Set a cadence
When you integrate two companies, you need to move fast. You need to set ground rules, communicate them, and get your people busy on integrating systems and practices early in the merger process. If you let things progress at too slow of a pace, you run the risk of ending up with, essentially, cliques. One legacy company’s employees will stay on one side of the gym and the other company’s employees will lean against the opposite wall. No one will dance.
To solve that problem, Grimm accelerated the overall cadence of the merged Grede company.
“You have to set that cadence,” he says. “Things we did quarterly in the old set-up, in the new company, we started doing those things monthly. Things that had been done monthly we started doing weekly. Weekly things we started doing daily. The whole cadence of the company accelerated, and that created faster decision-making. Make a decision and move on it. It might not be perfect but keep working on it so the productivity moves in the same direction.”
It all comes back to establishing a new culture. A culture needs to take root soon after the merger is announced. In many cases, you need to plant the cultural seeds well before an announcement is made. You have to get your employees to think and act like a member of a new organization, not a member of an established organization that has been forced into a partnership with another company.
“I can tell you, having gone through seven mergers and acquisitions, being on both the buying side and the selling side, I’ve been a part of processes where changes were made the day of the transaction,” Grimm says. “I’ve seen them done where changes have taken two or three years. My experience is that it’s better to move as quickly as possible, without causing a lot of disruption.”
With the economy still lagging and business slow, Grimm and his team decided to take advantage of the situation by spurring more change in the short term, while the merged company has more space to react.
“It’s not as if we merged the businesses when all of the plants were running at 90 percent capacity,” he says. “Two months ago, plants were probably running at 40 percent capacity, and now they’re maybe running at 55 percent capacity. Things are getting better, but we still have some time on our hands.
“That’s why you need to get more of these things done now, pick some of the easy fruit off the tree, make the changes and let’s keep going. That is how we picked what we needed to do, and you want to do it quickly because it sets the pace of the culture in the organization. If you set the cadence, set the pace, people begin to move to that pace, just like in sports. If you play hockey or football, if things start to move quicker, everyone is moving quicker.”
