Choreographing Cultural Integration After a Major Merger

After a major merger, leadership faced the challenge of bringing together employees spread across regions, offices, and distinct cultures. On paper, the deal made sense. In practice, it threatened to pull people apart. Without a clear roadmap, the risks were high: attrition, disengagement, siloed decision-making, and operational breakdown. What was needed wasn’t just a structural integration, but a cultural one.

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Andes’ Role

We designed an integration roadmap that aligned leadership, clarified priorities, and choreographed key milestones. But roadmaps alone don’t build trust. Beyond process, we facilitated cultural integration by:

• Naming the differences directly, rather than letting them fester.

• Surfacing the unspoken dynamics — the tensions, loyalties, and fears that sat just below the surface.

• Helping leaders create a shared identity that honored the past while making space for the future.

We treated integration less like a mechanical exercise and more like a relationship: something that required honesty, curiosity, and deliberate choreography to succeed.

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The Outcome

Engagement stabilized, turnover risk dropped, and teams began to operate as one system. The organization moved from fragmentation to cohesion, from suspicion to trust. It didn’t just merge on paper; it built a culture strong enough to sustain growth at scale.

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The Bigger Picture

Mergers often fail not because of structure, but because of relationships. Spreadsheets can merge in a day; people can’t. Integration only works when leaders are willing to name what’s difficult, surface the unspoken, and build a new shared identity together. That’s the real work of scaling: not just aligning strategy, but building the connective tissue that allows it to hold.