Dealing with Mergers and other Combinations

Understanding how your organization functions can seem overwhelming; where to start? In this session, we start with four common forms of organizations and investigate their strengths, weaknesses, and implications. You will come to a better appreciation of your organization and others, seeing them as the interplay of specific forms and forces.

You may have noticed that people play politics in organizations. Not you of course - other people. Nevertheless, it is important to understand how they do it and why. In fact, it is important to know about the positive side of politics and what it can do to help an organization.

Managers generally spend as much time “managing on the edges” – in other words out of their unit, relating to the rest of the organization and to the outside world – as they do inside their unit. Here we consider various roles related to this important work, with the concentration on “buffering”: how to manage the delicate balance of outside forces coming into the unit.

The word “collaboration” has a very positive connotation these days. Collaboration helps us break out of our “hierarchy fix” as well as our “market fix”. It also helps us direct more attention to how people connect with each other, as capable adults. But we also have to appreciate the negative, as well as positive. So the four of us have collaborated on this topic to bring together a set of points that we have found surprising about collaboration.

Many of today’s organizations are highly-structured and complex which can make communicating and getting the job done difficult. We look at two characteristics of their formal structures – silos and slabs - and the challenges these present to managing, and investigate ways to manage across and beyond them.

An awareness of culture can make a big difference to how you perceive management problems and to how you act on these problems. Understanding cultures can enhance inter-group relationships, and perhaps, even help you get a promotion more quickly.

Whether you are working in a very stable culture, or one which is constantly in transition, we will show you that you can be more effective as a manager if you understand how your culture works.