We just acquired a smaller competitor to increase our valuation before our own exit, and now we have duplicate leaders for several seats. How do we consolidate these two leadership teams without causing an immediate talent drain or culture clash?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

Acquisitions are great for scaling valuation, but consolidating two leadership teams is a highly sensitive process. If you handle it poorly, you will end up with a political civil war that destroys your culture and ruins the integration of the new business.

The golden rule here is that you must run the consolidation process through your Accountability Chart. You cannot have co-leaders or shared seats. There can only be one person in each seat on the leadership team. Having multiple people sharing a seat creates confusion and kills accountability.

Sit down with your Integrator and rebuild the Accountability Chart for the combined entity based solely on what the business needs to hit its future goals. Do not look at names or titles yet. Once the seats and their five bulleted roles are defined, look at the leaders from both companies and run them through the GWC™ tool.

Evaluate who best fits your core values and who gets, wants, and has the capacity to run each seat at the new, larger scale. Be honest and decisive. If a legacy leader is not the right fit for the consolidated seat, you must either transition them to a different seat where they can succeed or let them go. Keeping someone in a seat they do not GWC™ just to avoid a difficult conversation will only drag down the entire organization.