My Company was Sold! How to Survive and Thrive
Renee Rogers has managed through several large acquisitions as VP of Human Resources and VP of Leadership and Organizational Development at Zimmer Biomet, Zimmer, and Sulzer Orthopedics. In this episode we discuss the human side of an acquisition and how to handle it and thrive amongst the uncertainty and chaos. We discuss who makes the decisions, personnel choice, timing of decisions, culture clashes and how to deal with them, what you can do if you find yourself in this situation, what leaders should do, and how you have more leverage than you may think.
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Episode Transcript
This transcript was generated using an automated transcription service and is minimally edited. Please forgive the mistakes contained within it.
Patrick Kothe 00:31
Welcome. Well, if you stay in the medical device field long enough, your company is either going to be sold merged, or your company is going to buy another company. This is often great for long term success of companies, but it's going to most likely cause some short term pain and anxiety for the people within. Today we're going to look from the inside at two big deals in the orthopedic space, the Zimmer acquisition of Centerpulse orthopedics, and the Zimmer acquisition of Biomet. We're not going to focus on strategy, product line synergies, finance, or any of the other business reasons for mergers and acquisitions. What we're going to focus on is the people. If you've been involved in one of these, you know what I'm talking about? How is this situation going to affect me? Is this a positive or a negative for me? Is my pay going to change? What about my title? Who am I going to be reporting to? What's the culture of the new company? What's the organization going to look like post merger or post acquisition? Joining me to discuss the issue is Rene Rodgers. Renee has been in the medical device industry for 27 years. And what's really unique about her is that her resume has several companies listed, but it's really only been one entity that's changed name several times due to acquisitions. She began her medical device career at inter medics orthopedics, which was subsequently bought by Sulzer becoming Sulzer orthopedics, then the name was changed the center pulse orthopedics. Then the company was purchased by Zimmer, who then purchased biomed. So Renee has been with one entity but a lot of different iterations of that entity. Renee was vice president of human resources for the hermetic Sulzer center pulse company, as well as the VP of global human resources for Zimmer, then the Vice President of leadership and organization development for Zimmer Biomet, she's got some great insights into the process, and how to survive and thrive when the waves are high, and the boat is rockin. Here's our conversation. Renee, you've had a very successful career in medical device and organizational development through human resource management. How did it all get started?
Renee Rogers 03:10
I was kind of late to it. I didn't. I had a career for 10 years teaching English as a second language, and mostly in Asia. I lived abroad for over five years and then went to graduate school, I was going to get a PhD and foreign language education and I changed my major to adult learning in the workplace. So that that turned out to be Human Resource Development, organization development. And my first job. Well, my first job was at a utility, big utility. But I got recruited into a little startup company named inner medics orthopedics, it was less than 100 million, had the original startup group leadership group about a year in. They were purchased by a Swiss owned medical device saucer, medica, which wanted the orthopedic business, their approach to mergers to the acquisition, which I've subsequently learned was very Swiss, very European, was they were very hands off, they pretty much let the companies run, didn't try to combine them with any of the European operations. I'd say the first 10 years until we had the big acquisition 2003. With Zimmer, I think we ran pretty independently as standalone medical device companies. And it was really about growth from within. And there actually wasn't that much interaction between the other medical device companies in South America either. I was hired as a training and development learning specialist. It was a time when the company was bringing quality. They're trying to build quality systems. They hire Crosby, if you remember the early classic Crosby days, and they and the head of HR pet dx felt like she wanted a Learning specialists because she didn't feel like the training was that strong. And so she knew me through UT. And she recruited me. I worked with the factory, we had a lot of issues in the early days. How do we know that the people in the factory were really qualified, because we didn't have real standards around graduation, high school or literacy standards. And they decided that they wanted to empower those workgroups. In doing that, they felt like they needed to teach them how to work, teamwork, and they needed to teach them how to measure things better, and how to document things. So I was working with the supervisors designing curriculum on teaching these workshops, and they did pretest. And they hit post tests, and people weren't passing their tests. And so they were really puzzled as to what was