Culture Shock: How to Manage a Successful Merger

A. Susan Dickson, Private Ocean’s COO, believes you’re on the right track if you seek to involve your co-workers. “Organizations are living, breathing organisms made up of the people who inhabit them,” she told me. “So when you are talking about a mission statement, you need to have a retreat and bring all the players together, let the founders tell their histories and their stories, and allow others to offer their input in envisioning the future and creating that statement. People who participate in the process are a lot more likely to be engaged and to buy into the mission statement.”

I am a strong advocate of regular staff retreats, especially when guided by an outside expert or team of experts. An unbiased facilitator can encourage everyone in the firm to participate fully, giving even the top brass an opportunity to reveal vulnerabilities as well as strengths. A retreat to develop a mission statement seems to me an excellent way to initiate a soul-searching process that can be repeated as the firm grows.

Q. My client’s small electronics business has just been bought by a huge Japanese corporation. His young staff is used to working in jeans and sandals and calling everyone in the company by their first name, while the new Japanese managers wear a suit and tie every day and are punctilious about deference due to rank. I foresee a major culture clash in the offing. Is there hope for East and West to meet amicably?

A. Merging an informal, laid-back culture with another that is more formal and hierarchical is definitely a challenge. Greg Friedman thinks the merged firm is unlikely to develop a hybrid set of attitudes and behaviors if their cultures are very different. “I suspect that within a year, everyone will be either in suits or in jeans,” he predicts. “One side will win.”

More optimistically, Susan Dickson suggests bringing together as many people as possible from both cultures, introducing them in a relaxed atmosphere, and allowing them to get to know each other. For example, a company picnic or lunch at a casual restaurant, where formal constraints wouldn’t operate, might be a good way to launch friendly relations.

Dickson also proposes looking for opportunities to incorporate traditions from both cultures. For example, the company might institute “funky Fridays” in exchange for the staff dressing more neatly from Monday through Thursday, thus introducing casual dress into the Japanese managers’ culture in a way that isn’t offensive or disrespectful.

Q. We’ve been having bad luck keeping new hires, and I’m not sure why. In exit interviews, they just say they got a better offer. What questions should we be asking in interviews to weed out job-hoppers?

A. “I think you’re looking in the wrong direction,” Greg Friedman responds. “You probably don’t have an effective onboarding process to bring new people in and integrate them well.”

He points out that such a process should incorporate training, structure, and mentoring. The turnover problem should be greatly reduced if these factors are addressed, assuming you do a good job in interviewing. Friedman adds that the interview process should include at least three or four visits with different interviewers and different types of questions. “Everybody can be in ‘showtime’ mode for the first few visits,” he says. “But by the third visit, you start to get closer to who people really are.”

Olivia Mellan, a speaker, coach, and business consultant, is the author with Sherry Christie of The Client Connection: How Advisors Can Build Bridges That Last, available through the Investment Advisor Bookstore at www.invest-store.com/investmentadvisor. She also offers money psychology teleclasses , and leads intergenerational retreats for wealthy families. E-mail Olivia at [email protected].