One Merger, Two Cultures

Two Companies Merged. Two Cultures Didn't.

The deal closed. The org chart was redrawn. On paper, two companies became one. So why, eighteen months on, are there still two of everything — two systems, two chat channels, two sets of people who quietly stick to their own side?

In this episode we look at why so many mergers stall without anyone noticing, and why "we're one company now" so often isn't true. A merger isn't one team with a mix of people in it — it's two whole teams pushed together, each arriving complete with its own tools, habits and trusted colleagues. So they sit side by side instead of becoming one. It's a quiet stall that costs real money, and it won't close on its own.

You'll get four practical, structural moves to weaken the divide — plus the one idea to take away: we don't get rid of a divide by pretending it isn't there; we weaken it by building things that cross it.

Cultural Friction with Brendan Thomas Quinn — twenty minutes, one real problem, and what we can actually do about it. If this is live on your team, find out more at brendanthomasquinn.com, and subscribe so you don't miss the next episode.

Cultural Friction is hosted by Brendan Thomas Quinn who works with leaders and teams navigating cultural friction within teams that work together or are dispersed around the world — as an advisor, coach, and workshop facilitator, and as Adjunct Lecturer on an International Business Masters programme teaching Cross-Cultural Communication, Cultural Friction brings that same real-world, research-backed approach to your ears in 20 minutes.

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And, if you have comments or would like to suggest future topics to be discussed, let us know, we'd love to hear from you.

