Create a strong team
To guide your organization through a process as large as merging two companies, you need to lead with your best.
Often in mergers, the acquiring company keeps a stranglehold on the leadership team. But Geiger felt that if she were going to unite the banks, she would need to combine management from PNC and National City.
“It makes a true blended company, as opposed to what sometimes you’ll see in a merger is one organization has a larger number of leaders from their respective company,” she says. “… If we looked at the blending of our attributes, the blending of our successes, then that would allow us to work on preparing relentlessly for our conversion that occurred over the next year.”
On day one of the merger, Geiger started by making it clear to those who ran the 17 different lines of business that forming the leadership, as well as the transition to one company, would be a collaborative process all the way through. Once it was clear that everyone’s assistance was needed, she began evaluating in teams who would best fit each position.
If you’re going to ask for a collaborative effort, you must follow through on that request.
To show that this was not about PNC but about the two banks coming together, Geiger sat down with the leaders of each line of business, such as the heads of corporate banking and wealth management, and together they openly discussed what they thought would be the best going forward for that sector in the market.
When you have multiple effective, qualified leaders, it’s not all based on experience. You need to take into account each person’s background, skill set and personal interest and match those with the parts of the business that need to be led. That’s where true dialogue helps in the process.
In PNC’s case, developing the team through a collaborative, conversational effort allowed for stronger results because people were placed in what Geiger calls their strength zone, not their comfort zone. For example, through discussion, it became clear that one of the senior leaders running the retail bank would be better suited to head the business bank.
“That created a much more powerful and even a much better business going forward because we took the strengths of their past, put them into the new future, and they could capitalize on what they had done before the two came together,” Geiger says.
While developing your leadership team, there are certain characteristics you want members to possess, especially if you’re about to embark on something as detailed as a merger.
“The best people are people that listen, are people that learn, and then they lead,” Geiger says. “Listening and learning is so important, because the toughest part is we’re all accountable and we can’t really ask people to do anything that we’re not willing to do ourselves. You have to have people that are clearly defined as relationship builders. … They have to really be very good communicators, and they have to develop skills to allow people to want to work with them as opposed to for them.”
It worked out that PNC’s new leadership is made up equally from PNC and National City employees. To also ensure collaborative planning and to truly view the big picture, Geiger made sure that her direct team included the leaders of all 17 lines of business. With a large undertaking, such as a merger, you can’t afford to miss any details or leave any segment of your business out of the conversation.
“We specifically put the multiple lines of business together,” Geiger says. “It’s not a function of how big. It’s not a function of how profitable. It’s a function of having a collaborative effort that can look at all aspects of our business.”
Once your team is in place, you need to unite them under a common goal to ensure continual collaboration. The end objective of a merger is generally straightforward. Still, you have role changes, new people working together and some uncertainty about what lies ahead. You won’t be able to successfully lead the rest of your employees through the process unless management is unified. And the only way to ensure unification all the way to the end is through communication.
“You have to be an honest and frequent communicator,” Geiger says. “It takes ultimately very, very open and very regular communication, even if the information is not always positive. Communication is the key whether the information is good or bad. By having that openness, it allows you to manage the situation rather than the situation manage you.”
Really, what it comes down to is making sure everyone is on the same page. Throughout the process, Geiger met with her team weekly to discuss and make decisions about the merger agenda.
“The art of changing a group from what it is into what it ought to be is really about having people understand where they’re at and how to visualize and prepare relentlessly on where they want to be — knowing that, that all obviously continues to change,” Geiger says. “The secret is you have to communicate together what the success is going to look like, but then in order to achieve it, you have to have an everyday agenda in working toward that.”