Harvesting the Full Potential
of Serial Acquisitions

The US company had taken advantage of the market and made a series of acquisitions. Now, it was time to harvest the full potential of these acquisitions and accelerate the integration.

So far, post-merger integration had been a tick-off exercise.

Now was the time to win on the most difficult part – the people. They were recommended to work with Innovisor by people in their local network, as it is fast and focused approach would be able to tell who to work with on what, who to connect on what, and how.

Innovisor quickly established the insights required, which was a #SixChangeBlockers-intelligence baseline assessment and identifying the right people to activate and engage to succeed with the next phase.

It was clear from the start that the people side had been ignored post-merger. People were still primarily connecting to colleagues from their legacy company and overall commitment was dropping fast with resignations spreading from department to department and location to location as a dangerous virus.

People did not feel they belonged to the new company, they did not understand the priorities, and they did not know where to find the information and intelligence to get their job done.

One example of this was the core argument for the acquisition – the people working in a specific and critical R&D discipline. Their connectivity was still limited (NB! Colors indicate legacy company).

It is worth noting that none of the legacy companies were well connected in the discipline before, and it had only worsened in the months after the acquisitions, as key people and specialists started to leave.

Innovisor immediately identified with surgical precision who the hidden experts, who needed to be retained were, and together with the Leadership/OD made sure they got connected on the topics needed. This little intervention immediately improved commitment and consequently retention.

In the same way, the informal catalysts in the overall organization were identified, activated, and engaged. The informal catalysts were about 3% of the total employee population and 94% sought them out when they tried to make sense of what was going on. They did not seek out the leaders and managers, who were only sought out by about 46% of the people.

One of the key priorities in the engagement of the informal catalysts was that the informal catalysts understood the strategic priority of the organization, so they could move the company ahead together.

Worryingly only every fifth informal catalyst understood the strategic priority leading to a record low commitment versus the Innovisor benchmark, but also that they were unable to guide the 94% causing a serious risk for the organization.

Innovisor helped the core leadership team prioritize activities, so they knew where their interventions could have the highest possible impact in the shortest time.
We helped them stop non-value-adding activities and interventions to accelerate the full potential of their acquisitions and establish the feedback mechanisms and necessary KPIs needed to calibrate people and culture interventions more frequently and proactively based on early warning signals – not annual engagement surveys. This ensured ongoing leadership support and a proper project team set-up in the coming years – something less than 20% manage to maintain in change programs.

The practices introduced by Innovisor are now included in the company’s Standard Operating Procedure for post-merger integrations. It has in a few years tripled in size through acquisitions and organic growth, and its R&D innovation capabilities have been a key driver behind the exploding market value.