Publications

Just last year, companies spent $4.7 trillion dollars on Mergers & Acquisitions.

Despite the hefty investments, HBR calculated that 70% to 90% of M&A deals fail.

As you might know by now, I've been in the driver's seat of two M&As in my career. One when Wanadoo merged with Orange UK and the second when Venda Group was acquired by Netsuite. These were extremely difficult situations to deal with, both on a personal and a professional level. It looked much easier on paper.

I'd like to point your attention to two studies I recently read from Deloitte and PwC:

1. The first one shows that by a wide margin, post-deal integration is the most important concern for directors and CFOs

2. The second shows that companies capture most of value from M&A by focusing on people integration

The common denominator: people.

This echoes my previous article on change management which you can read below:

During a merger or an acquisition, I remember people commonly asking questions like: will I fit with the new company's culture, do I see myself staying at this new company, what am I going to be doing now, who will I refer to, will my project still get the funding it requires, will I get fired...?

These are all legitimate questions, but if you look closely these are not actual technical questions. They just reveal how people are worried, stressed, have doubts and feel lost.

I love this quote from Crucial Conversations (https://itun.es/us/g2DTD.l), a book that I highly recommend :

“[...] when Grandma served an enormous wedge of her famous Brussel-Sprout Pie à la mode then ask[ed], “Do you like it?”—she really meant: “Do you like me?”

When people ask about who their new boss will be, they don't really care about the specific answer to that question. What they really want to know is if they will continue to belong, feel valued and essential to their team.

When I look back at my time at Wanadoo, I wish everyone could have had the same support as I did with my executive coach. He kept me grounded, focusing on what's next and always with as much confidence as possible in the future merger!

Don't take it for granted: Minorities need support

I came up with the idea for this post following a great conversation with our fantastic coach, Graciela Meibar, who specializes in managing diversity and inclusion in large organizations.

Diversity and inclusion are now key components of a company's culture. They have made their way into most training programs and recruitment guidelines, becoming essential discussion points in organizational conversations.

There are countless studies that have proven the direct correlation between diversity, inclusion and financial performance.

Cornell University found that diversity in teams can boost teamwork and creativity, for example.

A McKinsey study found that:

• gender-diverse companies are 15% more likely to outperform their peers

• ethnically-diverse companies are 35% more likely to outperform their peers

Building gender and ethnically diverse companies implies building a culture where minorities are accepted as they are, can communicate freely, feel valued and supported as much, if not more than their colleagues.

The reason I say more is because if you look at the simple difference in confidence levels between women and men in the workplace:

• Men think they deserve $80,000 a year and the women $64,000—or 20 percent less.

• Women working at HP applied for a promotion only when they believed they met 100 percent of the qualifications listed for the job. Men were happy to apply when they thought they could meet 60 percent of the job requirements.

Now don't get me wrong, embracing diversity and inclusion is not easy. It takes strong leadership and commitment. To be successful, the company needs to set long-term, ambitious, diversity and inclusion goals, which is no small task.

Nevertheless, there are initial steps you can take immediately. Showing adequate support within your organization to all minorities is a great start!

At Spot.coach, we work with companies to provide the best support to the development and professional growth of all minorities. Spot.coach can create more open, transparent communication where everyone is able to share their differences and stories, without fear of judgement, where trust isn't a goal but a state of mind.

The Effects of SPOT.COACH

Here we are, after a year of testing and a beta started in October we’re excited to share with you some of our results. While measuring the performance of coaching can be difficult, we decided to have a very simple approach to performance by dividing our feedback into 2 parts: service quality and coaching effectiveness.

1/ Service Quality

Here are the two metrics I am most excited about:

Net Promoter Score which shows how much people loved their experience and how likely they are to recommend our product. These sessions can get very emotional which is in part why I think people like to talk about it with friends and family.

Coach Rating which is one of Spot.coach’s biggest bet. We believe that if we only select the best coaches, then coach matching is less important than high availability. An average 5/5 star rating shows coachees validate this idea and that our vetting process allows us to select only the best!

2/ Coaching Effectiveness

Even though measuring how effective the coaching was is difficult for the coachee we came up with 3 key indicators that best define the sensation coachees should experience.

Relief

Most of our coachees feel very stressed before their session. It is often what pushes them to book the session — they want to talk to someone as soon as possible. Making sure that we alleviate this stress is paramount in making the coaching effective. Our initial tests show that their stress level was reduced by 77% which I am very proud of.

