Of realignment and first impressions

My company (lets call it A) acquired another company (lets call it Z) last year, but the operational integration didn't happen till recently. The new organization structure was announced just before Chinese New Year and since many personnel were affected by realignment and/or addition of product portfolio, trainings were scheduled for the week following the Chinese New Year break. I opted for a change of portfolio in a totally different therapeutic area, and was caught in a whirlwind of meeting/training/conference for eight straight days beginning from Feb 24. It totally drained the life out of me!

With this new portfolio, 80% of the managers comprises of employees from legacy company A, while 80% of the sales team are from legacy company Z. Majority of the team members were friendly and willing to share their experience, but a few were rather antagonistic - it was as if they felt the new managers encroached into their space. But then, I supposed this is a normal reaction of people involved in any merger. Things got better as the training progressed and towards the 2nd last day when we had a team-building session, the facilitator had all of us paste a blank piece of paper on our back, and we went around writing on each other's paper what our first impression of that person was.

I was very surprised to see what had been written on my paper:


I wouldn't be surprised if those remarks had come from people whom I've worked with. But with this entirely new team, whom I had first contact only during the training, and considering such a shaky start to the training, I was really pleased with such positive remarks. It lifted my spirits, and bolstered my confidence that we could potentially work well with this team.

As Henry Ford once said, "Coming together is a beginning. Keeping together is progress. Working together is success". I hope we'll work together successfully.