One of the hardest aspects of leadership is bringing about effective cultural change.

Successful mergers and acquisitions see changes in organisational structure, resources, remuneration, performance management but the hardest of all is cultural integration.

Cultural integration is one of the most complex, difficult and time-consuming aspects of any successful integration program. Cultural integration commences the minute people from the different organisations come into contact. Without focused attention to cultural integration, it takes longer for people to meet, negotiate differences, maximise synergies and achieve intended results.

The primary goal of the cultural integration process is to build a culture that supports the business objectives and becomes deeply ingrained in the heart of the organisation and is reflected by the decisions and behaviours of each employee. But as important are secondary benefits of a common understanding across teams of acceptable management practices, performance and norms. In the longer term, culture endorses “the way that the company does things around here” which ultimately provides an organisation with its competitive advantage.

For entities it is important to understand each ones culture pre merger and try to work out which are the things that can be carried forward into the new entity and how this is achieved. Not everything is possible, nor should the organisations try to solve everything at once. The cultural web is a useful tool in analysing cultures of each organisation and identifying points of difference.

In the case of an insurance company, there were several short-term leverage points that were be used to integrate cultures. These were characterised by many of the formal day-to-day operations within each of the organisations that defined the cultures such as the mediums of communication, interactive controls, Human Resources practices, and performance measures. For each aspect, a joint team worked on:

• Identifying the key aspects and criteria of the desired culture
• Really understanding the elements of the respective cultures of each organisation that could be changed.
• Developing a new common set of organisational values
• Identifying the legends, heroes and champions
• Perpetuating the desired stories, symbols and rituals

Based on the two organisations, the team detailed the short-term priorities covering:

• Strategies to unify cultural conflict and eliminate “us versus them” mentality
• A program to build awareness and employee commitment to the goals and objectives of the new organisation
• A cultural development plan with specific interventions, responsibilities and timing
• A series of workshops to train change agents and leaders
• Management and executive coaching program to reinforce the messages
• Communication program to reinforce the messages

It is important to view these changes in context and from a holistic perspective, the change is more complex, more difficult to measure and much slower and its internal nature invariably takes second place to customer and revenue initiatives.