Leading Transformation: Mark Dendle on Acquisitions, Prioritization, and AI

So a couple of nuggets I want to unwind this a little.

You said invite them in during the acquisition.

You're inviting them in and you're telling them, I'm going to interpret it as you were telling them the why.

And then they were able to kind of fill in the dots and say, well, wait, now that you told me the why, here's better ways to do that.

And giving them that permission.

The other thing that I noted in what you said is also be conscious of how people are compensated.

It sounds like before they were compensated for acquisitions, but not necessarily integration, which gets you some goals achieved, but can leave you with a complete mess.

Oh, yeah.

And compensation alignment with objectives is just a basic.

And I've joined several companies where that was messed up and you do a whole study to get it realigned because companies change over time and compensation programs have to change with the needs of the company and where it's headed to.

So I've been part of that several times.

The communicating also and being outcome focused.

If you share the objectives with people, smart people will figure it out.

In a lot of those companies, we found talent we could bring to the corporate office.

and who stayed with the company 20 plus years, right? So you really want to meet people where they are and then just be very straightforward with them.

And the communication, the collaboration, the best ideas will come out if you get more than one mind working on it.

Yeah, almost like giving them that permission to explore.

And the permission to explore, the permission to make mistakes.

A mistake is only an error if done twice.

You're going to drop balls.

Just make sure they're not big balls.

We're juggling a lot.

So try and, you know, stay focused on the goal.

There's also always a lot of things to do.

I followed the Franklin Covey four disciplines of execution model.