When a merger doesn’t work, and how to help teams

Leaders have a great intuition when there is an issue in their teams or departments. However, they usually miss objective diagnosis about the root causes. Leadership analytics can bridge this gap.

A while back one of our clients asked for an www.inoteam.io workshop. The goal: arranging an engaging team building activity on problem solving and agility for a large group of executives. The leadership workshop was part an ongoing effort to enhance coordination and sense of belonging between two recently merged teams into “one” team.

The inoteam workshop was a big success, the client was very happy. The importance of collaboration and teamwork to achieve team results was beautifully highlighted thanks to the team dynamics analysis that was generated using the assemble task by inoteam. But this was not the end of the story.

As requested by our client, we conducted a deeper statistical analysis of the interactions data to answer a key question:

Are people now feel as part of a bigger one team or still struggle with the two old identities?

The result of the analysis was extremely interesting and informative. The analysis of about 15,000 data points which was collected in only 30 minutes via inoteam platform showed that the employees from the smaller team which was merged in the bigger team were on average twice as impatient to gain access to inforamtion compared to their colleagues. No other factor expect belonging to one or the other former teams had an impact on this outcome. They were fighting to get control over the shared information.

It was clear that there is hidden dynamic going on between the two sub-groups. Our recommendation to the management team was to ensure they provide more support and recognition for the members of the former small team who were now part of a “one” big team to create a more inclusive atmosphere for the team to feel at ease. The data also showed that this hidden dynamic is negatively affecting the teams performance as benchmark data was showed that the overall performance of teams was in the low performing band.

I share a few other points here that is applicable to many other business as well:

There was no statistically meaningful difference in performance of teams that were working physically together vs teams who joined remotely.

However:

Agile teams who did more experimentation in the process of solving the problems performed much better than those who looked for perfect solutions.

Leaders usually have a great intuition when there is an issue in their teams or departments. However, they usually miss objective evidence diagnosis on what could be the cause.

In our story, the managmenet was initially assuming it is due to the mix of in person and hybrid work setting. But the data helped them figure out the root cause of the challenge. Leadership analytics is an essential part of modern organisations and embracing the power of data and analytics can help organziations enable their teams to thrive and don’t struggle with hidden challenges.