These past two weeks have had me pulling my hair out getting ready for a national inspection. As this affects our accreditation as a hospital I will leave it to your imagination to visualize how busy it's been. So this is a no-frills post. Enjoy!
1. Michael Bonsignore, CEO of Honeywell, states that Honeywell will not be an extension of the old Honeywell or Allied Signal. He is creating a new culture that blends the best of the merged companies of Honeywell and Allied Signal. He says that Honeywell will compensate and reward people that look for best practices from both companies in creating a new corporate culture and punish those who do not. Do you predict Honeywell will be successful?
The nice thing about being Honeywell is that you are Honeywell. They have their presence in so many aspects of electronics and defense that they can still fail upwards.
If the question asks if I think the merger of cultures will be successful than I can say that I believe it will. It won't be an easy transition but ultimately people will go along if they feel supported and valued. It's amazing the return on investment one can get from simply letting people know they are supported even in times of trial. By adding in an incentive measure the CEO is letting people know that contributions to this change will be valued and that also can secure some buy-in.
2. What barriers do you see based on what you observed in the video?
The biggest barrier I can see will be psychosocial in nature. The employees of the bigger Honeywell, and this is pure supposition, may feel that they are the "bigger brother" and that since theirs is the acquiring company the smaller company's employees should be doing the listening. This is not in line with the CEO's vision for the company's future. It would behoove Mr. Bonsignore to let Honeywell know that the smaller company is an investment in the future of Honeywell and is not to be seen as a lame duck that needed rescuing.
A second barrier would be the sheer size of the merger. In smaller companies it would be easier to merge two cultures, if the company is small enough the cultures can be merged over pizza and beer. With Honeywell there are geographic challenges, layers of managers with varying degrees of loyalty and competency, and thousands of employees for whom change is very scary. To assume that this will go smoothly would be fantasy. A steady and patient guidance will be needed.
3. What critical success factors should Honeywell consider as it crafts its organizational strategies around a new culture?
Though it can be hard to measure I would list morale as a big success factor. Honeywell needs skilled and motivated workers in order to survive. Skilled and unmotivated workers will lead to stagnation. The merger will strain morale (more in some areas than others) and watching for upticks here will be important.
Increased shareholder value is an obvious metric for success. This is largely dependant on getting the new system working as quickly as possible.
These first two will build a third factor of public perception. Once again this is hard to quantify but increased sales, positive press, actual growth, and favorable returns are generally good indicators of how the public is perceiving a company to be functioning. I think these are too often viewed as separate entities rather than the all-encompassing concept. Wal-Mart's recent market woes are largely due to the public perceiving their labor practices to be poor. They may very well be poor or they may very well be industry standard. If the latter is the case Wal-Mart forgot they ARE the standard due to their size and as such the public will focus its attention there. Honeywell is not in the same market and caters to a different demographic but the paradigm can be the same.
4. What can you take away from this exercise to immediately use in your career?
I am trying to focus on learning how to use small changes in a resistant system to formulate bigger changes downstream. I am not ready for a Honeywell merger or a culture shift as the system in which I operate still thinks that I plug in a flash drive I will activate Skynet and bring doom to mankind. In essence, I hope to bank this insight for a time when I can formulate bigger change. Right not I work with the tools at hand.
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