The Clash of Large Company Styles Joining Small Company Styles
Mergers, acquisitions, spin-offs, and other methods of creating new organizations are very complex 
processes that have repercussions that cause tremendous damage to a company culture and employee engagement. The third part of my blog series called “Practical Leadership Insights about Leading during a Transition” focuses on the following;
People coming to a small company from a bigger company think of themselves as delegators and not workers. How do you get those people to be operationally efficient and do work instead of fill out plans?
Consider the case of “ABC Specialty Chemicals” who was recently spun out of a larger conglomerate. ABC is smaller organization that has a portfolio of specialty products that are on the verge of being commoditized, but their Customer Intimate strategy has enabled them to carve out a niche and continue to grow modestly, but profitably.
The leadership team and all of the employees run a very tight ship. They had a great culture of collaboration and a willingness to do whatever it takes to get the job done for customers. ABC was always looking for good people with experience to add to their team and had what seemed to be a great opportunity to hire four top talent engineers from their largest competitor who had just been “downsized” as part of a restructuring. The idea was that these four people could come right into ABC and make a difference from day one. ABC’s leadership jumped at the opportunity and hired them on the spot.
That decision turned out to be a very poor decision.
ABC had a small company, collaborative culture. It was a completely different environment than what these four newcomers had expected. There were no administrative assistants to make meetings. No unlimited budgets for outsourcing anything from coffee service to scientific studies. No unlimited work-from-home policy. The “outsiders” couldn’t believe that they actually had to do the work, manage people, and work on projects all at the same time. It was like an organ transplant that went terribly wrong. The other “core” leaders and employees became extremely resentful of their attitudes, unwillingness to collaborate, their disappearances, and their constant complaining about how good it used to be at their old company.
Within 8 months all four of the once-great-new-hires had either quit or were terminated for lack of performance. A waste of time, effort, energy and the near destruction of ABC’s culture.
Unfortunately, this is a common story and there are many different suggestions on what to do from a leadership perspective. Here is my suggestion: Develop a culture integration plan and measure the success on a weekly basis.
- Define early the culture expectations – You can’t simply expect one culture to uniformly transform into another. The best practice is to create a new and better one. Early on in the process, make sure you clearly define the culture expectations for everyone.
- Create a group of key stakeholders to develop a culture charter – Choose an influential group of stakeholder (from the new company and the old one) to develop a charter for the process.
- Create a new culture playbook – Map out the key characteristics of the culture, the expected behaviors, and expected outcomes.
- Train to the new culture – Invest in training programs that teach the new skills, tools, and best practices that will back the culture.
- Support the new culture – Leaders must be willing to change and accept a new culture and most of all, they must be willing to support it.
- Modify the new culture where necessary – It’s not going to be perfect from the start. The environment is evolving and things are constantly changing. Don’t be afraid to modify and adapt the playbook and process along the way.
