We authored new leadership expectations and an assessment framework during a merger of two equal-sized companies, accelerating integration and reinforcing a unified identity with employees and customers.
Client Profile
A global healthcare technology company with $17B in revenue
Challenge
When two industry giants in healthcare—each with distinct business models and cultures—merged, the risk wasn’t just operational. It was cultural rejection.
One company operated at the high end of the medical technology spectrum—complex, high-risk, and premium-priced products. The other sold critical but lower-margin medical supplies to the same hospital systems. While the merger made sense on paper, leaders feared that cultural misalignment would lead to retention issues, poor integration, and failure to realize the expected economic value.
Insight
Although both organizations served the same customer base, they approached that work through very different lenses—shaped by risk profile, pricing model, and technical complexity.
The real threat wasn’t that the merger would fail structurally. It was that one culture would dominate the other, and employees wouldn’t feel a sense of shared ownership in the new enterprise.
To prevent value loss, leadership needed to build a unifying culture—one that honored the best of both legacies while defining a new standard for how leaders would show up and collaborate.
Solution
ExecLead partnered with the executive teams of both organizations to lead a culture integration effort grounded in leadership alignment.
What we did:
Facilitated deep listening and discovery sessions with leaders from both companies to identify core cultural values and practices worth preserving
Co-created a new set of leadership expectations that reflected the shared identity of the combined company
Aligned the new leadership framework with the company’s new global brand so that both employees and the market experienced a consistent message
Delivered rollout and reinforcement strategies to ensure the leadership expectations became embedded across the organization
By linking leadership behaviors to brand identity, we created a coherent, unifying narrative that accelerated integration.
Impact
Culture didn’t become a barrier to value. It became a driver of it.
The new leadership expectations helped reinforce the brand promise by providing leaders with a shared playbook for how to operate in the new organization.
The result was a highly successful merger, with the combined company nearly doubling their overall revenue since the acquisition. They retained top talent, avoided culture clashes, and delivered on the strategic and financial goals of the deal.