Finance
Ego, Culture and Learning: Three Critical Factors to an M&A Deal
Published by Jessica Weisman-Pitts
Posted on May 11, 2022
7 min readLast updated: February 7, 2026
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Global Banking & Finance Review®
Company
Published by Jessica Weisman-Pitts
Posted on May 11, 2022
7 min readLast updated: February 7, 2026
Add as preferred source on GoogleBy Karen Thomas-Bland, founder of Seven Transformation
According to Bain M&A could account for 50% of revenue growth in banking and financial services in the years ahead, an increase from the already high 35% rate. As the M&A environment remains hot, traditional banks are facing increasing disruption from private equity firms and digital-native banks.
Success of M&A deals often comes down to three areas in my experience; management of leadership egos, an ability to integrate at least two cultures together, and an ability to learn from past experience so investors understand the challenges an integration can bring. These challenges aren’t often taught at business school, so leaders have to quickly learn from experience to navigate through them.
Manage egos to make integration work
A well-developed ego is of course necessary to make a deal happen in the first place – it requires a big, brave, and bold personality. But to make the integration work that well-developed ego needs to be reined in.
When it comes to determining future leadership roles, both sides jostle for position with the buy side working out the roles they want in the newly enlarged business. One CEO I worked with proudly declared ‘let’s get our retaliation in first, we won’t have anyone from that side on our Executive team’.
So how do you best manage egos?
Prioritise the integration of two or more cultures
Most organisations are made up of a corporate culture and many sub-cultures often at a function, service, or geographic level, and sometimes even down to a team level. In a merger when you assume you’re bringing together two cultures it’s often significantly more than that – you’re bringing together people with very different sets of values, behaviours, leadership styles, mindsets, and policies. The integration challenge is winning the hearts and minds of all employees and giving them a compelling vision to buy into.
To integrate multiple cultures together:-
Learn from past experience
In mergers and acquisitions, nothing quite beats past experience. Coupled with this there is often a sense of mystery and intrigue surrounding mergers and acquisitions which can lead people to throw everything they’ve learned out the window. Like any programme of change capturing lessons learned should be an on-going effort. This mindset should be strongly encouraged by the Integration Director from day one. By not learning from failures, we are inclined to repeat similar patterns. By not maximising on deal and integration successes, we potentially miss opportunities to implement good practices to successfully complete existing and future integration work.
To best learn from past experience: –
Whether the initial market reaction to a deal is positive or negative, leaders should maximise their efforts to explain a deal’s value to the board, to increase transparency in communications with investors, and to execute the integration correctly. Directors need to understand the value-creation thesis and how the company will pursue it and this needs to be communicated to investors with a realistic account of when value is realised and what it really takes to achieve it.
M&A stands for mergers and acquisitions, which refers to the process where companies consolidate through various types of financial transactions.
Corporate culture encompasses the beliefs, values, and behaviors that shape how a company's employees interact and work together.
Integration in business refers to the process of combining different systems, processes, or cultures to create a unified organization after a merger or acquisition.
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