Acquisition, Teams on Opposite Sides of the World, and COVID – Oh My!

If there was ever an organization for which I felt deep concern, it was this one

Half of the team had been acquired, losing a good many colleagues to layoffs and losing a good portion of the services and products that they had built (and of which they were, rightfully, proud) to cost-cutting and new direction from leadership.

Half of the team resided in the US and half in Japan – literally half a world away from each other – and they had only met once, briefly, with little direction provided as to how they should work together or what their objectives might be.

Then COVID hit, exacerbating an already-challenging situation.

Their new leader was hired right after COVID in May of 2020. He immediately recognized that there were some fundamentals to put into place: mission, vision, values, team operating processes and performance metrics.

We started with mission, vision, values and aligned those with those of the enterprise, ensuring that the company’s unique, collaborative and supportive culture was front-and-center. We then moved to socializing the organization’s five-year strategic plan, using virtual town halls and Q&A sessions to gather feedback, concerns and a better understanding about the barriers and likely resistance we would face to put the basics into place. Part of the town halls were personal sharing (as individuals were comfortable) about themselves as individuals (i.e., hobbies, family, vacations, etc.).

We asked each team leader to create a short seminar-style learning session to educate the other team about their customers, their standard operations, and any special projects they had on tap.

Finally, we put together a program that included Executive Coaching of the leader and his two managers to increase their change management competence, identified projects that representatives from both teams could participate in to increase the team’s overall visibility, build credibility and trust amongst the team members themselves, and make progress towards innovating their services.

These are just a few simple steps – basic common-sense activities – to help teams facing multiple changes from multiple directions find some equilibrium. Think about the basic needs of your team(s). What can you do to help them find their own version of equilibrium?