After a merger or acquisition, there are regularly two people sitting in the same chair. Two finance directors, two heads of operations, two sales managers who both think they will be leading the team from Monday. That is not an exception, that is the standard picture of an integration in which two organizations with their own structure, their own language and their own way of deciding come together.
The question that then comes up is often framed wrongly. "Who is the best?" is a question about persons. The question that leads somewhere is a question about roles: which role needs to exist after the integration, what does that role require from the person who fills it, and which of the two organizations has the structure, the system or the customer relationship that role needs to connect to. That is a different order than putting people side by side and picking one.
A role-based view forces an intermediate step. Before someone is placed in a chair, the question stands what that chair means after the integration. Is it the same role that now exists twice, or do two different roles emerge from the combination — for instance a role focused on one customer segment and one on the other, or a role for the transition period and one for the structure afterward. Only once that question is answered does it make sense to look at who fits it best. Without that step, the choice becomes a comparison of résumés, and that touches on persons sooner than necessary.
Cultural difference makes this step more important, not superfluous. Two cultures that differ widely — one decides quickly and informally, the other works with committees and documentation — mean that the same job title was in practice a different role. The finance director who was used to making decisions himself functions differently from the finance director who was used to advising a board. Whoever does not name that difference is comparing two people on a role that did not mean the same thing for both of them.
How large the cultural difference is partly determines how much of the original role can remain intact. With two organizations that are close to each other in decision-making and responsibility, it is plausible that the role can largely continue unchanged, with one of the two people in it. With a large distance between the cultures, it is conceivable that neither of the two versions of the role fits the new situation one to one, and that the role therefore needs to be redesigned before anyone fits it. When does integrating destroy value is in cases like this a question that should be asked before the personnel choice: sometimes the answer is that the roles remain separate, each focused on a distinct part of the organization, rather than being merged simply because the org chart happens to draw it that way.
Between the moment of signing and the moment a decision is made about who fills which role, there is a period in which no one knows where they stand. That uncertainty is one of the recognizable reasons why people leave, not because they lose, but because they don't know whether they are losing. Why do people leave in the unclear months describes that mechanism, and it is relevant to exactly this situation: the longer the double role remains unresolved, the greater the chance that one of the two people leaves early, with or without the knowledge they carried.
That makes speed of deciding itself an instrument, apart from the outcome. A role that is assigned within a manageable timeframe — even if the answer is "both roles remain separate" — gives both people something to respond to. A role that remains hanging for weeks without a decision gives no one anything to respond to, except uncertainty.
As long as two organizations still exist side by side, with their own reporting lines and their own habits, the overview of who holds which role is itself already a challenge. How do you keep roles clear across two organizations is about that foundation: without a current picture of who is responsible for what, every choice about a double role becomes a separate action instead of part of a whole. That overview should also show who the key people are — not by title, but by the knowledge and relationships they carry. Who are your key people in an acquisition helps to sharpen that question beyond what the org chart shows on its own.
This page describes a way of looking at things, not an outcome. There is no fixed rule that says which of the two people fits the role, and no model that captures the cultural difference in a number from which the decision follows. What can be structured: the role before the person, the degree of cultural difference as a factor in designing that role, and the pace at which a decision is made. The integration office of mergerintegration.net is intended to capture that structure once it becomes available — for now the tool is under construction, and anyone who wants to use it can sign up for the waiting list.
There is one more question that belongs with this issue and that goes beyond who gets the role: how much of the work in that role is actually task-based work, and how much of it could soon be done by AI. That changes the discussion about double roles, because a role that consists largely of repeatable work does not need to be treated as scarce as quickly as a role built on relationships and judgment. The work scan from FTE TO AI calculates per task which part of the work can be taken over by AI, giving a different starting point to the conversation about who fills which role after the integration.
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.