Challenge: The president of a division of a large manufacturing company needed a quick resolution to integration. They had merged three other divisions into one organization to create economy of scale with increased efficiency. However, the structure of new business unit was a convoluted hodge-podge of un-integrated legacy positions. The uncertainty, inefficiency and conflict caused by this post-integration disorder was interfering with the original vision for a more streamlined and cost-effective business unit The executive team needed to achieve greater operational consistency to improve organizational performance to support their ambitious growth objectives.
How We Helped: As we collaborated with executives to design an effective integration process, we quickly uncovered many issues that explained the confusion and conflict in the new unit. Jobs with the same title sometimes had very different accountabilities, and some positions with different titles had overlapping accountabilities. In addition, many employees were uncertain of their real role and accountabilities in the new organization, and therefore focused on outmoded tasks. We also uncovered a substantial amount of hidden information about the informal business culture that drove the persistent conflict among the merging divisions.
Results: The company continued to use the process we developed for defining and tracking job roles and accountabilities to achieve consistency of operations and improve organizational performance. Also, our uncovering of the hidden sources of conflicts in the blended division allowed executives to take steps to effectively resolve the issues and create a much more effective and efficient organization.
