companies how to work together fast.
How our clients describe our work
“We had roughly a year to integrate two merging companies. Whenever you go through an acquisition, there’s always going to be challenges. Some of it is personality, some of it is understanding the operations of another company; the goals, the culture, the structure … and trying to bring all of that together into one is pretty challenging.”
“BLUECASE gives you a lot of tools to give your leadership team the right approach to be able to tackle challenges. Having the resources that BLUECASE has is almost like being able to steal that capability from a much larger company.”
“You have the things that you plan for such as system integration and process integration, but then probably the biggest challenges are cultural.”
“We had some friction across our leadership team with a few folks who simply couldn’t communicate with each other. It had gotten to a point where they didn’t have a constructive relationship at all. In the first couple of sessions we had with BLUECASE, we were able to address that breakdown. The results were impressive.”
“Working with a BLUECASE coach over months really started to transform me personally and the organization.”
“I think everyone gets into habits. You get stuck in, ‘This is the way I’ve done it for many years, this has been successful for me personally,’ but you forget to take into account that what’s working for you may not be working for others. The BLUECASE tools, by teaching you to listen — actively listen — helps you to acknowledge what people are saying and empathize with what they’re feeling.”
“The BLUECASE training led to better cross-functional collaboration. This set us up for success because our employees and our managers were better able to address the challenges that they were seeing.”
“Prior to going through this process, we were haphazardly putting out fires left and right. I think that the employees could see it. Once our employees saw that our leadership team had a more logical focus and a goal to improve the big things that were holding us back, people got more and more excited.”
“So some of the results that we’ve seen… we all tend to trust each other and we have a lot more cross-company collaboration and communication. Even after being in management for more than 20-25 years, there were a lot of things we learned that none of us had ever been exposed to before.”
“I would encourage anybody at any company to look into the BLUECASE training. It’s going to lead to better communication across their employees, across their departments, across their executives, and it’s going to improve each person who does the training individually, as well.”
“If you are an executive and you’re skeptical about going through BLUECASE training, I would highly encourage you to set that skepticism aside for 24 hours and go through that first session with your executive team.”
Each year, between 70 to 90% of Mergers and Acquisitions fail.
Source: Harvard Business School, The New M&A Playbook
Why?
A lack of strategic alignment, clashing work cultures, and communication problems top the list of reasons for this failure.
- Taking on a new company or bringing two organizations together is often one of the hardest and riskiest decisions you can make. It’s notoriously difficult.
- You can plan for integrating systems and processes. But no matter how prepared you think you are, bringing more than one company culture together naturally results in a kind of workplace shock.
- As a result, bickering, poor communications, interpersonal tensions, and departmental silos breed sluggish progress and low engagement.
- You end up working harder and harder, but confidence falters as the complaining and lack of motivation grows. And when all this goes on too long, your best people start to leave, and the investment fails to deliver the intended result.
What’s Going on Here?
This isn’t necessarily anyone’s fault. Even the best leaders are going to struggle with the burdens of culture clashes that seem out of your control.
Each merging or acquired company has its own cultural norms: how you talk to each other, how you run meetings, how you get projects done, how you socialize. When one company is expected to join another, the transition from one culture to another is jarring for everyone.
Sometimes, team tensions and breakdowns still reflect the cultural divides years after an initial M&A event.
Conventional approaches to addressing these issues often identify the problem, but don’t solve it. You might hire a big name consulting firm who provides you with decks upon decks with data and recommendations. But all the data and research in the world won’t help you solve for the fact that, after an M&A, people have to re-learn how to work together as quickly as possible.
Without a clear, strategic approach to merging cultures (and guidance to apply that approach), the problem doesn’t just go away on its own. The resulting cultural issues lead to poor decision-making, low employee morale, and other issues that negatively impact financial performance.
OUR RESULTS
AS A RESULT OF WORKING WITH US YOU WILL:
• Experience divided teams becoming one company.
• Successfully navigate the people challenges when you bring two or more companies together.
• Understand the specific leadership cultural challenges slowing your company down.
• Grow more quickly with less frustration.
• Improve your company culture and increase your eNPS (employee Net Promoter) score.
• Embed a shared language of practices and tools that improves cross functional communication and collaboration across your company.
• Eliminate tension and waste and get more done in less time.
• Increase retention of your key players and make your managers great leaders.
• Improve camaraderie and collaboration.
• See your investment return exponential gains.
• Enjoy your work and see a lot more happy faces across the company.
Recent Case-Study Results:
- We worked with a PE-backed company whose culture struggled post-M&A with silos, disengagement, low morale, poor cross-functional communication, and executive team misalignment. Their eNPS score jumped 40 points in 9 months. Their CEO said, “we were broken, and you fixed us.”
- In 2013, we started working with a struggling 10M company that today is a global company worth over a billion dollars and seen as the star in one of the largest technology funds in their PE-backer’s portfolio.
- Three years after we began working with them, a financial services company client sold for nine times its revenue—one of the largest exits in Austin, Texas the year it sold.
- A fintech company acquired a company that doubled their size, expanding their company from one office location to multiple across the U.S. BLUECASE supported their leadership and cultural integration and their Private Equity firm said the acquisition was the smoothest they had ever seen.
How?
The results of working with us happen fast. Often, companies will say that they see monumental gains after our very first session with them. Here’s how we get these results:
- Leadership Team and Cultural Assessment: Gain objective data to understand the unique leadership cultural challenges slowing your company down.
- M&A Executive Strategic Alignment: We very quickly align your executive team and their teams around simple and pragmatic strategies, so work gets done with speed while trust, performance, and communications skyrocket.
- Cross-functional Leadership Development: Our unique training approach builds cross-functional relationships that naturally break down divides caused by company or department-specific silos. We facilitate conversations that increase transparency and trust, build up friendship and camaraderie, and get your company operating as one in a very short period of time. Because leaders of various teams go through this together, it creates a sense of becoming one company.
- M&A Leadership Toolkit: We provide executives, directors, and managers with a set of pragmatic, actionable tools and skills that lead to fast trust-building, collaboration, and ownership across your company. Our coaching tools provide a framework of shared language, shared practices, and shared guidelines to have effective conversations across teams, departments, and acquired companies that lead to results.
- Individual and Group Coaching: Increase retention of your key players and make your managers great leaders in your post-M&A environment. Identify key skills you’d like your managers to develop, and watch as the leadership, delegation, communication, and motivation in your company skyrockets.
HERE’S WHAT OUR CLIENTS SAY:
LOGIX
Post-integration, friction among team members led to tensions and communications breakdowns that prevented company goals and were felt across the company. As a result of our work: improved eNPS, improved cross-functional collaboration, executive alignment, successful cultural integration.
BYPASS
Friction between departments at Bypass led to divides and silos. As a result of our work: cross-cultural integration between Engineering and Sales, supported solving the cross-functional challenges of these silos, leading directly to acquisition.
ESO
We supported ESO, consistently recognized as a top place to work in Austin, through 13 acquisitions to establish a shared language of leadership, communication, and collaboration, supporting their growth from 50 employees to 400, enabling their successful response through the adaptive challenges of 2020 to achieve record-breaking growth.