Make a plan of action
Winner’s second step was crafting a plan with his new team to direct the rest of the integration process. Because every function of the organization was affected by the acquisition, they wanted their plan to reflect them all.
“One of the challenges is you can try to do too much,” he says. “And what you end up doing in that case is you don’t do any of them well.”
They quickly realized they had to boil down their outlook to three to five critical objectives.
But they couldn’t do it alone. The first move was bringing in an experienced project planner — something Winner highly recommends doing.
He then asked not only the senior management but also the regional vice presidents and their territory managers, as well as agents — which the company views as customers — what was critical to them in the new organization.
As the responses came in, they listed them on a spreadsheet and assigned someone to summarize the key themes. This helped categorize responses by culture, product or service, and so on.
“That allows you to dig a little deeper into what were some of the key themes and then say, ‘What do we need to do about it? How do we need to plan?’” Winner says. “Coordinate the integration to address the concerns that are coming out.”
While they evaluated input, Winner and his team were also debating the changes they knew the acquisition would require.
“That’s one of the benefits of having a management team that came from all parts of the organization,” he says. “They brought different viewpoints, and they brought different experiences and so we had a very open discussion and dialogue about, ‘OK, if we had to narrow it down, what are those three to five critical things we have to get done?’”
They also brought in experts from across the organization to help them predict any challenges that their plan might present.
After you identify your broad goals from senior team discussions and other input, draw out the details by breaking initiatives down into steps.
For example, Winner’s objective of rebuilding relationships in the company’s shifting footprint encompassed steps to transfer underwriting support to offices inside the new territory, to tell agents who they would report to now and to open two new offices.
“The important thing is you have to have detailed project plans,” says Winner, who relied on his project planner to drive the team to the right level of detail. “You have to have specific dates as to when you’re going to accomplish something and who’s got responsibility for it. They’ve got to be detailed enough and actionable enough.”
The integration plan Winner devised with his team outlined what to do without directly stating the desired result. He realized that he couldn’t just lay out the steps and hope the vision decanted itself.
“People can take that more informal communication and they can kind of weave it the way they want to weave it,” he says.
So his team got more specific about the end goal of their plan. The process begins as a conversation about the backgrounds of your management team. That’s why it’s important to build a diverse team so it can serve as a repr
esentative from all sides of the organization.
That conversation forms a base of understanding where your employees are coming from. But you have to be willing to move on from there.
“We all bring our own backgrounds of what’s made us successful in whatever we’ve done, and so your first move is always to go back to where you’re comfortable and what’s made you a success in past,” he says. “As a leader, you have to be very willing to set those types of things aside and be very willing to listen, to adapt to change and to take a different process.”
So you start talking about the future. To overcome the differences surrounding who you were as separate companies, build common ground around who you want to be as an integrated company.
Your integration plan can serve as a guide because it lays out what you’re working toward. You can’t just skip the step of defining what that is.
“You think about it when you’re growing up: ‘Who do I want to be when I grow up?’” Winner says. “Well, in this case, it’s, ‘Who do we want to be when we get through this integration? How do we want ourselves defined?’”
Asking those kinds of questions, like, “How do we want competitors to think of us?” or, “Where do we want to be in five years?” can direct you. Simply articulating the answers can provide a clear goal to give employees direction and encourage their buy-in.
“It allows employees to then feel a greater sense of the organization they’re a part of,” Winner says. “Then it positions them much better to communicate that message and support that message to our agents as they work with them.”
