Dublin Session - Multicultural teams, Mergers and Acquisitions and the importance of Intercultural skills

By Andrew Scott, Dwellworks

For those who were fortunate enough to attend this session, I am sure they would agree it was a fact packed and at times amusing look at how our panellists Isabelle Prémont (Anywr), Alex Neale (Silverdoor) have navigated their way through both differing international and corporate cultures, following recent acquisitions and mergers as part of their organizations strategic growth plans. We were also fortunate to have Cheryl Obal (Cheryl Obal & Associates) on the panel who is a seasoned intercultural expert and well known trainer. Cheryl shared some of her experiences from when she has been involved in an advisory capacity to organizations who had either recently gone through a merger/acquisition or where about to, she also provided some great hints and tips on what to look out.

The main focus of the session was to demonstrate how important cultural awareness is when acquiring or merging businesses, and how often it gets overlooked as the focus tends to be on the strategic/ financial benefits of such a transaction. Having been fortunate myself to be involved with several acquisitions, one actually being the acquisition of an intercultural training business, I learnt very quickly how the future success of any such transaction is critically dependant on genuine corporate culture awareness as well as understanding those key national cultural differences that can play a major factor in a transition and future shape of an organization.

This subject matter and the engagement of the audience was such that the session could have probably run for several hours, and the audiences open interaction was great to see and provided further insights, ideas, thoughts and anecdotes, which has become very much synonymous with a EuRA conference session. Finally, many thanks to Isabelle, Cheryl and Alex for taking the time to be part of this session and their willingness to be open and transparent with their experiences.

I very much hope this subject matter will get further airtime at conference and wish all those companies who will be involved in a merger or acquisition before we all meet again in Vilamoura every success.

Kindest regards

Andrew Scott Dwellworks