going on. After many conversations, we started wondering, well, maybe they can't read the test. Maybe the people in the factories, literacy wasn't that high. And because I had a background in adult education, I actually brought in different methodologies for assessing literacy and math competencies, it turned out to be a real cultural program, because it didn't make people feel very safe to learn, they're going to have to take a test about whether they could read or write. So we did assess everyone. And we found out that we had a lot of people who didn't have high school graduation level, either literacy or math level skills, we actually brought in a cert a silver self directed, individually individual learning lab in the factory where people will come at night, and they would take these classes, you know, self directed classes to improve their reading. So those are the early days. But what so what happened was all that I was working with learning, but it was really about organization development, it was about what kind of people do you bring in? How do you bring them in in a way that integrates them? How do you orient them so that they can work in this, this greater team environment? So then I sort of migrated over to new product development. And you know, we didn't actually have a project management system. So I was, I was doing a lot of work with managers, frontline managers, around defining the processes for how we were going to not only understand what new products we needed, but how are we going to develop those, and then how are we going to make them I was doing that for quite a while for a number of years. And one of the Presidents we had Jerry MARLAR, when he was hired, he was a very big vision guy, he was a he was very big into doing vision. And so we did a massive project to establish purpose mission values for the company all in the service of taking us beyond 100 million in revenue. And so I played a facilitative role in that. And that led me into facilitating the strategic planning process. And so I got a new all the guys at the top, and they were all guys, except for the head of HR. And then she got cancer and died. They said, you know, in those days, medical device weren't that sophisticated about HR. And they said, Well, we know Renee, maybe she can do it. And I said, I'm not actually an HR person, I'm an od person. That's really that's a very different skill set, we agreed that I would head up HR on an interim basis. So I kind of fell into HR really through the back door. It's very unusual for someone to come into top HR leadership roles from an od background. So I started heading up HR. And I always did HR from an organization development perspective. And it was in the early days. So it was a lot about building the basic systems for hiring people for understanding what do you need are the systems for recruiting talent for bringing them in, that was always a big deal. But also performance management, system present or succession planning, or team building, which you needed all the time, or quality training systems, all those kinds of things. So that that was what HR was very much about in those early days. And you build up from the bottom up if you don't have it. That 2001 we had the terrible recall, we had the hip terrible hip failure, which actually occurred because they made some changes in the manufacturing process. From a whole lot of pressure from the European corporate organization. And competition, honestly, that was set up about where was it cheaper and better to make product. They made some changes and it caused a failure. And as you remember, it really caused the whole corporation to be at risk financially. I'm always proud, though, of the way the situation was handled, because the priority was always how do we make sure that we have money to fix the problem for the individual patient So there was a huge process set in place to make sure that people could get the part taken out the new input in and that all that was covered and paid for. And that was a long process and very hard on people. That was I said, that experience taught not only me, but everybody what quality meant.
Patrick Kothe 10:22
Yeah, as I recall that I was in assisted division at that point, Carbo medics a heartfelt decision. I think we had already divested the pacemaker division out of that was the first to
Renee Rogers 10:33
go, I think you're right, right. Right, right.
Patrick Kothe 10:34
But at that point, we are all up for sale. And then point again, to fund this billion dollar lawsuit that occurred, what I thought was done very well was the openness of the company to share information, the openness of the company to accept responsibility for it. And then the patient first added towards it, there was some really good things that occurred during that time in a very drastically bad time for patients. Yes, it revealed a lot of character about the people, and
Renee Rogers 11:08
it did and then also, you know, you don't stop, you have to kind of you have to rebuild your systems after something like that. So even if you're going to get sold, you still go forward. So the The reason we were so attractive to to acquire was we were in a really good business. And the quality systems that we built up were really wrote best. And so we were really a good company, by the time we got bought by the financial finances, you know, made it not possible to continue.
