THE BUSINESS COACH with Laura Murphy: It’s a buy-out

Answer: “A wholly successful buy-out is the Holy Grail, it’s that difficult to achieve. Even when companies seem to be a perfect match, changes in processes, expectations, culture and, importantly, values, makes life tricky for a while.

You rightly want to show strong leadership before you have to step down. It has to be the right type of leadership though. A senior manager in a major UK bank (now a local entrepreneur) accurately predicted that the culture change his new CEO brought would result in high performance but reduced trust and integrity. It will be interesting to see what difference the Co-op Bank buy out of Lloyds TSB branches make to staff performance and customer satisfaction with their ethical mission statement.

In discussions with the incoming CEO continue with the practical things: harmonising processes and procedures, terms and conditions etc, commission job shadowing, training sessions, coaching, so that staff are as best prepared as they can be for the new regime.

Even with all of this, remember some will thrive whilst others will fall by the wayside. Your continued honesty and integrity during the transition phase will lay strong foundations for your staff to cope with either result.”

Laura is an organisation development specialist and executive coach with mtc2 ltd.  To solve your problem email [email protected] Tweet @WayfinderWoman Names and details have been changed to protect confidentiality.