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Successful Growth Through Mergers
Mergers and acquisitions offer the opportunity to accelerate an organization's growth, expand product and service offerings, and enter new markets. They also are an opportunity for financial disaster and public embarrassment.
For every merger success there are high-profile failures, such as AOL & Time Warner. In fact, a Training Magazine article says that 55 to 70 percent of mergers fail to meet the anticipated purpose. It's further estimated that one in three mergers fails for cultural reasons.
Mergers can succeed, however, when attention is given to cultural issues throughout the merger process. The TRACOM Group has helped one of America's largest independent oil and gas producers successfully grow via mergers and acquisitions. This Oklahoma-based company has averaged more than one such event annually since 1992, including a 2003 merger valued at more than $5 billion. The combined company now employs more than 4,000 people.
While the merger and acquisition activity was driven by a strategy to grow oil and gas reserves, it still came down to the company's people to make the merger successful. Management knew that building a common culture was critical when integrating new businesses and people. Great attention was paid to helping new and existing employees understand where the business was going and their role within the company.
TRACOM's products have become an important part of these performance and culture efforts. TRACOM’s Producing Results with Others course, (based on the Social Style Model™) and Team Development training, in particular, were a significant part of the company's leadership development process and merger success strategy.
A leadership development program was created to address the critical skills that were affecting executives and supervisors on a daily basis. Creating common competencies throughout the organization was the goal. Management knew that interpersonal skills were a critical skill for effective managers and a prerequisite for success. Social Style(sm) training directly addressed the issues and struggles that managers faced every day.
The company has found that providing Social Style training has helped build a common culture and a context for dealing with business issues. People are able to separate interpersonal issues or differences from the fundamental business issues.
“Mergers and acquisitions are a business function, but on a practical level they are highly emotional,” said the company's director of performance development. “The fact that both companies used Social Style training made a noticeable impact in our merger. It helped the merger go more smoothly than previous mergers.”
TRACOM's Team Development training was used to improve workgroup productivity and encourage individual contributors to work collaboratively.
“We had a group of brilliant individuals working on a high-impact project that was initially struggling. People were giving good effort, but without good results. There was limited feedback and collaboration. TRACOM's Team Development training and multi-rater feedback tools helped to get the project back on track.”
“Managers have told me that TRACOM's training has made their jobs easier and made them more effective in producing their results. As a training manager, it doesn't get much better than that.”
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