Organizing and Aligning Your M&A Team: Positioning Your Team for Victory

You’ve likely experienced what happens when M&A team members fail to communicate effectively. M&A is often a chaotic process, and poor communication will lead to disconnected ideas about the deal’s objectives and how to accomplish them. Your M&A pipeline is an engine for strategic growth, which makes it critical to effectively manage how your team works together. Fortunately, the right solutions are available to help you avoid these kinds of pitfalls. You must start with organizing and aligning your M&A team. 

Why Teamwork in M&A Is Important 

M&A teams need to work together cohesively because they’re unlike any other team in your company. As an organizational leader, you may struggle with proper team alignment during mergers. Often, this results in lost data or an inability to reach a consensus, leading to a slow, cumbersome, and expensive process. 

Along with their day job obligations, each one of your team members has a significant and demanding role in the integration that can create a lot of stress. However, being a part of this unique team means each member acknowledges that their responsibilities are not solely independent from others. That is, one member’s neglect or misunderstanding of their delegated tasks can cause a negative ripple effect on other team players’ abilities to complete their own assignments. 

Organize the Ways Your M&A Team Should Work Together 

A well-run team produces elements that can lead to smoother M&A transactions: 

• Solid Working Relationships: While your primary focus is not for team members to become lifelong friends, you want them to have positive working relationships with each other and those outside the team. 
• Ability to Think Outside the Box: Strong working relationships can lead your team members, both individually and cooperatively, to better analyze or assess risks and processes for optimal results. 
• Enhanced Team Identity: Integration work can call team identity into question. As two companies merge, a new identity is born. A smooth process relies on the collective identity of your team and your organization. 

Align Your M&A Team 

Creating efficient teamwork starts with alignment. Identify the deal thesis of your M&A transaction to your members and emphasize the strategies you want them to use for achieving specific objectives. The team needs to know the reasons you are buying the company and the drivers that will create long-term value. They also need to clearly understand each team member’s roles and responsibilities. 

Misalignment can have many adverse effects on your integration process, including: 

• A lack of communication between team members 
• A disconnect between leadership and team employees 
• An inability to reach decisions 
• Competing business strategies on how to accomplish the merger 

Utilize a RACI Chart

To ensure effective alignment of the teams and individuals involved, it is essential that you clearly define the roles and responsibilities of those associated with the project at hand.  By setting expectations across the organization and departments, you will ensure everyone sings from the same sheet of music.  One way to do this is by leveraging a RACI chart.  RACI is an acronym for “Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, and Informed.”  As a reference, see an example RACI chart and detailed description in our article on Roles and Responsibilities. 

In this way, you provide a high-level master copy available to the team to eliminate any confusion around who is ultimately liable for various aspects of the project.  With a purpose-built M&A solution such as Devensoft, you can easily assign tasks to your team and define those who are responsible or accountable for those steps, request status updates, and easily output progress reports for simplified visibility. 

Effective alignment doesn’t have to be an obstacle. Your team members can utilize innovative software solutions to navigate their assignments and every other aspect of the M&A integration project.  Each member will benefit from using intuitive dashboards and adjusting the software to the specific integration needs — providing a flawless transition between phases.  

Improve Communication in M&A Teams 

Mergers are complex deals to close and it’s a challenge to ensure that the lines of communication are flawless. Having the right communication tools and strategies in place streamlines and improves your team members’ focus, allowing them to effectively meet the defined M&A transaction aims. 

Enhanced team member alignment often leads to better communication, both within and between functional teams. Take proactive steps to concentrate team communication in the right direction, keeping all members on their assigned track.  

Implement Progress Reports for Team Members  

To avoid your team members experiencing a disconnect with the real-time progress of the integration, determine if they lack the ability to receive immediate and accurate updates on critical activities.  They should be able to quickly find the answers they need. Without a way to promptly view datasets, your team members can become uncertain of where they are in the process and where they need to go next. 

Effective alignment and communication falter when team members lack access to detailed reports of the deal’s priorities and strategy. You can avoid this pitfall by implementing a method for members to produce their own detailed reports, fostering communication between them. 

Secure a Single Repository for Documents 

Access to documents from a single source of truth is vital to a smooth and continuous M&A team workflow. You already know that integrations require more documents, contracts, and invoices being passed from one department to the next. Your team doesn’t have time to waste searching for missing or sensitive information.  

Provide your team with a secure, data-encrypted repository for all transaction documents conducive to organized and aligned teamwork. Team members can save valuable time and with document bulk import and drag-and-drop functionality. Your team leads can also decide who can view, edit, and delete files. 

Employ an Advanced M&A Software Platform for Your Integration Teams   

Your M&A strategies go beyond the terms and legalities of the deals. Start streamlining the workflow with your in-house team members to aim high and achieve your deal objectives. Defining appropriate alignment, creating seamless communication, and providing real-time access to necessary data from a single and secure environment collectively powers your organization’s strategic growth. It all begins with implementing innovative software solutions purpose-built for your M&A team members.  

Top global companies trust Devensoft to provide an industry-leading M&A software platform unmatched in innovation, precision, user experience, and customer-value delivery. Speak with a Devensoft professional for expert information on how you can initiate or improve your M&A team organization and alignment.