Transcript

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The deal closed 18 months ago. Two companies have come together and now they're one company. So here's the question: why do we still have two of everything? Two ways of logging a project, two tools that do the same job, and everyone knows which one is theirs. Two chat channels, the official combined one where people are nice and polite and show up every day, and then we've got the old one where the real conversations still happen. People are friendly in the joint meeting, then they go back to their own systems, their own habits, their own people that they've worked with for years. There's a phrase that most of us have when we kind of get to this point, and that is that integration is taking a little longer than expected. I want to suggest that it isn't a process that's going slow. I want to suggest that the integration has probably stopped. Slow and stopped are really two very different things. Slow still gets there in the end, stopped never does. Today, why two companies can merge on paper and stay two in practice long after they were expected to, and what we can build to make them money. Let's go. Let's talk about mergers. Let's talk about um companies coming together, people from different cultures trying to integrate and work well together. Um so this uh isn't really a major catastrophe. Nobody's arguing in the corridors, you know, everybody's polite, and the work gets done, clients get served, the lights stay on. And underneath all of that, the two companies we were supposed to join into one, they're kind of still running side by side. They haven't really fully integrated. And we can see this every day. I mean, watch who people ask when they get stuck. It's nearly always somebody from their own side, the person that they've they would have asked before the merger took place. Um, watch which system a task lands in when nobody says which ones to use, it's usually the old one. Watch who gets pulled onto a difficult high-stakes part of a project. It's going to usually be somebody from the same team, the same side, nearly every time. And it's not that people are trying to be difficult or that they're really pushing against it in a very um conscious way. It's just habit, it's history. You know, as humans, we uh always tend to go with what's comfortable, comfortable, what we know, and so we get pulled towards those people that we've worked with for years. None of that would matter much if it was fading, if it was slowly going somewhere. That normal awkwardness of colleagues uh learning how to work together, if that was slowly sorting itself out, this really wouldn't matter so much. But here's the problem: in a lot of mergers, it doesn't fade, it doesn't slowly work its way out. What actually happens is it hardens, and the difference between the two teams becomes really obvious. The integration just hasn't happened, the line between the two sides becomes a permanent part of how the place works, a line that everyone can feel, but nobody's really talking about because on the surface everything looks fine, um, and we don't have to change the way that we're working. And this is where it costs real money. The stall, this stopping of the integration, doesn't show up as a crisis, it shows up as the kind of combined team that's really still two teams but with one name, running two sets of processes, meeting once a week, um, being polite, being cordial, but still keeping these two things separate. And the most expensive part of all, this shows up kind of um in a year or two when the best people from the team that was acquired, they leave. Not because anybody's treated them badly, but because they still feel that they're not really part of an integrated team, and they just still feel like they're part of the team that's been acquired. Those people, they get lost. Put together, and we get the kind of quieties kind of failure that there is. The deal doesn't just blow up, it just underdelivers. The savings and the growth in the plan, they never quite arrive in the way that was hoped. And because nothing obviously is broken, nobody can say, Well, this is what went wrong, it's this or it's that. There's just this kind of bottom line number that should have been bigger, and a company that should have felt like one, but the reality is it's still two. That's the friction, it's not conflict, it's not chaos, it's just two capable groups of people quietly staying two capable groups of people, and all of the potential benefits of merging, they're slowly starting to dissipate. So, what does it happen? Well, um, this happens in even some of the best run mergers. The ones with a super plan a communications team, and even in some cases, consultants that are brought in to work through the two different teams to bring those teams together and to um make that merge happen in a in a very uh coherent and a very productive way. Um, but I'm gonna suggest um, and there's a few things, there can be a few reasons why merges don't don't work, um, and I'm just gonna focus on one of these things today. Um, two researchers, Dora Lau and Keith Murnahan, they came up with this thing in the 90s, um, and they kind of called uh one of the reasons why teams don't come together well is because of fault lines. So, fault lines. So let's start with a normal team. People differ in all sorts of ways, their job, their age, how long they've been here, how they like to work, and normally those differences they're all mixed up within the within the team. No two people kind of line up exactly the same way, there's no real duplication in the team, so there's no clean line that you can draw and split that team into two, and that mix is actually what's really important because it's what keeps that team from splitting into two different camps. Everyone is a bit different from everyone else, so there's no single divide that can take over and cause the team to fall apart into two distinct uh camps. Now, a merger is different because it isn't one team with a mix of people in it, it's two whole teams from two different companies that are being pushed together and asked to become one whole team and to work coherently and to work as effectively, and often with mergers to even work better than the two teams on their own were doing before. And each one of these teams arrives complete. It is it is it it has its own office, it has its own tools, its own way of working, its own people that it has trusted for years, so they don't easily blend into one coherent team. What happens is they kind of sit side by side, two teams just under a single name, and because each side already has everything that it needs, nobody has much reason or really any motivation to kind of reach across to the other side. This is the strongest divide an organization ever gets. It's simply what a merger is, and it's why we're one company now often just isn't true. It sounds great, but in reality it actually isn't true. Um, everybody feels it, everybody can feel that fault line, that line down the middle that's separating these two teams and keeping them separated. Now, the practical part because it's easy to hear fault lines and think, oh well, people are just being tribal or they're just being loyal, but that isn't really what it's all about. It's not that the people are the problem, it's the setup. So when someone works closely day to day with a colleague from the other side, the divide quietly fades. So those two people are kind of bridging this divide because they need to rely on that person, that person's from the other company, so there's a connection, there's a bridge over there. Um, but here's what kind of catches leaders when when the divide is is strong, if we don't actually do something that actively um works to bridge this divide, then that divide, that fault line is actually going to really take hold and it's gonna really harden. And