The Merger & Acquisition Leader's Playbook

CHAPTER 24Communication: Everything Communicates

The third component and backbone of the change management playbook is communication. Be deliberate about your ongoing communication efforts as you cycle through the five BRAVE questions again and again.

Everything communicates. Everything. Even the things you don't do and don't say send powerful signals to everybody in the organization observing you.¹

Because we live amid a communication revolution, the guidelines for communicating are changing dramatically. As much as you would like to treat communication as a logical, sequential, ongoing communication campaign, in many cases you must manage it as an iterative set of concurrent conversations.

Guest Contributor Michael Ovalles

It is perplexing to see how communications is typically at the bottom of the priorities in most merger and acquisition (M&A) scenarios. Unfortunately, organizations focus heavily on closing the deal and on operationalizing it (with a heavy focus on return on investment [ROI]) falling over and over on the same trap: lack of or insufficient communication with both internal and external stakeholders.

Unfortunately, the lack of or poor communication has profound implications on the success of an M&A strategy as stakeholders will always fill information gaps with perceptions and unreliable data points, resulting in a narrowed or mistaken understanding ...