What is the biggest and most costly challenge post-merger?

It’s helping your people move forward effectively and efficiently towards your new shared future. It’s helping them rapidly embrace the new direction.

Let’s face it. You can design systems. You can find potential synergies. You can create strategies. You can create initiatives and set goals.

But at the end of the day, it is your team, your people, that determine whether those systems, potential synergies, strategies and initiatives will actually achieve the goals you set for yourselves.

And the cold, hard reality is that people, on whole, do not generally function well through change. (read about Thriving through Change)

So what can we do about it?

How do we successfully lead through change?

We have to understand what drives people. What makes us tick. We have to know how to push the good buttons and disengage the negative buttons.

We need to know that good people resist change. And that resistance doesn’t make them bad, stupid or foolish. It makes them human. It simply means they need training and skill-building, so they can embrace and thrive though change.

Mergers lead to massive uncertainty.

To thrive post-merger leaders must create certainty.

Most people cannot stand massive uncertainty. One of the most basic and fundamental human drivers is the need for stability, certainty and predictability.

Leaders who have had success in the past are often much more tolerant of uncertainty in their worlds.

The best of us have learned to embrace uncertainty around us because we have such a core of certainty within ourselves. This internal certainty is much of what allowed these leaders to thrive and lead successfully in the past.

But often leaders forget — others do not necessarily have the same skills or the same perspective.

In fact, most people do not.

Certainty in the face of massive uncertainty & change is a skill that most people have not had the training or opportunity to develop.

Fear makes us do silly things. It makes us freeze. It makes us grab on to something and hold tight, even when the smart thing to do is to let go and move forward.

Fear shuts down the prefrontal cortex – robbing us of intellect and logic in the moment, and trigging defensive behavior.

Sometimes when we do the wrong thing, we’re not stupid, we are just scared. And when we are scared or stressed in the extreme, we typically prefer the certainty of the pain we know rather than the uncertainty of anything else— even if it has a high chance of being much better.

SHIFTING PEOPLE’S EMOTIONS IS THE KEY TO POST MERGER LEADERSHIP

When in fear or pain there are two primary ways to get someone to move, act or do something other than freeze:

1. Make it more fearful or painful to stay where they are – that will make them leap
2. Eliminate the fear and/or replace it with courage

You’ve probably heard the expression “You can’t argue with drunk people”, right? Because the fact that they are drunk often makes their arguments completely irrational.

And along the same lines, you can’t reason with someone intoxicated by fear. They are certain that bad things are coming.

You have to shift them into a better emotional state – courage, determination, hope, faith, excitement, confidence, something that returns them to a state of positive certainty, hopeful certainty.

The ability to shift people emotionally is a learnable skill. It’s a trainable skill.

Think about a time when you were or could have been frozen by fear.

What got you to move?

Was it being aware that greater pain would await you if you didn’t act? Was it the strong desire to create the outcome or goal you wanted to achieve. Was it because you did it for someone you loved or cared about?

The stronger the why, emotionally, the stronger the drive to act.

Almost everyone on your team knows what they should do to create a successful future – even in the face of change.

But we don’t do what we SHOULD do, we do what we MUST do.

And for most people, unless the have received training, what we MUST do is RESIST change and hold on to the past. Not because we are foolish. Not because we are weak. Not because we don’t know better. We do it because our fight/freeze/flight system hijacks our brain.

People left to their own devices typically have two default states: 1) normal and 2) crisis mode.

When crisis strikes our brain unleashes a seemingly different person into our body.

Our brain can either call a fear driven person who reacts and responds, covers and defends, or attacks without thought or it can be trained to call for the hero that lives in each of us.

We can be trained to step up in the face of uncertainty. We can be trained to turn fear into power. We can be trained to bring our intellect back online rather than succumbing to instinctual defensive behavior. We can be trained to feel unstoppable. We can be trained to connect and communicate rather than throwing up barriers. We can be trained to be our best self in the face of change, challenge external uncertainty.

These are the skills that allow us to lead and thrive through a merger and to drive powerful and transformational results.