Confidence

Feeling overwhelmed gives us poor confidence in our capacity to address the issues at hand or succeed in our role. We were amazed by the 90% increase in our coachees' confidence level.

Clarity

This is a personal favorite. A big part of Spot.coach is making the 1-hour conversation actionable - meaning that after about 45min we start discussing potential solutions to the issue raised during the session. This can be scheduling a meeting with a manager for example. Coachees rated the clarity of next steps at 83%. We’re going to be aiming for 100% but in a simple 1-hour session I think it’s something to be excited about.

3/ Other interesting comments & statisticsAverage rating per session → 91%

Calculated based on the average of all of the different metrics measured.

Feedback

"Really great and focused conversation on the topic I suggested. Meaningful time and suggestions on where to go next. Great experience — thanks so much!"

We’re excited to be launching out of beta next week with 2 major companies who have over 3,000 employees. It's an exciting time for coaching and more specifically spot.coaching which is bringing flexibility and scalability to traditional executive coaching.

This anonymized story happened while I was running Wanadoo. I think it best shows the need for people to have difficult conversations early on to prevent a minor issue from blowing out of proportion. This weakens trust, confidence and performance in teams and organizations.

John is an Associate and David is his manager.

It starts with a small interruption

The trigger

John is in a meeting with David, his manager, and other colleagues. David asks about about a recent counter-performance of the team. John speaks up — but is abruptly interrupted by David. John is upset.

Every small detail adds to the fire

Over-analysis of people’s action + conflict becomes a distraction

The next day, David ignores John as he passes by in the hallway. Minutes later, he overhears Rupert, a colleague, joking about yesterday’s football game with David. What had he done? John feels that David’s has something against him. He spends the afternoon trying to trace this back to an incident rather than spending time on his presentation for next Monday. Was it the maybe too direct answer last week? The report which came in late two weeks ago?

Negative feedback feels unfair

John feels unfairly targeted

On Fridays, David typically wants to see a draft of John’s deck ahead of his weekly presentation. It’s usually just a formality, but that week David wrote back: “ok. Would add a section on market segmentation — otherwise pls kill slides 16, 23, and 25–30”. He now has to work on the week-end for his Monday presentation. John is convinced that his presentation is as good as his previous ones and feels like he is being punished. “David has no right to make me come in on week-ends”.

Starts to feel isolated

Paranoia

After a Saturday morning spent at the office working on fixing his slides, John gives a mediocre presentation — without the usual drive, smiles and enthusiasm. The audience isn’t very responsive. John now thinks everyone has something against him and that’s all because of David. Surely he’s been talking behind his back. John feels left out.

Gossiping starts

Social validation & gossiping

After a long stressful week, John goes out for lunch with his friends Daniel and Patrick who work in other departements of the company. He talks to them about how David has been behaving around him all-while favouring Rupert. “Haven’t you noticed?”. Daniel and Patrick hadn’t thought of David that way but agree with John by connecting isolated events they also experienced. The word begins to spread, gossiping starts.

The Conversation

Resolution through a simple conversation

Monthly reviews arrive a week later. David asks John about his disappointing performance over the past month. He can often see him slacking off and would like him to be as focused and pro-active as before. “You are a pillar of this team. I can’t let you drift away like this, I need you. I want to help but I need to know what’s been going on with you first”. John can’t believe what he’s hearing. “But David, you’ve completely cut me out for the past month!”

During their conversation, John will understand that over the past month, David was focusing his attention on Rupert, a new team member who had been struggling. David knew he could trust John so he didn’t make any efforts to be supportive — he hadn’t felt the need to. John realizes his mistake and apologizes. David does the same.

This entire episode cost the company thousands of dollars — in stress, conflict, company culture (rumors), time, motivation, work quality and productivity. All of that solved by a simple conversation. At spot.coach we believe that we can enable those conversations by allowing employees like John to have immediate access to a neutral coach to address stress and conflict, hence preventing him from allowing it to grow out of proportion.

We built a conflict & stress cost calculator on our website. How much is your yearly loss?

The 5 main challenges of an internal spot.coaching program

As coaching becomes increasingly popular, leading companies like Intel have decided to develop spot.coaching programs with their internal coaches in order to support a greater amount of employees. You know how much I value any effort towards enabling more people to benefit from coaching. However here are the 5 challenges I believe need to be overcome for internal spot.coaching programs to be successful...

