In August, Brandon Curry of Work Arts moderated a conversation for the HR M&A Roundtable about the role of organization design in M&A, with organization designers Molly Maymar and Lorraine Damerau, from Kates Kesler. They shared their experiences helping clients navigate org design challenges in M&A contexts and facilitated an interactive round table discussion.
Key Topics:
What is Organization Design
The important role org design plays in a successful M&A
Designing the integrative layer of an organization
Best practices for engaging stakeholders from real-life examples
We Sign Tomorrow? Inside a Tech Acquisition | A Paddle Documentary
In February, I met the team at Paddle to explore contributing to their acquisition of – and integration with – ProfitWell. It’s not common to be able to share much about the work we do in due diligence, organization design, and integration. This is an exception.
The team at Paddle (inclusive of ProfitWell) is amazing. I am very proud to work closely with the team, of the work that’s being done, and of the organization that’s developing! In their efforts to be the most helpful brand in SaaS, they filmed the journey to share their experiences as an insider’s view of a tech acquisition.
Brandon joined his friend and collaborator, Rohit Sathe, to lead a session on the future of talent at the aim10x Global 2022 conference with 10.000+ registrants, 70+ speakers. In this talk, Brandon and Rohit led a discussion to explore the future of talent, supply chain, and what skills and competencies the workforce will need to develop to create a competitive advantage within the supply chain.
What the future of supply chain may look like – The skills and competencies that will help build a stronger supply chain – The strategies to create and curate these skills and competencies among talent?
As we navigate 2022 talent realities, opportunities to change your work are abundant. Many are evaluating their options. In fact, employees increasingly quit their jobs while still contemplating the value that their work adds (or does not add) to their lives. Others are the survivors holding the pieces together in the wake of attrition. Obsessing over retention of scarce and valuable people is top priority for organizations and the Earning x Learning matrix will be a helpful addition to the Talent Management toolkit for most organizations and individuals.
For Individuals: You are evaluating options of where to contribute your time and talents going forward, and should assess what will be gained beyond compensation. What will your options be two moves from now? Finding a team willing to pay you competitively to stretch and expand your capabilities, making you more valuable in the future, is most often achieved in the organization that knows you and wants to keep a good thing going. There are a lot of people with buyers remorse after their 2021 employer change.
For Organizations: You seek to engage, develop, and retain key talent. Differentiating your value proposition beyond (i.e., including) compensation to offer learning opportunities through developmental assignments will improve your retention and development of talent.
Skeptical of the value of developmental cross-moves? In January, MIT Sloan published Toxic Culture Is Driving the Great Resignation: Research using (empirical) employee data revealing the top five predictors of attrition and four actions managers can take in the short term to reduce attrition. From the analysis, the number one (#1) action identified that managers can take in the short term to reduce attrition, “providing employees with lateral career opportunities… is 2.5 times more powerful as a predictor of a company’s relative retention rate compared with compensation.”
Individuals have a great opportunity to move beyond “should I stay or should I go?” to assess “how do I stay and grow?” as a potentially more rewarding option.
Organizations are likely to have more openings than you built into your Annual Operating Plan (AOP) due to attrition and perhaps growth. Before looking externally and without lowering your standards, look across your current team. While further destabilizing the business through internal moves may seem unmanageable, you have much more control of the change happening on your terms and timing, and you are selecting someone you know will work in your organization.
A practical recommendation for leadership teams: regularly (multiple times per year) talk Talent candidly and confidentially as a team:
WHO: What key talents (each leader to prioritize top 1-3 from across the team) require action to best retain your assets and steward the team?
WHAT: From the Earning x Learning matrix, what action is needed as we obsess over retaining our best assets?
Not every team member will be retained. You’ll be happy for some as they take opportunities beyond your organization and you are happy to have a team that is a great place to be from. But, for many, this extra proactive step will make a significant difference.
At scale and over a multi-year time horizon, this will also support improvements in collaboration, strengthening informal networks and increasing the speed and agility with which organizations can adapt and make change. Development occurs through experiences. Offer your best people your best experiences as a differentiating capability to earn the right to win and retain talent through a differentiated value proposition.
In February, Brandon Curry was invited to contribute – as Fellow of CGS Advisors, Study Lead & Co-Author of the Insights Report – to a public panel event hosted by the Industry 4.0 Orchestration Collaborative. In this event he shared the key insights from the 2021 Labor and Technology Adoption study followed by an engaging panel discussion with executive leaders from Waste Management, Siemens Digital, Plex Systems and Verizon Wireless. The study commissioned by the Collaborative to understand the effects the accelerating labor shortage will have on I4.0 technology adoption. Catch the full replay above.
Work Arts’ Brandon Curry joined his friend and Droste Group founder, Lisa Satawa, for an engaging leadership panel along with David Bomzer and Dr. Michael Burchell. The Leadership Exchange is Droste’s facilitated quarterly discussion attended by a broad group of HR and Talent leaders.
Catch the full playback below, including:
What’s driving the current labor volatility and why employees are quitting? What things organizations are getting right and wrong in their responses?
