If your company went through a merger, would you volunteer to be on the merger-integration team? - SmartBrief

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If your company went through a merger, would you volunteer to be on the merger-integration team?

2 min read

By Mike Figliuolo 05/26/16

Leadership

SmartPulse — our weekly nonscientific reader poll in SmartBrief on Leadership — tracks feedback from more than 190,000 business leaders. We run the poll question each week in our e-newsletter.

Last week, we asked: If your company went through a merger, would you volunteer to be on the merger-integration team?

  • Absolutely — it’s a critical project that enables me to drive important results: 93.63%
  • Heck no — those projects are high-risk nightmares and I want nothing to do with them: 6.37%

M&A seems exciting. A surprisingly high percentage of folks would volunteer to be on an M&A integration team. While the work is obviously critical to the organization, it’s perhaps some of the most challenging work out there. On top of that, it can be a career-breaker if it doesn’t go well. That said, you’ll gain valuable experience as well as lessen the odds that you’ll become a “synergy” in the merger itself (after all, that’s a big part of the value of a merger — reducing redundancies). It would be interesting to see how these replies split out for people who have been on an integration team and those who haven’t.

Mike Figliuolo is managing director of thoughtLEADERS and author of “One Piece of Paper: The Simple Approach to Powerful, Personal Leadership.”