How to survive and thrive after an acquisition

Eve Tahmincioglu • Profile • E-mail

For more than a decade, Ron Weston worked as an architect for Hillier Architecture, one of the biggest architecture firms in the United States. So he was a bit nervous about his future when a global architectural powerhouse, U.K.-based RMJM, acquired the firm last year.

“I wondered if I would lose my job despite what we were told. We all know when mergers happen there are overlaps, or for other reasons you can get pushed out,” he said.

Thankfully, he is still working for the combined company, and he’s happier than ever. But he made sure he was proactive after the merger, researching the new owners, networking with managers and putting in extra hours.

“You have to reach out and pursue opportunities,” he said.

The rate of mergers and acquisitions lately is almost dizzying. JPMorgan Chase & Co. gobbled up Bear Stearns and Washington Mutual. Last month, Bank of America bought Merrill Lynch in a $50 billion deal. And last Friday, federal regulators cleared Wells Fargo's $11.7 billion acquisition of Wachovia Corp.

After a merger, employees don’t know what to expect. Job loss and uncertainty are workers' biggest concerns, according to an Accenture survey of more than 900 workers who were part of a merger or acquisition.

More than 40 percent of those surveyed said “it took three months or more before they understood how the deal would affect them in terms of departmental reorganizations, new responsibilities, layoffs, and other changes, and 36 percent said the merger or acquisition made their job more difficult.”

But if you are lucky enough to survive immediate layoffs, it's a good time to come up with a strategy to survive and thrive once the new bosses descend upon your department.

“Think about it as an involuntary job change,” said Rebecca Schalm, a senior consultant at management consultancy RHR International. “You got a new job without going through the recruitment process.”

A new company culture
Change after a corporate marriage sometimes comes within weeks, but it can also take months, depending on the financial circumstances. If your company was struggling, the acquiring company may want to come in quick and clean house. If two fairly healthy companies merged, integration may take longer.

But the bottom line is, two different cultures cannot exist together, so expect the new owners to impose their way of doing business, experts say.

Getting disparate cultures to mesh well is the hardest task. It can be “a shock to the system” for employees on both sides of a merger, adds Elisa Hukins, cultural integration leader for Mercer, a global human resources firm.

Indeed, a recent Mercer survey found that more than half of organizations report cultural integration issues hurt the overall success of many mergers and acquisitions.

The shock of the merger, says Hukins, “costs time, emotional energy, and ultimately all these things lead to dollars lost. If an organization has a long protracted integration, people can’t work effectively together. The bigger difference between two cultures, the bigger the shock will be.”

So how do you minimize the shock to your career?

Many merger integration experts have told me the management at the acquiring firm often relies on the leaders of major divisions at the company they’ve bought to tell them who should stay and who should go.

If you’re the top banana at a profitable division within a company, often the new managers will want to keep things intact at that unit, even if they do impose their own manager to oversee the operation.

For everyone else, it’s time to do more than just your job.

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