We help you address the culture aspects of integrations so your newly merged organization can deliver greater value. Of the three strategies for addressing organizational culture in mergers ー adapting to the culture of one company, incorporating and integrating the cultures of both companies into a new culture, and keeping the cultures of each company separate ー we focus on incorporating and integrating corporate cultures. For cross-border mergers, we help you address differences between company and national cultures to help your people define, implement and take ownership of their new culture.

Cultural fit and alignment are significant factors for successful integration. They can also be deciding factors in why integrations fail. Our expertise centers on taking a high-involvement approach to cultural integration and then empowering the people across your organization to take personal ownership of their new culture.

Situation

Following an merger of a US-based Fortune 100 Financial Services and a Japanese Insurance Company, our client wanted to transform its corporate culture and the behaviors of its entire Japan workforce of more than 10,000 employees in order to achieve the strategic business goals of the newly merged company. At the same time, they also were commited to retaining the best parts of the Japan firm's corporate culture and management methods.

Solution

Our team of Japanese and American consultants partnered with the client’s culture transformation leadership team to develop a strategy and comprehensive project plan. Using insights from an awareness survey and interviews with key stakeholders as our guide, we finalized our plans for a multi-day cultural integration workshop. The workshop allowed participants to gain an deep understanding of the impact of national cultures and values in the new organization, inclduing the misunderstandings and frictions that tend to occur between their different cultures. They also dialogued about their respective company's proud histories and the characteristics of their organizational cultures. In the workshop's later sessions, the executives from both companies worked together to define the desired culture of the new organization. Following the workshop, we developed a suite of support tools, training experiences and executive coaching to help employees adapt to the new culture.

Results

Employees of both the US and Japanese entities together developed a new corporate culture which accommodated both American and Japanese values into a new hybrid company culture that all members could identify with. The hybrid cultural also helped people overcome an “us-versus-them” mentality. This shift to an inclusive “us” mindset was an enabling factor for improved collaboration across the company.