When a Merger is in Your Future, Look Forward, Not Backward

Almost always when a company is merged or acquired it gets people’s attention. It rattles their cages. It’s an unsettling event, and it destabilizes things.

That’s not all bad. Sometimes a merger shakes people out of a rut. It may cause you to do some introspection or self-examination, and it may make you stretch.

A merger can motivate people—of course, there are plenty of times when it demotivates people, too.

But you probably can make this a real turning point in your life. The merger may be one of those things that really hits you and knocks you off the tracks you’ve been running on. It may cause you to rethink your values, or reconsider where you’re headed.

It’s easy for a person to grow stale in a job. Maybe it’s time for you to take a hard look at your job performance and how you can improve it. Are you working up to your potential? How do you need to change?

Now is the time for “New Year’s resolutions.”

This is true whether you are being promoted or demoted, transferred or reassigned, given a new boss, assigned new responsibilities or a change in your present duties, retired early or terminated, or even if it looks like your job situation is going to remain the same.

In fact, even if you have no earthly idea how you’ll be affected by the merger, now is the time to stretch and set some new goals for yourself.

It’s very important for you to keep looking forward, not backward. Give yourself some targets to shoot for. Decide how you want to be positioned once the dust settles. You need to have a personal sense of direction.

Otherwise, you add to the ambiguity and uncertainty in your life. And you will be more likely to bog down in the stress and frustration of the merger situation.

Decide now to use the merger as a sort of starting over point. Use it as a motivating event to help you grow.

Using the words of a catchy book title, If You Don’t Know Where You’re Going, You’ll Probably End Up Somewhere Else.

That’s why you need to set some goals for yourself. Set goals for this week, this month, this quarter, or the current year. Make them very specific and measurable . . . but don’t set too many.

The whole idea of goal setting is to give your life focus and direction. Don’t spread yourself too thin, or try to go in too many directions at once.

Just make sure that you are operating with a sense of purpose, in both your personal and your business life.

If you come to work and put in your eight to ten hours, you may as well make productive use of it. It’s easy to sit around for six hours or so, talking about how frustrating the merger is, and how things used to be, then scrambling to get your work done in the last two or three hours. That’s not uncommon at all. But it can add to your personal stress load.