Patrick Kothe 11:40
Yeah. And as I recall, it was a manufacturing issue that was going on was how the hips dam was cleaned. cleaning process was changed, right in the head some day
Renee Rogers 11:52
where they were bringing something that had been outsourced and and First, we were going to be bought by Smith and Nephew. Do you remember that? So for six months, it was more, it was more of a backroom deal, and that I think the European owners really preferred a European owned company to purchase them. So there was a lot of agreement that the best purchaser would be Smith and Nephew, and so actually was on the team that was sent to Memphis and we mapped everything out what the acquisition was going to be like, what the process is really like I was actually offered the job to be head of HR. And I had my daughter in school and I went in to the project management office every week, I and other people traveled there. And one day I walked in, and the project manager pulls out this piece of paper from a yahoo news report, and it says hostile takeover. Zimmer is moving forward. And so I said, What does this mean? And they said, I think it means you need to go home. Oh, so anyway, I went home and I just essentially like everybody waiting. Then a couple of months. I did get a call from wait Ray Elliot, Rene. Yes. Who are you come to Warsaw, Warsaw. And of course, you remember when the acquisition was published in the Austin American statesman. It said that Zimmer from Warsaw, Poland has purchased. It actually said Poland. So what he said come to Warsaw, and it wasn't sure what he was talking about. But a bit worse idea, of course. And so I went up and it's a big cultural shift to go from Texas. I'm a native Texan to Warsaw, Indiana. Everything about it is different. But the president of the company is this at that time, said he was going to go up and he kind of convinced me to go with him. He He subsequently Two months later called me and said, I'm not going to stay there. That's it. What are you talking about? You've already got me up here.
Patrick Kothe 13:58
We're all free agent.
Renee Rogers 14:00
But you've never you don't count on anybody saying they're gonna follow through all that. But anyway, so I did go up and it was a it was an acquisition in the real sense of the word and that the agenda was really driven almost completely by Detmer. They had a very, very strong plan. They had a whole infrastructure for really integrating the company, which included shutting down the Austin factory. It was quite a process. And believe it or not, I mean zipper itself had only spun off from Bristol Myers Squibb a few years before. So the truth is, they had no nobody had any HR systems. They didn't have any HR systems. We were primitive and very similar ways. The good news is that we didn't have to take anything apart. We really built from scratch. And so when I say built from scratch, I mean, compensation systems set ways to give out starts to people Globally benefits designed, redesigned, they had very rich Bristol, pharmaceutical era benefits that would have bankrupted the whole thing if they extended it all too. So we had to redo the whole structure for, for benefits, the pension schemes, they had a pension we didn't, that was the first three years then we had them, we then we could finally move to things like performance management and succession planning. And even five years after that learning management systems,
Patrick Kothe 15:30
we're gonna we're gonna dig into some of those issues in detail in a couple minutes. But that was your first big acquisition. That one was 2003, it was a $3 billion acquisition, the combined company had 6500 employees that can combined entity at that point in time was $2.6 billion in revenue. And at that point, there were several publications that rated that as a healthcare deal of the year. So that was a that was a big deal. At that point in time. Several years later, as you were still also VP of HR at Zimmer, you acquired Biomet,
Renee Rogers 16:17
actually, I wasn't VP of HR at that time, it was it was actually quite a few years later. So it was 2015. Yeah. And in 2009, my family didn't want to live in Indiana anymore. And I was kind of done doing HR. I mean, I did it, I loved it. But it wasn't really where my heart and passion was. My passion was really around od and leadership development and learning and development. I went to David devorah, who was the president and said, first of all, I think you need it, I think you need an HR person, really, that comes from HR. I'm a home grown version of it. And I had a very good relationship with and we work together collaboratively for many years, I respected him a lot. And I said out loud, let's let's try to find my replacement. And I'm in no hurry, it'll take as long as it takes. Let's upgrade, you know, upgrade me, you could you could get someone who comes from a big company, we got someone from GE, who really knows big company HR. I'll stick around, I'll even report to that person. Because guess what, there's a whole lot of work to be done building learning and development here. I had to have a lot more energy to do that. And oh, by the way, can I move back to Awesome? And yeah, you can do that. So I did what I really advise people to do if you can target your job, just ask for another one. And if it's a demotion, so what if that's the job you want to do? You know what I mean? And that's the way to stay alive. As I say 27 years with a company, that was no way in the same job. And I wouldn't have done HR for that long. So anyway, yeah, in 2009, I was back in Austin, Austin 2015, they acquired. And by that time, I was firmly entrenched in learning and development, leadership development. But the big issue was culture. So we had a lot of systems that needed to be modified. But it wasn't the same thing where you were building systems from scratch. It was more really you had two companies with very, very different cultures, how are you going to bring those together?
