If you ever want to understand an organization, don’t start by reading the project plan. Sit in on the first integration meeting instead. Within twenty minutes you’ll hear Finance talking about synergies, IT talking about systems, Operations talking about continuity, HR talking about people, and Sales talking about customers. It’s the same acquisition, but everyone is describing a different reality.
The first few times I experienced this, I assumed people simply needed to communicate more clearly. Surely if everyone sat in the same room long enough, the misunderstandings would disappear and the project would naturally move forward. It seemed like a reasonable assumption until I realized the problem was never that people were communicating poorly. The problem was that they were communicating perfectly, just in the language of their own profession.
Ask Finance how an integration is progressing and you’ll probably hear about synergies, budgets, forecasts, and whether the business case is still holding together. Walk down the hall and ask IT the exact same question and the conversation quickly becomes interfaces, data migration, security, infrastructure, and whether anyone has remembered that one application everyone forgot existed until last Thursday. HR will give you an entirely different answer, one centred on leadership alignment, retention, organizational design, and the growing number of employees asking, “So…what exactly does this mean for me?” None of them are wrong. They are simply looking at the same mountain from different sides.
One of my favourite moments in almost every integration is when someone says, “I don’t understand why they don’t get it.”
I always smile a little when I hear that because, in most cases, they do get it. They just don’t see the same problem. Finance assumes everyone appreciates the urgency of capturing synergies. Operations is trying to keep customers happy while learning new processes. IT knows that one seemingly harmless request will probably require six weeks of development work, while the business is wondering why changing a field on a screen has somehow become a quarterly initiative.
At that point I usually find myself playing interpreter. Not because I understand technology better than IT, or finance better than Finance, but because I’ve spent enough years watching these conversations unfold to recognize that everyone is making perfect sense within the world they live in. My job is often to help one group understand why another group is reacting the way they are. Once that happens, the conversation changes. People stop arguing about positions and start understanding perspectives.
The more acquisition integrations I have been involved in, the more convinced I have become that this is one of the least appreciated skills in integration leadership. We spend a great deal of time talking about governance, project plans, risk registers, and steering committees, all of which are important. We spend far less time talking about translation, even though it may be the thing that keeps all of those other mechanisms moving.
Interestingly, I have noticed that the strongest integration leaders rarely have all the answers. They are simply curious enough to ask questions from every angle before drawing conclusions. They know that a delayed system interface is not just an IT problem. It may become a customer problem, a finance problem, an operations problem, and eventually a leadership problem. They understand that every decision sends ripples through parts of the organization that may not even be represented in the meeting.
Perhaps that is why the best integration leaders often appear so calm. They are not trying to win every discussion. They are trying to make sure everyone leaves the room speaking the same language. Once people genuinely understand each other’s constraints, priorities, and objectives, good decisions become much easier to make.
Looking back, I don’t think the best integration leaders I have worked with were exceptional because they built the best project plans or ran the most efficient meetings. Those things certainly helped, but they were not what people remembered. What made them different was their ability to help Finance understand Operations, Operations understand IT, IT understand HR, and executives understand what all of it meant for Monday morning.
Maybe that is the real job after all. Not managing the integration. Helping the organization finally understand itself.
