Prep your team for transition
While you may be persuaded to spend all of your time working
on the big deal, Goldston says that internally, you can’t lose focus.
When you are working through an acquisition, you have to be
clear-cut with your people and lead them through a time full of distraction.
“It’s really important to have a high-level, clear strategic vision
that you can articulate [and] use as a rallying cry, No. 1,” he says.
“No. 2, you come up with your list of three to five critical things
that must get done to do the acquisition or the merger and have
everybody focused against that and then, thirdly, articulate to people from a business and personal standpoint what does this acquisition mean to you.
“It’s important for the people in the company that is the acquirer
to understand how this fits into the total mix of the company and
what it means for them so that they also understand that, as an
acquiring company, does this company provide additional career opportunities, does it provide opportunities to leverage all of the things that we’ve
built as a team?”
The important thing is to make the acquisition an important focal point that doesn’t
completely drive the company in a new
direction.
“You don’t want people to become like
kids in a candy store,” he says. “It’s very
easy to get sidetracked because there’s so
many new and different things you’re being
presented with; you have to stay focused
on those three to five things and have regular, weekly updated meetings as to where
you are against those.”
The thing is to set realistic goals about
bringing the new company in and assimilating it. You can’t expect everything to run
smoothly — in fact, Goldston says you will
most certainly hit snags you never
dreamed of — but by setting reasonable
and measurable goals for the company’s
transition period, you will stay on track.
“You can’t constantly ask people to climb
Kilimanjaro, not everyone can climb it, and
you don’t have to get to the top of Kilimanjaro
to be a very big success,” he says. “So it’s
important to set aggressive goals but goals
you believe that if people work hard and are
smart can achieve, because coming up short
of a very lofty goal on a constant basis is a
major demotivator to workers because they
don’t, in retrospect, think they achieved a
high level but just didn’t get to the pinnacle,
they think they came up short.”