Coaching & Mentoring - Managing change resulting from mergers and acquisitions

The challenge

Following an acquisition which doubled the size of a business overnight, the new company invested in a coaching mentoring programme to support the change process.

We were engaged to coach and mentor various departmental managers who found the changes affected their motivation, will and feeling of value. A typical response of individuals that are faced with this type of large-scale change.

The effect

The business managers were feeling stuck and unable to look past how they feel, and engage in another perspective which was impacting progression of the United Intention of the Acquisition. We demonstrated how mentoring, followed by coaching can be used to support people through change.

This type of change often unveils a personal and very close to home surge of worry, fear and a “being done to” reaction. The tiers to consider are senior level, middle and supervisory management, helping hands on the front line, customer facing and of course; the customer across both businesses.

Solution

Using the Analysis, Reflection, Action approach and facilitated reflection workshops, we met several times with the managers on a face to face basis, building rapport, and investigating the individual challenges together. We used a suite of structured questions and techniques, open conversation, comparisons, sharing experiences and sometimes raw emotional outburst!

We came to the agreement that most of the challenge wasn’t related to skill or experience, technical ability or management capability, but about the territory. "The World" that had shifted around them – seriously affecting confidence, creating a sense of ‘lack of control’, moving from a ‘large fish / small pond’ to ‘small fish / very big pond’, and leading to feeling less valued or worthy.

Once we agreed this was the case, a period of reflection was necessary allowing the managers to reflect and decide their desired actions – to stay or to go…

Mentoring ensured the control of the situation was always with the mentee… However, once the challenge wass properly identified and opened, a variety of solutions became evident.

Result

After reflection the majority of managers decided to stay and make a success of their career, recognising the collective resources between them, including the experience and ‘test and learn’ case studies of their own as well as reflective tools to use.  

We co-created a series of achievable success factors that fitted in with the learning and practical aspects of the new ‘day job’; based around developing new relationships with heightened perspective. We continued to meet to review progress and overcome barriers and within a matter of weeks confidence grew and managers continued with the process, taking each new aspect in their stride and beginning to take control of their own success path.

They have gone on to form an internal mentorship scheme ensuring new team members have a role model and supporter, and their service and delivery for both clients and other managers is widely recognised.

Talent Retention is a critical factor in Long Term Business success. These people were about to leave this business…..what a shame that would have been. During this experience they captured leadership tools and thought provoking techniques that support the business, ongoing and strengthened their skills and increasing their communication and leadership tool kit.