Patrick Kothe 18:28
Let's just stop here for a second and talk about the two companies. So he has Zimmer, and you have biomed. And at that point, they were two very large companies on their own. And they're big rivals,
Renee Rogers 18:39
I mean, yes,
Patrick Kothe 18:40
competitors, right, similar products, you're gonna have a lot of things that needed to be integrated together. So that was a $14 billion acquisition, and it was an acquisition, it was more of a merger than right, then then the center pulse one, and we'll kind of get into that in a minute. But that was 14 billion combined 18,000 employees, and now combined $6 billion in revenue. So this was a big deal within within the medical device space in 2015. And, once again, you've got all of these things, right? coming together, right? So without kind of getting into into the real specifics yet. Let's let's talk about some of the issues and how you approach these acquisitions because some companies are being bought some people, some companies are buying something. But when you go to merge these two groups together, there are certain things that need to get merged product lines and regulatory systems and quality systems and all our assets. But from an overall standpoint, it's its leadership, and how are you going to structure the company And who's going to stay and who's going to go and who's really going to merge all that stuff at which is more of an organizational development, more of an HR function. So let's kind of kind of start at the top here for a second. In these situations, who makes the decisions on the top level, the leadership level, what happens
Renee Rogers 20:22
in the case of the two acquisitions I've been a part of it was the very top presidents have a huge say, they obviously have to get buy in from their boards. So they have to make a case that their proposal makes sense. They usually have their closest colleagues and advisors, the finance guys usually super involved. Each each executive on the existing team of the acquiring team, and then they start meeting with the executives of the acquired team. And then there's this negotiation. And I will tell you, the biggest problem is relatively objective information, because people only know what they know. So I know in the case of the Zimmer Biomet, depending on who was the executive that was chosen, they knew their own people way better than they knew the other side's people. Some leaders are better than others about really being curious, and really trying to understand, especially when it's so big. So if you take something like sales, it was Biomet executives who were at the top, and now you're talking about distributorships, all over the country, that's a big job to get to know, both sides. And when I say get to know, they also have to be comfortable with them, they have to trust them, they Baba. So I would say pretty much the biomat side stayed in place, except in regions, where you already had a big problem where they had a big problem. That's just human nature, right? That's just how it goes. And then they learn over time, there's a lot of pragmatism in how those decisions get made. So the very top team that you put together is crucial.
Patrick Kothe 22:03
I can recall in my career, we were merged into another division at that point, I was director of sales for the US. And we were merged into another division, there was another director of sales in the US and and we're going to be one Salesforce, and I was not going to be leaving Salesforce, he was going to because we were we were being in essence shut down and merged into into their group, it was extremely frustrating from my side, because I had to advocate for all of the people that were reporting to me. And every decision down the line was my guys better. And from his side, every decision, my guys better, we're gonna have to let your guy go. And it was extremely frustrating, because he wasn't a curious person, he wasn't looking at it. From a holistic standpoint, it was my guys,
Renee Rogers 22:55
let's be honest, I mean, they have allegiance to their guys, I mean, they, they have bad relationships, you know, decision making around personnel, hugely influenced by the relationship that people have. And we all we all are selective in our perceptions. And and the information that we pay attention to, I will say the top team was very, it was 5050, a little bit, maybe 6040 biomed. So David, actually went out of his way to actually pull together a team that was representative of the two companies, but that those executives represented a huge body of people where decisions had to be made, right? So that
Patrick Kothe 23:39
you can have the best intentions at the top, and you can influence those top decisions, but it has to filter down all the way through an organ organization. So as someone who's in charge of organizational development or HR at the at the other other thing, how do you get involved in helping people make those decisions?
Renee Rogers 23:59
You know, HR is especially the second one, absolutely at the table. Certainly I was at the table, after, you know, the executive team was was put together interested. It's a challenging role in HR. The real power in HR comes from your consultative capabilities. Rarely does HR have the power to unilaterally say you're going to do this, you're going to do that we do have our systems that we build up, and we have ways of evaluating levels at which people should be qualified to work. But in all cases, it's ultimately pretty subjective. And you're just helping managers make good decisions, fully conscious of the long term implications of that decision. Inevitably they'll make a decision that affects the short term, right because, okay, maybe this isn't the best person but we absolutely can't lose this person right now. Or Maybe we shouldn't pay him that much. But there's no way they're going to stay otherwise. And so you make those compromises all the time, HR needs to be making them fully aware of the consequences of those decisions, and not allowing them to be painful. You know what I mean? Sure, because the reality is that pragmatics often plays into it. And you have to understand you're on a learning journey, you'll work with it as a consultant to a manager. And they'll make this decision. And then I'll make the same decision again, each time gradually learning a lesson that if they only pay attention to this aspect of the situation, they're going to inevitably have other aspects, I mean, compensations a good one, if you pay this person above market, because they are absolutely indispensable, and you can't live without them. When you try to hire your next person, you're gonna have problems. And then when you hire your third person, you're gonna have problems. So don't allow people to make these decisions without understanding all the consequences.
