An Energy Company Maintains Its Cultural Spark amid Multiple Acquisitions

EnergyCo*, a leading services provider in the energy sector, recently acquired several competitors, doubling its size and adding 6,000 employees. Historically, EnergyCo’s culture had been a differentiating asset: a driver of growth, a source of pride within the community, and a hallmark of how work got done. But its expansion raised a critical question: Could that culture scale? We partnered with EnergyCo to identify the strengths of its distinctive culture and embed them across its expanded footprint. Equally important, we helped the team pinpoint where the culture needed to evolve to meet the new realities of greater scale and complexity in the business. 

Preserving and protecting what works

In many companies, the culture is something that is experienced and lived but often isn’t carefully considered or documented. To discover which elements were essential to preserve and protect, we first needed to establish a clear understanding of the current culture. Together, we built a comprehensive diagnostic using our “cultural fault lines” approach to spotlight areas of alignment (and friction) that can emerge during business integrations. The diagnostic included:

• More than 80 interviews across all levels of both legacy and acquired teams
• A memo capturing key cultural dynamics and how they showed up for various employee populations or people of various tenures
• Insights into how the culture was enabling or constraining the company’s evolving strategy

We identified key behaviors that served EnergyCo well as a smaller company but that created complexity within a larger organization. For example, as companies grow, where decision-making sits often needs to shift; final decisions that once escalated to the C-suite increasingly need to be delegated to leaders and teams, with clear decision rights and accountability. In that context, a consensus-driven decision-making approach that worked in the past may be less effective at a larger scale. 

With this foundation in place, we cocreated a cultural vision aligned with the business strategy. Through a workshop that included C-suite executives along with key leaders from across the company, we defined what to preserve and protect and what needed to evolve. From there, a detailed cultural initiative roadmap turned aspiration into action. This included hands-on workshops with employees from different teams, levels, and lengths of service to talk through new ways of working and communicating, and focused efforts to reshape the culture in the areas that mattered most.

Anchored in strengths, but geared for change

By the end of our engagement with EnergyCo, the leadership team agreed upon the strengths and challenges of their current culture and were keenly aware of the components they needed to adjust to meet the demands of a larger, more complex business. Leaders launched coordinated efforts around these priorities, maintaining flexibility so that the culture could continue to adapt as the organization settled into its new operating reality. And perhaps most importantly, they knew how to talk about their culture to people who were joining, either as new hires or part of an acquisition, ensuring that all employees were set up for success.