Organization Failure to Create a Growth Culture

The current freight forwarding industry is a competitive, complex, and highly volatile business environment, where today the traditional freight companies are transforming themselves either through mergers or by the acquisition by so-called cash-rich companies who are hunger to grow by hook or crook. Their only objective is to get their share prices?up by adapting means of destructive methodology by taking over great companies at a premium price. When you acquire a company it's all about the people and culture, since the same forces rocking businesses are also overwhelming employees, driving up their fear and compromising their capacity. Good planning, communication, and being as honest and open with people as possible go a long way in integrations, well it’s all spoken royally but the ground reality is shocking as the professionals are targeted to exit with inhumane manner. Although "The Wall Street Journal" reports that merger and acquisition activity has slowed since the 2007 boom that saw $4.3 trillion in deals, it is still front and center in the world of business. Organizational cultures often collide post-merger, and the fallout can be disastrous. When faced with a merger, keep issues related to blending cultures a top priority and take steps to ensure a smooth transition such as Ahead of planning, the study of the acquired organization, employee grievance redressal mechanism, employee approachable integration professionals, involving the employees in each process with equal participation, communicating frequently, take efforts to bring the culture together, evaluate and retain the best practices, policies, and systems from the two cultures and finally given time.?

The leadership should refrain from the bias of inheriting their people in the new environment.?

The purpose of the car is not to buy gas, the purpose of the company is not to make money. The purpose of the car is to go somewhere and the fuel helps to get there, the purpose of a company is to accomplish something to advance a greater cause to contribute to society, and money will help you to get there.

Growth culture comes from the ideology of the management.?

Agreed that the Group / Regional / Country leadership focused on how to build high-performance cultures, in the current scenario as most of them believe their current culture is the best and fail to learn from the acquiring company. Building an organization focused on?ignoring?a culture?may not be the best, healthiest, or most sustainable way to achieve results. Based on the recent experiences that the first impact and biggest concern on mergers and acquisitions is that the existing employee’s emotional balance and peace of mind are highly impacted.?

One can argue here that?if a company is leading the marketplace, and has got the best culture in place, why they are not successful in the industry organic growth?, why focus to hijack cultured employees effort and assets?

Instead, it may be more effective to focus on creating a culture of growth.?A culture is simply the collection of beliefs on which people build their behavior. Learning organizations focus on intellectually oriented issues such as knowledge and expertise but the acquired company with untrained management focus on what they believe will increase stress levels and signal risk to target company employees.

A true growth culture also focuses on deeper issues connected to how people feel and how they behave as a result. In a growth culture, people build their capacity to see through blind spots, acknowledge insecurities and shortcomings rather than unconsciously acting them out and spend less energy defending their value so they have more energy available to create external value.?We have seen the company’s acquisitions in the past for a strategic reason to strengthen their product mix and reach newer markets. Such moves complement each other by strengthening the growth culture with a win-win situation for both Organizations and their employees. But today, such acquisitions have become a rare event and what is seen is more acquisitions that are seen?are aimed?to kill their competition.

Building a growth culture requires a blend of individual and organizational components. A focus on continuous?learning?through inquiry, curiosity, and transparency, in place of judgment, certainty and self-protection. Time-limited, manageable?experiments?with new behaviors to test our unconscious assumption that changing the status quo is dangerous and likely to have negative consequences. Continuous?feedback up, down, and across the organization is grounded in a shared commitment to helping each other grow and get better. In contrast, having an?exaggerated sense of superiority?spoil the culture often exacerbates people’s fears by creating up a zero-sum game in which people are failing. Acquired company trust their own lower levels management traits but never seems to be reviewing or creating a forum to collect feedback.?

The superiority?treat themselves as winners and they quickly weeded out their competitors, Results failure in growth culture.

Does weeding out contribute to the rewarding success storyline? At first, one needs to realize one's mistakes and learn from their failures and shortcomings as critical opportunities for learning and improving, individually and collectively. The synergy should not be restricted to only the commercial sides of the business, but also to ensure the cultural bonding and shared values are inclusive in action while integrating the different entities.?Now you can understand why certain customers avoid working with the acquired company, more than the commercial gain values treat them apart.

To my knowledge, the acquiring management instinctively knows the fact they are inclined to hide, rationalize, minimize, cover-up, and deny their weaknesses and mistakes because they make us feel vulnerable. These fears narrow and limit perspective rather than enlarging it, failure of openness. We began building a company growth culture in the aftermath of a tumultuous period during which we brought in several new leaders, with different skill sets, to reinvent what we provided to clients and how we ran our business. Until then, we had always been a conflict-averse culture, preferring to see ourselves as a happy family for as long as our business culture with the values retained. But realistically, acquired hadn’t built enough safety to make that possible, and it's evident in their behavior and work culture.

Employees offend been misrepresented and mistreated with acquiring superiority?power with lack of common grievance redressal board in place

inviting their so-called leadership to play the act of trust all among us, in areas including our honesty, intentions, authenticity, skills, integrity, standards, and results well remain their the books of management traits.

???????????The acquired company trained their key staff to keep their fake smile, talks all high in all the initial meetings, and create a fake environment of trust, just to collect all the information you have on hand but they don’t care about the culture and values you carry, it is evident that they fail to learn knowledge management principles, that’s resulting unaware to grown on their own organically. The feedback we got was raw and tough, it was shared with the rest of the company. What had resonated for us most deeply and what we were doing about it was what behaving differently look would like it was intense and demanding work, but we all left feeling buoyed. Culture fails not just because of the acquired company but also the fact that the person who sold the company remain money-minded with no formal employee compensation program signed off, thus followed by their subsequent so-called leadership played a mediator role and focused to cream their tail with all possible scams, The new age selfish leaders are of highly motivated to mint money for themselves thereby abandoning their people and a great culture built over time.

Exempting a unit of leaders who raise to speak for their people also to work in building an futuristic employee cultured workspace.

???????????Nothing followed in principle left with superiority?rule and predefined decision, due to lack of open, approachable global grievance redressal committee, an employee manhandling is well kept under the blanket and make them leave on their own. They are trained to lie and mislead throughout and everything is scripted. If you statistically compare the salary of the employee who stayed long with the company most likely to end up with a lesser package compare to market standard, all these decades they remain to build blocks in forming this culture and growth. Employees with rich cultures will have their slot in the market and the customers will join hands by fueling to decompose, in remembering their people handling experience. The leadership at the top alone is accountable for the development and maintaining of the culture.?

Their behavior will remain as a culture of the brand will eventually grow wider and reach a bigger audience in the industry resulting in Organization's Failure to Create a Growth Culture.?

“When a culture fails does it mean we followed wrong culture or immoral so-called leadership traits?”

The Secret of change is to focus all of your energy, not on fighting for the buried culture but on building the new with your values.

Manoj Prakash

B.COM;DCFA;PGDHRM;MBA;MSW;MIB (PHD)