After signing, it often turns out that two organizations have filled the same function twice. A financial director on both sides, two heads of operations, two account managers for the same clients. The question that then comes to the table is not who is the better manager. It is an organizational question: which role remains, in what form, and what happens to the other.
That question is often asked faster than it is answered. Under time pressure, overlap then gets resolved based on who shouts loudest, who happens to belong to the acquiring party, or who is first to have a conversation with the new leadership. None of those routes has anything to do with what the role requires or what the organization needs after the integration.
The starting point is the role, not the person. What must this function do after the integration, given the new scale, the new clients, the new structure? Often the role itself changes enough that the old version of it, on either side, no longer quite fits. That makes the comparison fairer: you are not looking at who was better in the old function, but at who or what fits the new one.
This assessment belongs in the synergy baseline and the Day 1 plan, not in an informal conversation between two managers who both have a stake in the outcome. As soon as role questions are resolved outside that structure, there is a risk that the decision will later be reversed, with all the unrest that entails.
Overlap in roles is not automatically a problem that must be solved by cutting one position. Sometimes having the same function twice means the combined organization genuinely has twice the amount of work in that domain. Sometimes it means the roles actually diverge once you place them side by side, and the problem is not overlap but unclear job titles.
The question of whether overlapping functions should be merged is therefore not separate from the broader question of whether parts of the organization should be merged at all. That is precisely what the decision list is for: recording per component what is and is not integrated, rather than assuming it as a given simply because a deal has been signed.
When determining who takes over a role, what counts is not only the job title but also what someone actually does: which client relationships, which knowledge of processes, which informal authority within a team. That is exactly why who your key people are in an acquisition with two cultures is a separate question, apart from the organization chart. Two people with the same title can carry a very different weight in the daily functioning of their organization.
That weight also touches on the question of how you prevent knowledge from leaving the moment someone leaves the organization. When one of two people with the same role ultimately does not continue, it is not enough to treat that as a personnel decision. It directly touches on how you prevent knowledge from leaving with someone, especially if that knowledge has not been recorded anywhere outside that one person.
As long as the decision has not been made, two people are effectively operating in one role. Both know the situation is temporary; neither knows when or how it will be resolved. That uncertainty is one of the reasons people leave before a decision has even been made, which directly relates to why people leave in the unclear months after the deal. The longer two people remain in the same role without clarity, the greater the chance that you will no longer need to make the choice, because one of them has already made it for you.
That is why a role question like this deserves a place in the Day 1 plan, with a set moment at which the decision is made, rather than being left hanging as an open item that gets pushed from month to month.
The integration office keeps track of dependencies: who depends on what, which decisions are waiting on each other, and which role question can only be answered once another structural choice has been made. This prevents the question about two people in the same role from being answered before it is known what the broader organizational structure will look like. The tool is under construction; anyone who wants to work with this already can sign up for the waiting list.
Sometimes the answer to two people in one role is that both roles remain necessary, in an adapted form. Sometimes it is that the role itself becomes redundant once processes merge. Both outcomes can be assessed more fairly if you first establish how you keep roles clear across two organizations with different cultures, so that the comparison is about what the work requires, not about who happened to already be there.
Another way to look at the same overlap is to break the work itself down into tasks. FTE TO AI's work scan calculates, per task, what portion of it can be taken over by AI, which sometimes turns a role question into a task question: not which of the two keeps the function, but what part of both functions will still need to be done by a human going forward.
Vraag maar wat er op Day 1 moet staan, of wat integreren juist kapotmaakt.
Answers come from this site’s knowledge base. Not tailored advice, and not a scan of your company.