A User's Guide for a Successful Merger

After the Bankers, Financiers and Consultants Have Left the Building

Part 1 (more to come)

Sense-Making from the Sidelines: Art of the Deal or Heart of the Deal?

Many people who see my profile on LinkedIn are often surprised to see my job description as a ‘sense-maker’. They then will ask me what do I do and become even more surprised when I say that I am the head of leadership development for CelcomDigi. Some will probe further and walk away with an understanding (hopefully a fresh one) while others walk away thinking “why can’t he just say ‘leadership development’! I get the frustration and that’s OK.

I am 54. Have not seen all and done all. No. In fact I feel I know nothing and I am constantly surprised by how much I have to change my point of view in the light of new evidence. I had steadfast beliefs on so many things before. Things taught to me by my leaders, managers, bosses and of course by books and ‘gurus’. I felt confident and I led front the front and I must say, relatively well (thankfully my line of work has little opportunity to bankrupt a company. Its all the upside if I get anything right at all).

Then Covid-19 hit and I slowed down. Helped also by a fortuitous change of job role which allowed me to pull the brakes on my activities and frantic ‘doing’ and dramatically increase my thinking and ‘being’.  Further supported by the serene surroundings of Sabah where I spent most of the pandemic years. Yes, thinking and being. You would be surprised at how little we actually think and just be. We are so full of activities and action that we have forgotten the ‘why’. Yes, yes that guy, Simon Sinek, says the same thing.

And so, during the pandemic years I went back to ‘school’: I read more – far more than I have done before although throughout my life I read a lot relatively speaking. This time though I stopped reading management/leadership/business books. Instead, I went back to my passion – History. I read the histories of everything from British Naval history to the history of the environmental movement and the origins of information technology and AI. I read the history of the atomic age, the history of Magna Carta and the life stories of Frida Kahlo, Charles Dickens, Leo Tolstoy, Catherine the Great, Peter the Great and Charles Darwin among others. The thing about historians – the good ones – is that while they don’t make sage proclamations like management gurus and consultants, they quietly and with valid analysis identify the similarities between what happened during say, Samuel Pepys’s time and the great London fire and plague and what modern day leaders did during the Covid-19 pandemic. Similarly, history will tell us that while Greta Thunberg can inspire us to take up arms against oil majors, it was Alexander Humbolt who brought ‘environment’ to our living rooms and universities alike. Good historians are great at reminding us on the timeless essence of human ingenuity and folly. Even more, they are good at reminding us on the simple, basic and fundamental things that we take for granted but erodes and chips away at our humanity and our ability to achieve our fullest potential.

I read like a possessed man. All that time usually spent on driving to and from work and attending long meetings were converted into reading time. But I also spoke to people from the mainstream of management thought leadership and those who are not so mainstream. I told myself that I have done enough of reading them, it’s time to talk to them instead. Because they could not travel and charge an arm and a leg for ‘keynotes’ they were willing to take calls with an unknown guy from Malaysia. In short, my reading from non-management books coupled with my simultaneous conversations with outlier management thinkers switched on a light bulb in my head - We have gotten leadership and the art of management way too complicated. By extension of that, my own vocation in the field of HR has become pretentious, bookish and flashy. HR folks have become more ‘consultant’ than consultants themselves. Some HR folks think like McKinsey, not like the guy who has to go out and make that damn sales or ensure a decent level of well-being at the work-place. Some talent-management folks I know think like a vendor instead of someone as part of an actual business who needs to stare-down shareholders and financial analysists every quarter.

Then of course by the end of 2022, with lightning speed, I became an employee of a newly merged company. A merger of fierce competitors for what 20 years? What do I do now? The easiest answer would have been to get busy and bring ‘new’ ideas and ‘new’ programmes to ‘ensure the synergy is achieved’ and ‘key business drivers’ are ‘fine-tuned’ to ‘drive shareholder value’. It was time to switch-on the turbo engine and get cracking. One has to stay relevant and the way to stay relevant is to be busy doing…stuff. Being busy is always rewarded. That’s how KPIs work after all.