Read the full article on Medium >

#OrganizationalChange

Navigating organizational change is a tricky task so it is no surprise that, according to McKinsey & Company, one in three change programs fail.

Employees are always reluctant to change, as it implies reshaping their habits and stepping out of their comfort zone. Yet change is inevitable for companies wanting to stay competitive. So how can companies successfully implement their change program?

Leading change in organizations has been at the heart of my career. It was both exciting and challenging. Changing processes and structures, and abandoning an iconic brand when transforming Freeserve into Wanadoo were an immense task. Still, our most difficult project was to have people embrace the new culture. Individuals in newly-formed teams will lose their support network, having to build new relationships and trust with co-workers and managers. They will generally feel alone and in need of someone with whom to share their thoughts and concerns.

Read my piece on trust and communication in organizations --> Why bean bags and yoga classes are like duct tape on a wall crack

Talent management teams are well aware of the stress this creates for employees and are at the forefront of helping everyone through these unsettling times. Being already swamped by multiple priorities, they have to resort to less interactive support mediums like books, e-learning tools or workshops. But will watching a video really address their personal concerns? Under a stressful situation, people simply need to talk to someone who can help them navigate this difficult phase.

Organizational change revolves around people and needs to be addressed as such.

My personal experience leading change has helped me understand the potentially negative effects change had on people. I remember employees (the bravest!) coming to me at night trying to find answers and feel confident about the company's plan. Looking back, a 1-hour sit down with a professional coach would have avoided many doubts and stress preventing us from quickly adopting the new changes.

The next time you launch a new product, form a new team, reorganize a division, acquire a company or simply appoint a new manager: consider the people and try spot.coaching.

#EmployeeHappiness

Want your employees to be happier? According to blogs and major news outlets: Get them to start their workday with a yoga class, play ping-pong during breaks and eat free healthy snacks.

Initially popular among Silicon Valley start-ups and high-growth technology companies, these benefits aim to reduce employee stress, which contributes to better overall satisfaction and enhanced productivity.

But here’s a question: Can employee happiness be reduced to these trendy benefits?

In a recent study, Harvard Business Review investigates what constitutes employee satisfaction. While the above-mentioned methods boost employees’ short-term happiness, the authors claim that long-lasting effects require a very different yet simpler approach: build trust between colleagues. Based on Gallup’s analysis which shows that high engagement leads to better outcomes for individuals and organizations, they argue that building trust in a company is what makes a meaningful difference on employee productivity, stress and overall happiness. It therefore seems that rather than eating company-provided snacks on bean bags, people are just looking for trust with their colleagues and managers.

Communication is the cement for your crackling wall.

The most innovative companies understand that employee happiness will result from the implementation of trust in their organization; and achieving this requires building open and transparent communication. It is therefore no surprise that Intel has developed an internal spot.coaching program to do so, and if you are serious about employee happiness in your organization, I believe you should too.

On my first day as CFO of Freeserve, 15 years ago, I was assigned a professional coach by the Board of Directors. I was unfamiliar with the practice hence sceptical at the beginning - but after my first session I remember this dual feeling of both being amazed by the experience and the value of coaching, as well as regretting not having discovered the practice earlier in my career.

15 years later and after the sale of Venda to Netsuite (Oracle) I decided to study coaching at the Hudson Institute in California.

There is nothing new about the benefits of coaching. In fact, Bill Gates and Eric Schmidt famously said "everyone needs a coach". Professional coaching is widely recognized as the best way for executives to become better leaders and create more open and productive organizations. What struck me however was how few people benefited from the practice.

While studying at the Hudson Institute of Coaching, I also realized how powerful just one hour session could be to provide clarity and help to make a decision or engage in a difficult conversation. Over the last twelve months, I met numerous executives and organisations to describe my vision. Not only most of them shared my enthusiasm but an increasing number of high growth companies start using these 1-to-1 coaching sessions with their internal coaches to resolve workplace stress and conflict. The goal is to provide the employee with quick, focused and actionable solutions to address a specific issue during a powerful "One problem, one hour" session.

The deeper I dove into the world of spot.coaching, the more confident I was that spot.coaching is the solution to enabling organizations to offer the benefits of coaching to all their employees.

Spot.coach is an affordable, easy to set up and commitment-light solution that enables organization to start implementing spot.coaching techniques to make their teams more open, productive and creative, today.

I'm very excited about the impact that spot.coach can have in organizations around the world. Feel free to get in touch: eric@spot.coach.