I placed the receiver back on the cradle and sat at my desk on a dreary Sunday afternoon, slightly shell-shocked at the cost of the takeaway food order I had just placed.
£568.
Sure, I was ordering for about 20 colleagues who were in the office with me. But then I remembered that we were working on the largest hostile takeover in the world worth £110 billion. Surely £568 was a rounding error on the investment bank spreadsheets calculating the shareholder value from the deal?
Last week, a university friend (who's a reader of Effortless Thursdays) messaged me as soon as the announcement hit the newswire: BHP had made an offer to buy Anglo American for USD 39 billion.
He asked me how I felt not being in the chair any longer and whether I was itching to do it again.
That question whisked me back to that £568 moment at the beginning of a 20+ year career of M&A transactions at Linkaters and Anglo American.
I felt that electricity of excitement again - the teamwork, deep collaboration, and the tenacity needed when the stakes were high.
But more than 20 years later, the excitement gave way to something else.
I think about my colleagues whose spaces at work are being infiltrated by thoughts of uncertainty:
"Is my job safe?"
“What is Elliott going to do with its stake?”
"Do I have the strength and energy to go through another round of rearranging the deck chairs?"
Cookies
You know those screens that pop up when you visit a website asking you to "Accept Cookies"?
If you were to replace "cookies" with "tracking tools", would you still click "Accept All"?
The thing is we have "Accept Cookies" in the world of M&A.
CEOs talk about the "synergies" that will be created.
Investment bankers calculate the "accretive shareholder value" where £568 is not even a rounding error.
But just as cookies hide the true nature of what goes on, "synergies" and "shareholder value" do, too.
There are no line items on financial spreadsheets to model the human and cultural aspects of a deal when synergies are shorthand for job cuts.
And yet how we come together in organisations to innovate, problem solve and create is about relationships.
Do your team members enable you or hinder you?
Is your leader inspiring or demotivating?
As Peter Hawkins, Professor of Leadership at Henley Business School says:
"All aspects of leadership are relational"
That relational imperative is even more important after a merger or takeover: How can we ensure post-deal that the people who remain are motivated, and not merely incentivised?
But what about in the middle of a takeover?
What can we do if we're one of these team members whose organisation is being taken over?
What if you're a leader, how can you exemplify leadership that serves when everything else is uncertain?
How can you best handle your own worries?
Focus on your team
One of my colleagues recently said to me what gave her joy at work.
“It's easy to forget how much joy my team brings me, because I often focus on what's out of my control”, she said.
Takeovers or any major change in organisations can be unsettling because so much is subject to the whims of ∑ AutoSums and Macros on excel spreadsheets, and out of your control.
It feels threatening to the point that your heart feels flat and bored.
You could blame, moan and whine about what's happening, and focus on things out of your control.
But what if you focused on your team - or the people that bring you energy, joy and purpose?
The ones that put a smile on your face, that draw you into conversations about what's good and joyful, rather than "What if?" and "What's wrong?".
Don't allow yourself to be a prisoner of your knowledge like Shakespeare’s Hamlet was, for:
"there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so."
👉 Over to you!
Who can you connect with in your team that can allow joy to emerge?
If you’re wondering how to focus on joy when you might not be feeling joy yourself right now, I shared 9 suggestions for how to re-discover the joy in what you do at work in edition 60 of Effortless Thursdays. 👇
ps If you’re an entrepreneur, a lawyer or another high-flying professional - who’s looking to re-discover your purpose and joy for what you do, get in touch and let’s have a conversation.
That’s it for this week!
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To your health and success!
Eric
What a simple and beautiful way of summarizing leadership.
"As Peter Hawkins, Professor of Leadership at Henley Business School says:
"All aspects of leadership are relational"