Merged on Paper.
Divided in Practice.
Your team knows where the integration is stuck. We get them to say it out loud, while there’s still time to act on it.
What happens around month four.
Most integrations look clean for the first hundred days. The plan is solid. People are still polite. The deal logic still tracks.
Then month four hits.
Two teams that should be one are still on separate Slack workspaces. The acquired engineering lead keeps needing more time on the integration. A VP agrees in the steering committee and tells their team something different in the hallway. Talent you couldn’t afford to lose is updating their LinkedIn.
You can feel it. The synergy targets you put in the deck are starting to feel like fiction. And the obvious tools aren’t reaching whatever it is that’s actually getting in the way.
The part nobody has a method for.
Every integration leader we talk to names some version of the same thing.
The deal model never accounts for what people aren’t saying. Culture can’t be measured from behind the diligence wall. Commercial teams slow down post-close because nobody is sure of their role yet. The playbooks cover systems, contracts, and org charts. The human layer is the part that surfaces six months in, when there isn’t much room left to fix it.
You probably have a strong IMO. A culture survey going out. A communications cadence. None of that is the issue.
The issue is that people hold back when there’s still ambiguity about whose team they’re on. So the real concerns route through hallway conversations, side-channel Slacks, and exit interviews you’ll see eighteen months too late.
That’s where we work. We surface what teams won’t volunteer through normal channels, fast enough that you can still do something with it.
Ways to work together.
Three ways to engage. Each one is scoped to the deal.
Integration Read
Integration Engagement
Operating Partner
What a half-day surfaced.
Six months after a major organizational change, leadership at a thirty-four person company needed to know what people actually thought. Not the polished version.
They were watching key staff disengage and the next quarter’s plan was already wobbling.
We ran a half-day session.
“It allowed us to go beyond the surface level.”
Survey results from eighteen of thirty-four participants. The engagement was a post-restructure realignment, not an M&A integration. We’ve included it because the dynamic is the same: a team six months into a major change, leadership unsure what people actually believe, real concerns not surfacing in standard meetings.
Who we work with.
Most integration leaders we talk to hit a wall around month six.
The obvious work is done. Teams are saying the right things and not executing. The next board update is six weeks out.
If that’s landing, let’s talk. Thirty minutes. A few specific questions to surface where the integration is actually stuck. No deck.