By Bonnie Chiu and Natsayi Sithole
This is the third blog in our integration series. If you’re new to the series, start with the first and second blogs here.
Even the most hard-nosed business people and M&A practitioners recognise that ultimately these transactions and the work that follows are all about people. This is even more so the case for the social impact space.
We provide design, advisory, evaluation expertise, and capacity building for charities, funders, social enterprises, public sector departments, so that they can deepen their impact, learn, improve, or scale. The nature of a knowledge organisation means the value we bring is mainly based on the diversity, depth, and breadth of experience of our people and that they work in this field often because they are driven by a clear set of values and principles. We think that change of this nature needs an exceptional level of care and self-awareness. Are we always getting it right? Absolutely, not. But what we have encouraged is an environment in which feedback is given and heard and recommitted to ongoing self-reflection as we go.
Through the process of combining TSIP and Renaisi, we want to ensure that we retained staff and created the conditions for their talent to shine in an evolved combined organisation. They have directly shaped the new trajectory of our shared mission, while grappling with some realities including continuing business as usual working with our partners and communities we work alongside as seamlessly as possible. It’s taken a lot of trial and error to get this right. We reflect on some of the lessons we have learned / re-learned so far:
Dial up your attunement
The pace of the journey of combining organisations depends on the level of trust. However, trust is a moving target especially when there’s complexity involved. Now, as systems change practitioners, we knew that what determines success of any change process is what’s beneath the surface. Relationships and trust (relational change), mindsets, assumptions and emotions (transformative change). That did not make us immune from falling into common pitfalls!
When we started on this journey, we had milestones and targets as you’d expect. We wanted to provide clarity, and we knew staff wanted to have this resolved so that they could have more certainty day-to-day. However, we did not fully account for the need to respond to the pace at which our colleague’s inner responses to change would influence this pace and how much adaptation would be needed. We over indexed on pace and certainty -hearing this was needed – by focussing on the surface and getting things done. Harmonising policies, comparing our methodologies and service offerings, reviewing our budgets and consider cost savings and revenue synergies. The list goes on.
Whilst we also created collaboration spaces, a combined leadership team to equalise decision-making, away days, socials, open platforms for sharing learning and expertise, and focussed on leadership behaviours (e.g. us owning mistakes rather than being defensive), and layering group conversations with one-to-one relationships (all the things you’d expect), we still did not fully appreciate how consistently attuned to the emotional world of our team beneath the surface we needed to be.
We underestimated how discomfort with uncertainty and underlying assumptions held across the teams would require us to slow down, change direction, revisit decisions. We’re not afraid to share that frustrations emerged as timelines shifted along with communication. Our colleagues told us we where we were going wrong. Leaders are often used to holding high levels of uncertainty comfortably. They shared that through some of our actions and ways of working, we’d tacitly implied that everyone else had to be OK with this too, rather than creating the right conditions in which people could raise their comfort at their own pace.
Optimism can co-exist with difficult emotions. We need to make space for both.
When we started the integration journey, we wanted to encourage optimism about the future. We created “good vibes only” spaces and we all of course had a role in keeping our work going externally. Our intention was to lean into the positives, not erase the past, but we weren’t honouring everyone’s reality in doing so. When endings or evolutions are taking place, inevitably there are big and deep emotions. Both TSIP and Renaisi went through difficult periods of change prior to joining TSIC group, including having their close colleagues transition out of the organisations. There was grief, confusion, frustration, anxiety. We recognised we were not getting our approach right, so we sought help. We worked with an external Deep Democracy Co-Resolve facilitator to help process those emotions and raise our collective awareness of where we were all truly at within this change.
A few months in, we also brought in a guest speaker who is a specialist in third sector mergers to share their experiences with our team. This helped the teams to both situate their current experience in a wider context and validate them too. We heard that this type of change involves working in the grey, holding uncertainty, and that it generally takes about six months for people to simply find their feet before anything concrete can be achieved. Twelve months for full integration. Gradually, we have learned how to leave space for difficult emotions to surface. How to hold and witness them for our team, without feeling compelled to “fix”, or transform them.
This required us to get comfortable holding a range of emotions and realities across the teams, and to resist defensiveness or pushing unhealthy positivity when our role at times is just to facilitate and to acknowledge. Crucially, to fully and loudly acknowledge the courage, patience, commitment and trust the whole team were showing even in the trickiest of moments – none of which is a given.
As organisations committed to building equitable and inclusive workplaces, we had wanted to make sure that we are dismantling the single hero / leader narrative and taking an open approach. For some of the team, being involved in decisions, leaning into collective ownership and seeing the future potential while there were many things that could not be assured in the short-term felt like a burden.
The journey through significant change can feel like a marathon. Trust and comfort in change ebbs and flows. The dynamic nature of human experience coupled with fast-moving complex change means this requires intentional and consistent focus. We have learned that staying attuned to the team and attuned to your own emotional fluidity as you’re moving through organisational change is key. Your inner realm is also often a fractal of what else is going on in the organisation. Sure, there’s a to-do list, milestones, deliverables, the urgency to reap the benefits quickly. But through it all what matters is how people feel. Are they heard? Do they feel understood? Are you tending to and tapped into the collective subconscious or running a completely different race to everyone else?