The Merger & Acquisition Leader's Playbook

CHAPTER 22Integration Leadership: Start Here

The first component of the change management playbook is integration leadership. The other components dig into what the integration leaders need to lead.

Stand Up Your Transition, Transformation, or Project Management Offices

Complex change management efforts through points of inflection like mergers and acquisitions or restructurings go better with people giving leaders leverage by managing the change processes. These people have different titles in different organizations. Here's one set of definitions:

Leaders inspire, enable, and empower others to do their absolute best together to realize a meaningful and rewarding shared purpose.

Deputies are second in command, empowered to act in their superiors' absence. As such, they are leaders themselves who may step in to manage some changes and processes.

Chiefs of staff give leaders increased leverage by managing them, priorities, programs, and projects, and communication. Where a deputy has some direct power, a chief of staff's power is all indirect as the voice of the leader.

A project management office (PMO) conceives potential programs and projects in line with enterprise-level priorities, helps prioritize and define those programs and projects with team charters, assembles resources, communicates and coordinates within and across programs and projects, facilitates key meetings, ...