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HR’s Role in Mergers & Joint Ventures Part 2 of 3
5 December 2011:
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Managing Mergers Substantial academic research has been invested into whether mergers and acquisitions deliver the value over the long term that their proponents promised to shareholders. Whilst there is no overall consensus on this point, the research clearly indicates that the time and effort needed to get systems and people working together is more often than not severly under-estimated. This also applies to joint ventures.
Too often, efforts to communicate the purpose and value of the new company or venture are driven by the communications department and interpreted as whitewash by employees. To succeed, the new company or venture must become a living entity to which employees can relate. HR has a vital role in making this happen.
Lessons from Nokia Siemens Networks’ Consistency in Leadership Initiative
The joint venture between industrial giants Nokia and Siemens was founded in April 2007 to provide mobile communications infrastructure and services globally. A history of acquisitions, the most recent being parts of Motorola’s wireless network infrastructure, together with the group’s heritage from two existing companies meant “we were good at integration, but not necessarily at dealing with the ensuing complexity,” according to Eric Sorin, Global Head of HR Center of Expertise at Nokia Siemens Networks.
“You need clear and consistent leadership to see a turnaround through successfully,” said Sorin. “Not only did we have two leadership styles, from our two parent companies, we also had no common understanding of what we expected from our leadership team, no stated values and resulting desired behaviours and consequently no metrics against which to assess leadership behaviour, or a clear development plan to move leadership to a desired profile. We launched the Consistency in Leadership Programme to create a clear and distinctive management culture that would enable the organisation to act consistently and with individual & collaborative accountability for achieving business goals. Along the way, we wanted to improve employee commitment through a sense of confidence that management was pulling together for the success of the company and not divided or fighting to protect their own turf or avoid accountability. Most of all though, our goal was to implement a leadership programme that would result in swift and visible improvements through better customer engagement and stakeholder trust. ”
Sorin and his team worked with the senior executive team to develop a leadership code, defining behavioural and performance expectations for line-and senior management, that was rolled out in stages to the company’s senior and line managers.
Keys to Managing Mergers and Joint Ventures
- Employees will not commit to the new entity unless they can identify with it. HR has a vital role to play in creating the identity of the new company by defining the behavioural and performance expectations and the cultural norms that will support the achievement of the stated business goals of the new enterprise.
- Communicating these values and expectations needs personal engagement by each level of management over a sustained period of time. Too often, an initial burst of activity rapidly tails off into internal emails and blogs.
About Eric Sorin
Eric Sorin is the Global Head of the HR Centre of Expertise for NSN and holds a master degree in Human Resources from the Sorbonne university in Paris. He started his career with Thomson Consumer Electronics where he faced the sensitive task of closing industrial sites and organizing the redeployment of hundreds of redundant employees (mostly blue collars). This first and “tough” experience shaped some of his core beliefs as a HR professional.
He then joined Hewlett Packard in 1988 where he held a number of roles for the PC and Network businesses (recruitment, HR development, HR manager, and C&B). He relocated to the UK in 1999 and was soon appointed as Director of Compensation for the EMEA region where he drove the integration of compensation programs following the acquisition of Compaq.
After 15 years spent at HP, Eric joined Nokia in 2004 as Global Head of Compensation. He transitioned to the newly formed Nokia Siemens Networks joint venture in 2007 as Global Head of C&B in charge of aligning related programs and policies for 60,000 employees in more than 100 countries. Since 2009, Eric is the Global Head of the HR Centre of Expertise for NSN where he leads a team of 75 HR experts distributed in 25 countries, responsible for developing and deploying the HR corporate initiatives in the areas of talent, leadership and organization development in addition to compensation & benefits.
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