In this Work Arts interview, Brandon Curry and Jennifer J. Fondrevay discuss their individual experiences leading and advising organizations through mergers, acquisitions, and other significant transformations. Jennifer shares how calls for help have changed, including her perspective on lessons leaders have learned from leading through the pandemic that help us lead through transactions and transformations. Brandon and Jennifer also discuss how post-merger integration culture and team development work is different following nearly two years of hybrid and remote work.
Jennifer is the author of the book Now What: A Survivor’s Guide to Thriving Through Mergers & Acquisitions. She is also Founder of Day1 Ready™, a consultancy that advises forward-thinking business leaders, owners, and C-Suite executives on how to prepare for the human capital challenges of M&A. As a Fortune 500 C-Suite “survivor” of three multibillion-dollar acquisitions, Jennifer has been on all sides of the deal equation. She saw countless growth strategies fail due to a workforce that couldn’t pivot and adapt as quickly as leadership anticipated.
When her Harvard Business Review (HBR) article “After a Merger, Don’t Let “Us vs. Them” Thinking Ruin the Company” went viral, Jennifer recognized the power and interest in a human-centric approach to business transformation, where employees are at the heart of the change.
Arts We Like is a series of posts spotlighting great thinkers, ideas, products and partners that we share to help enable remarkable performance through more effective and engaged organizations. Contact Us about how to deploy these solutions as a part of a broader People Strategy or engagements to develop your organization, capabilities and talent.
Dr. Michael Walsh is an industrial and organizational psychologist, author, professor and leader of human resources and people analytics. In this Work Arts Interview, he shares some of the foundational ideas of his 2021 book, HR Analytics Essentials You Always Wanted To Know, discusses how changes in work are impacting organizations and their HR professionals’ efforts to build healthy communities that retain talent, and leaves us with practical steps we can take to make better decisions.
Michael currently leads Global Talent Management and Organizational Effectiveness for Eaton Corporation’s Vehicle Group. He also teaches graduate students at the University of Illinois and Wayne State University. Previously, Michael started and led the Global People Strategy and Analytics function at Bloomberg and the People Analytics and Insights Function at Fiat Chrysler Automobiles. Michael began his professional career as a client facing consultant for Mercer’s Human Capital practice focused on HR Strategy, Organizational Design/Development and Human Capital Analytics. He worked for Mercer in Chicago, Dubai and New York.
Arts We Like is a series of posts spotlighting great thinkers, ideas, products and partners that we share to help enable remarkable performance through more effective and engaged organizations. Contact Us about how to deploy these solutions as a part of a broader HR Strategy or engagements to develop your organization, capabilities and talent.
Klint C. Kendrick, Ph.D., SPHR, is a leading voice in HR mergers and acquisitions. In our discussion he shares some rich wisdom for HR leaders, corporate development, M&A practitioners and executives engaged in mergers, acquisitions and divestitures including the backstory on how he entered HR M&A, his view on what makes a great HR M&A professional, and due diligence lessons learned valuable to both buyers and sellers.
Klint is a highly qualified and experienced practitioner, having contributed to more than 85 M&A projects. He contributes to the profession through scholarship, service and writing, including his 2020 book, The HR M&A Practitioners Guide. Klint is a founding Chair of the HR M&A Roundtable.
Arts We Like is a series of posts spotlighting great thinkers, ideas, products and partners that we share to help enable remarkable performance through more effective and engaged organizations. Contact Us about how to deploy these solutions as a part of a broader HR Strategy or engagements to develop your organization, capabilities and talent.
This Work Arts interview highlights my June discussion with Julian Chender, talking all things Organization Design & Development. We discuss where we’ve come from, where we are going, as well as the foundation of social science and management/business science that shape what we know as organization development.
Julian shares some backstory on the historical foundations of the recent ODReview published article, OD in Times of Disruption, he co-authored with Corrie Voss, MOD, Ed.D. With enduring social science, we continue to appreciate and apply the work of original thinkers like Kurt Lewin, Edgar Schein and Jay R. Galbraith, from the early work in the OD field. On the management/business side, we continue to evolve as organizations face new challenges, leading to the need for both scale and agility. Finally, Julian shares insights on what he is learning as a part of the Fellowship Program at Kates Kesler.
Julian Chender is an Organization Development and Design practitioner and scholar. He oversaw Leadership Development at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease during the global Ebola and Zika outbreaks and then at Veldhoen + Company helped organizations align their culture, technology and physical space to meet strategic goals. He is now a Fellow at Kates Kesler Organization Consulting, part of Accenture, where he consults on large organization design projects. Julian is Founder of the OD Salon and was the 2020 recipient of the OD Network’s Emerging Practitioner Award.
Arts We Like is a series of posts spotlighting great thinkers, ideas, products and partners that we share to help enable remarkable performance through more effective and engaged organizations. Contact Us about how to deploy these solutions as a part of a broader HR Strategy or engagements to develop your organization, capabilities and talent.
Work Arts 