uh every month the two sides that they keep to their own tools, their own channels, their own people, that divide just gets a little deeper, a little harder, until it kind of stops feeling like it's a merger problem, and it kind of just becomes well, this is how it is around here, this is how things are. Um, so it's not bad chemistry, it's not resistance to change, it's one unusually strong divide that's just being left to get harder and harder and harder. And sometimes we assume that this divide is going to soften over time, but the truth is that it really never does. So, what can we do about this? Well, first, and this may be a little bit counterintuitive, but we don't weaken this divide by talking about it. Um, not with a value statement, not with a better together campaign, not with another town hall meeting. Those things don't weaken these fault lines. They're great, they sound great, great words, great rhetoric, but it just doesn't actually provide a solution. We weaken these fault lines by building across them, and that means changing how the work is set up, not how people are feeling. And I'm gonna go through four key areas, uh key moves that we can do that I think kind of changes something that we control. Move one, build mixed teams with a shared goal, only both sides can reach. So, this is probably the most powerful move. So, we're gonna start with this one. We need to put people from both sides on the same small team and give them a target that they can't hit on their own. Um, one side's reach plus the other side's product, or one side's clients plus the other side's skills. We're we're creating a team where each person in that team is essential, um, but the people in that team are actually from two different, well, from the two originally different organizations, and this creates a new us. Um, it creates a new us, this team with this new goal. Um, and the person they need to reach, um, they need the people that they need to actually achieve this come from the other side, so they're working together. We haven't given a speech about working together, we've just mixed a team, giving them a shared goal that need to they need to start working on and relying on each other. Move two, mix the everyday work, not just the leadership. So, this is a little trap that that can catch really uh good integrations. Leadership team, totally behind it. They've done a lot of talking about it, they understand. Um, often they're creating new strategies together, so they're already kind of mixing at a leadership level, so they're kind of aligned, they're on the same page, and then that leadership team can assume right, brilliant, we're done here now. Um, we just now need this to filter down. But that the divide, the fault line, doesn't live at the top, it lives in the daily work, it lives in who sits together, who's paired up with who on what actual job, who's on the call getting it done. If the leaders are mixed and the day-to-day isn't, then the merger is like it's in the boardroom, but it isn't anywhere else. So we have to mix the pairs, we have to mix the teams, we mix, we make small teams, we mix them because it's in those daily tasks, in those operations that happen every day, that's what makes a merger work, not the fact that the leadership is all on board and all know where they're going. I mean, that's great and that's important too, but but the success or failure will happen with the with the everyday people doing the everyday tasks working together. So, um, yeah, so super important that the teams that we create are mixed teams, and that there is a coherent and an intentional leadership that is helping those teams to operate well together and to be mixed with shared goals. Otherwise, the merger doesn't work, it only works at leadership level, and the real day-to-day stuff just doesn't happen, and that is where a merger can break down. Move three make working across the line an easy option. So if we ask an honest question about our own systems, and somebody wants to get something done today, is the quickest way, the combined way, so working together in our new teams, or is it the old way? And if the old system or the old channel or the old way of working is faster, then people are just gonna naturally use that way. Not because not out of loyalty, but just because it creates less the least amount of friction, um, it's easier, I know how to do it. Um, whereas if the new way of working is harder, requires much more cognitive load from me, requires me to have to do a lot more steps to get there, then I'm not going to do it. I'm just gonna revert to my known way of doing things. So every time that the old way is the easier way, then we're quietly rewarding people for staying apart, for staying split. So it's not about willpower, it's about design. We make the combined way the quick, easy one, and we let the old way slowly become the slower one. Um, and then people will will naturally flow towards a way that is easier and quicker. We're not asking people to do the harder thing because it's right, we're making the easy thing the one that brings the both sides together. And then move forward, give it more time than the plan said, um, and spend that time building. So bringing two companies together takes longer than uh a plan usually admits. Um, and that's totally okay. Give it 18 months, give it two years, but time on its own won't allow for that fault line to fade away and for those teams to work really well together. Um, if we spend those months waiting for the two cultures to blend by themselves, then what we're going to end up with is a divide that is much harder to break because over time that fault line will get stronger and deeper and harder. And the longer it's in place, the harder it is to break. So we need to spend that time building intentional team building, management, mixing, bringing those people together, helping them to utilize each other's skills, not because they have to, not because that's uh our goal, but because that's how they're going to achieve the tasks, the KPIs, they're going to achieve what it is that they need to do. Now, none of these four ask people, none of these four moves ask anybody to feel differently or to be more open or to try harder to get along, because really that that kind of thing doesn't work. Or these four moves kind of changes something that we can control. Who's on the team, who's paired with who, um, which way is the easy way, um, and and how much extra time is spent. We don't talk a divide away, it just never goes with words. We build across those fault lines and we do it very intentionally, and we mix and enable people within the teams to rely upon each other across those fault lines. Okay, so here we are. The one thing, so if there's one thing that I want you to take away from this episode, it's this. We don't get rid of a fault line by pretending it isn't there or just talking about it. We weaken a fault line by building things that cross it. So every we're one company now, it's just insisting, it's just words. People can feel the line that's underneath, they can feel that fault line. So it just kind of bounces off, it doesn't really make any difference, any change. Every mixed team, every shared job, every system that only works well when both sides use it, that's what crosses the line. And crossing the line is the only thing that actually works. So we stop announcing that we're we're doing this or that we're two teams, we're now one. We stop using the words and we actually start building across that fault line because that's the easiest way to turn two companies into one. If this is a live issue for your team right now, that's exactly the kind of thing I work through one-to-one with leaders, through advisory, through coaching, and through workshops. You can find out more about the work that I do by visiting brendandomasquin.com, and you can also find me on LinkedIn.