After a company merger or acquisition, we all can struggle to find our way back to a feeling of “home.”
According to a recent Deloitte M&A trends report, mergers and acquisitions are up considerably from last year. This trend means more managers are trying to wrangle employees from disparate teams into one cohesive team. This challenge is exacerbated when it comes to blending two voices into one for proposal development. In this article, we’ll address three ways you can help unify your team after a merger or acquisition.
Start With a Mission and Vision
When you have two teams, there will likely be some overlapping capabilities, and there may be a culture clash. Before embarking on this journey, taking the time to clarify this new team’s mission and vision can be a powerful way to unify the team members. A people-first, process-second approach can help your team find a new cohesive voice. An off-site team retreat is a great place to start.
Choose a Common Language; Create Style and Data Guides
After the mission and vision are set, it’s also important to uncover key assumptions and the terminology used by each team. One firm might call a submission a “proposal” while another firm calls it a “bid.” Word choice may seem like a small thing, but differences in workday vernacular can create large communication issues over time. A useful method to proactively address these differences is to work together to document your business processes, with the goal of solidifying new procedures and sharing these with colleagues.
Next, it’s time to create style and data guides. These guides will keep your team focused and on the same path. Many of you may already be familiar with style guides. A data guide contains directions more specific to using a tool like a customer relationship management (CRM) or other database to store proposal information. For example, if you need to pull a company reference and one proposal team stored this information under the acronym for the company and the other team stored it under the company’s full name, this can create delays in finding information, perhaps even a missed deadline.
Taking the time to clarify this new team’s mission and vision can be a powerful way to unify the team members. A people-first, process-second approach can help your team find a new cohesive voice.
Goals and Metrics
As your newly formed team begins to manage the changes required to build one voice, goals tied to specific metrics will help your team gain clarity on its progress. First, give your team a reasonable timeline for achieving all the action items you defined during your planning meeting. Second, make sure that you have metrics to measure how you’re progressing on each goal. Maybe you uncover that there are 30 pieces of content that need to be revised. Meeting regularly to check on your goal progress is a common characteristic of high-functioning teams.
Summary
Merging two teams or acquiring a new team can be a challenge to manage. Make the most out of this opportunity by developing a mission and vision that everyone can stand behind, creating updated style and data guides, setting realistic goals, and communicating about those goals regularly. The capacity for finding our way back home is always with us—we may just need to have a little adventure along the way.
Chaz Ross-Munro, CF APMP, is a professional services consultant, and Christina Leahy is a project manager, both for Cosential Inc., an Austin, Texas-based CRM solution provider. They can be reached at [email protected] and [email protected], respectively.
Join the Conversation