Keep it moving
Leer took the first step toward reducing the opportunity for conflict in the merger of Arch Mineral and Ashland Coal by creating integration teams. These small units of two to four people would work on bringing the companies together department by department.
The size of the teams was very much intentional.
“I didn’t want the teams to be so large that they had to have a meeting to schedule the next meeting,” Leer says. “Both corporations had systems and methods that had been successful. As we were trying to merge them, I didn’t want to get into long, drawn-out discussions with, ‘We did it this way,’ or, ‘We’ve always done it this way.’
“By keeping the teams small and keeping the teams with very tight time frames, we set up a dynamic where instead of arguing about which way was the better way, it was more like, ‘We need to get this done. Let’s pick a method here because this crazy son of a gun in the corner office expects us to be done on Tuesday. There’s no way we can be done on Tuesday.’ That helped speed up the whole integration process.
“It really puts pressure on the teams to get to the heart of what they should be doing, as opposed to focusing a lot of time, attention and resources on peripheral issues and things that aren’t as important.”
In this particular case, Leer had worked in both companies and had a good knowledge of the people who could step up and get the job done in the quick and effective manner he was looking for.
“You really want to put the stars on the integration team,” Leer says. “By their very nature being the stars, they are almost always driven, self-motivated and focused on getting their tasks done. I don’t find that motivating those teams is hard. They’re probably moving faster than with me looking over their shoulder.”
Finding the people to serve on these teams is usually not as hard as you might think. In fact, you can actually do more harm than good by thinking about these choices too much.
“Your own people will know, often better than you as you go down through the organization, who gets the job done and who maybe is not as effective at getting the job done,” Leer says.
“Sometimes in moving quickly, you will make the wrong choice or make a mistake. You just have to say, ‘I’m willing to do that.’ That has a cost to the organization, but the cost of moving slowly and letting some of the best people, those stars, drift away and get captured by a competitor is more costly than having to go back and re-slot somebody or make other changes six months or a year after the merger. It just is too hard and takes too much time to get to know everyone.”
Follow the same philosophy in selecting a person to head up the consolidation effort and serve as a point person for any related questions. Make sure this person is not you.
“That way, there is at least one contact point that if nothing can get resolved by the integration teams, it comes to somebody who is intimately involved in the daily guts of trying to integrate two organizations,” Leer says. “Heck, I’m not knowledgeable on whether we should use XYZ or ZYX software. You need somebody who will be working very hard because they do have their day job. But you have to make sure you’re still running the organization and the company while you’re doing all this.”
That doesn’t mean you can’t check in on the integration meetings and see how things are going.
“Spend time walking around,” Leer says. “Stop in at an integration team’s meeting or even with an individual team member and ask them, ‘How’s it going? What are the problems? What are the issues that you are facing? Is there anything insurmountable that we can address at a higher level and put more resources on?’”
Ultimately, your job is simply to make sure things continue to get done.
“I don’t mind that they have long, drawn-out discussions as they try to resolve their issues,” Leer says. “But I have a tight time frame. It’s coming to decision time. You could spend a day coming to a decision point but come to the decision point. Don’t sit there and say, ‘We’ll defer this until three weeks from now.’”