Change Management

An excerpt from Mergers: Growth in the Fast Lane

Word flies as soon as people pick up the scent that a merger is in the works. This is high drama. Hot stuff. Everybody has an opinion, and all the rules of gossip prevail. For the next several months you’re fighting a war for the truth.

Nothing new about that. What is different these days, though, is the way word travels. In just a few short years, communication has developed a far greater range (worldwide), more rapid cruising speed (fast as light), and accessibility to all (the “wired world”).

Today messages crisscross the planet at E-speed. The lowest employee in your organization can hit the Internet, tune in to the World Wide Web, or simply shoot word instantly to others via E-mail, fax, cellular phone or voice mail. In the past you worried about the grapevine and tried to control the rumor mill. Today that means controlling the light waves, the electron stream. You just can’t contain information like you did. Neither can you wait a week or so to respond to questions, concerns, suppositions or false stories.

Remember, a merger is always a fast-breaking story. Every day brings new developments. The truth is a moving target, and often dead on arrival. In your efforts to control communications and manage messages, you’re not going to get by with an 800 number or a company newsletter that comes out once a month or even every week. You need a home page on the Net. An E-mail burst. Chat rooms. Videoconferencing. A barrage of rumors reverberates through the wired world, from legitimate and other sources. You’ve got to get your message through. At E-speed. And it had better be tight, sound and consistent. Otherwise, the critics will electrocute it.

We’re living in a networked world these days, and you need to take the high ground in cyberspace as well as with conventional communication channels. Your job? Get there first—to listen, and to feed a steady stream of honest, positive, proactive messages to all key stake holders. In fact, today’s mergers need a communication manager, an “information czar,” a dedicated person serving as message central for merger news.

Your ambition should be to over-communicate. Don’t worry about redundancy here, or that people will resent being told twice or tire of the message. Never suppose the obvious is apparent to others. There is no penalty for talking too much. 

Silence, on the other hand, is a major sin. It creates an information vacuum, and that’s something mergers abhor. If you’re not filling the communication void, somebody will—with rumors, fear-mongering, wishful thinking, warped information, and even outright lies. Plus, with modern technology readily at hand, anybody who really wants to can stir up trouble by communicating faster, easier, and to more people than was ever possible before.

Two-way communications are critical for the foreseeable future. So first, magnetize yourself to bad news. You want it coming to you rather than going to others. If you know what the problems are, chances are you can fix them. Make it easy for people to communicate what’s going wrong, and never shoot the messengers. And again, be overly generous with outbound information. Become a perpetual communications machine—e.g., talk too much, write too much, explain too frequently, listen excessively. In times of great uncertainty, this is how you learn and how you lead.

In the process of keeping all your people updated, tell why before how or what. Today’s “thought workers” want more than mere orders. They want reasons . . . logic . . . rationale. They’ll accept just about anything so long as it makes sense to them, no matter how difficult or disappointing. Articulate the logic behind the merger, and they’ll help you create the how to make it work.

Just one final note: Don’t blow smoke. Don’t shave the truth. Don’t play the propaganda game. You can’t con these people, at least not for long. Besides, you’re dealing with adults here, and they deserve the truth. Build your credibility by leveling with them. Give it to them straight—the good, the bad and the ugly. Arm them with understanding—feed them a steady flow of accurate information—if you want to enlist their support for the merger.