I on the other hand, decided to switch off the turbo of activities. There were enough people doing stuff but not enough of those who wanted to connect the dots and tell a story that can calm people’s nerves and help them feel good about themselves and then feel good about the new company. It must have been from something that I read during the pandemic, I suddenly had this insight that it is precisely during times of great change that those who can and willing to, must reduce activities and increase retrospection and reflection to ask questions instead of rushing to provide answers. It is also the time to remind people that they are capable agents who can and know how to manage their lives. It was the time to remind people that they simply have to remember the basics and the fundamentals. In short, while everyone was asking everyone else to keep looking to the future, I decided to remind people of the past.

So finally it came to pass that we were one week into the new year (2023) and slightly more than a month of being a new company called CelcomDigi. After many years of market rumours and false starts, two of the most storied telco operators in Malaysia went through a corporate exercise and merged to become a new entity on 1st December 2022.

Then, on Friday 6th of January 2023 a few of us went out for lunch and the topic of conversation was all about the new company and our roles in it. To be more precise, I think it was about our fears about the new company. Since all of us at the table were very senior and have had many years of corporate experience under our belts, I guess we were able to skillfully camouflage our fears and made the conversations sound, well, ‘corporate’. But we were fearful. There were simply too many unknowns.

In the midst of the conversation someone casually mentioned about how many employees were taking to our in-house WorkPlace platform to voice their grievances. They were picking on ‘small’ things and using these to channel their frustrations company wide. These small things, such as complaints about food choices in the cafeteria, the parking lots or the different toilet facilities were clearly a mask for deeper concerns and fears. The WorkPlace platform which was, to the credit of the Management of CelcomDigi, was kept open and unhindered was at the risk of becoming toxic. As I listened in and contributed to this conversation, I had this burning question at the back of my mind: What can be done to balance out the negativity that was beginning to take root? Sorry, the consultants have left the building. We were on our own.

As I came back to the office and logged into WorkPlace to reread some of the comments and sharing by CDzens (that’s how we call ourselves), the answer dawned on me. If employees have been given the freedom by the organization to openly share their concerns and feelings then it is also the freedom of the employees to use the platform to share what is working and what is positive and to be celebrated. It is also freedom to help others to make sense of their fears and worries. That’s all it takes.

Hence, over a span of 30 minutes I wrote my first Friday posting on WorkPlace with a heartfelt sharing to show empathy for all the fears and concerns felt by the employees and at the same time to provide an opportunity for them to be comfortable with the changes they were facing.

I didn’t know what to expect. Will my sharing be ignored? Will it gain traction? Will it trigger a conversation?

But it also didn’t occur to me then that I can’t hope to create a balance through just one sharing. That fact dawned on me the following Thursday when a colleague asked me what will I be writing for my next “Friday musing”! That’s when I realized that my Friday writing needs to be more than just a one-off sharing. It has to be regular and interesting and thought provoking. It has to drive positivity. It had to provide clarity and focus for what matters most to a rank and file employee.  It had to be a tool for sense-making – for my own and for my fellow colleagues. When I signed off with “See you next week” in my first post I actually meant “see you in the office next week”. I didn’t think then that I will be ‘seeing’ them weekly on Fridays for the following two years and counting. Eventually, I also realized that my Friday musings can also be used effectively to drive my own Team’s agenda as the team responsible for CelcomDigi’s Leadership Development.

Every Friday since that first posting on 6th January 2023, I have been highlighting all that needs to be remembered, focused on, prioritized and improved on to make the merger successful – after the bankers, financiers and consultants have ended their involvement.

And now, I want to share them with you. This is a user’s guide to make your merger as successful as ours and even if you are not in the midst of a merger, these will still be useful as I can bet you that you are now probably so ‘sophisticated’ that you have forgotten many of the things that I talk about here. Yes, you are probably all for McKinsey, LBS,  INSEAD, Harvard, psychometric assessment, engagement surveys, assessment centres, talent mapping and talent councils. Go ahead and continue with them. But, these things that I am sharing here will be the things that you will ultimately have to focus on behind all that corporate-speak and ‘strategic plans’.

I will probably not share everything. There are some things that are too specific for my organization but for the most part I think my musings are universally relevant. These I will humbly share. I am planning to post them on Mondays (perhaps not every Monday) and I hope you will forgive my sometimes rambling heart-felt thought process, spelling errors and grammatical faux-pas.

Its an honest user’s guide written by an actual user. I hope you will enjoy it.

See you again soon.

SK

May 5th, 2025