Patrick Kothe 26:09
So you mentioned that you got levels of compensation and levels of people. And a lot of times when you bring companies together, a director at one company is a VP at a different level, or vice versa. So leveling companies as you're bringing him in, not only with that type of level, but also compensation levels, I'm sure is also a challenge. How do I deal with that?
Renee Rogers 26:32
Well, first, you have to have a system. And that is the job of HR to create the original system, and the system is, so it's a logical construct. And it is informed by research on the value of any given job in a marketplace, you might have to play pay a clinical person more than you're going to pay an entry level engineer just because that particular job pays more in the market. So you build a system of levels. What I learned is keep it really broad. And don't try to get overly left brain details. Create large categories that allow you to research the value of jobs in the marketplace, create a broad set of categories around qualifications, if you will, you know you and you have to get consensus is education important. You know, this was a big, always a big issue in medical device companies. Because you have a lot of technical engineering types, you don't have an engineering degree. But then if you don't want make engineering degree, your entry level requirement, you have problems later on. So you get broad consensus around what really matters in terms of the qualifications of people. And then you use that in your consultative process, when you have a person to try to slop people. And it has to be done in collaboration with leaders, because if they don't get to collaborate, they will never accept it. And all the time you're trying to help them understand that it doesn't serve you to overpay somebody. And it certainly doesn't pay you serve you to unders pay someone. So you've got to have a way to be tracking all this internal equity. I mean, the whole reason you have systems, internal equity is a huge problem always, nobody ever thinks it's fair because life isn't fair. But unless you have some system that gives you a rationale for why you're going to give this person 50% more stock options that you're going to give somebody else, you're going to really have problems communicating that you are a company that cares about fairness, and that cares about compensating people in a way that that is fair,
Patrick Kothe 28:53
let's dig into communications a little bit, because there's so much there is Communications at the outset, when a company is the rumors start that a company is being sold. Right? And and then there's the period of time when you know you're being sold. And I can tell you if you know from experience, when it's announced you're being sold, budgets are slashed, you are you know, just taking everything down to the bone so you can look attractive to a buyer and motivation starts to wane. People start to you know, check out mentally because they don't know what's going on. So there's kind of a two edged sword with you need to communicate. But when you communicate, there's repercussions to that. So how do you deal with that and that phase, that communication?
Renee Rogers 29:42
Yeah, that's a real. I mean, there's a real art to that. And of course, at the end of the day, you have your formal communications, but they fall short of the actual communication of frontline leaders and people who are heading up teams and often They don't know, they have to what they have to say is I don't know, because they haven't been told either. First of all, I think you have to be as honest as you can, I think organizations need to be more courageous about being honest about either Adam, we don't know. Or it's premature to talk about this. And just say that, rather than just go into silence, what you want of your managers is even in the context of not knowing to be able to communicate optimism and positive messages, not necessarily about the outcome, collectively, but about the outcome for individuals. So you know, I always say, I, all the people I worked with were eminently employable. And whatever happened to them, they went on to a better thing, just as good or better. So, you know, it's not like you're talking about people who are living without a home, under the bridge, you're talking about people who have absolutely real sellable, important skills. But if they, but if they insist that it's going to hit, they're going to have to be applied in a very narrow way, they're never going to be happy managers can communicate how much they believe in people and how confident they are, that everybody's going to get through this. We can't say exactly what it's gonna look like on the other end, and HR needs to do that, too. You know, HR kind of goes around looking depressed, but honestly, five years from now, you're not going to regret it, I guarantee you,
Patrick Kothe 31:34
uncertainty and change is managed, individually better in some people than others. And that, and that's one of the things that really kind of drives that issue that people have when they're demotivated or they're, they're anxious, because they don't know what's going to happen. And
Renee Rogers 31:53
if a manager is anxious, I mean, that is tough, they spread that anxiety to everybody. And so you know, that's why I've always said, You've really got to work on managers, you've got to prioritize communicating with managers, because they will shape the communication.
Patrick Kothe 32:09
So we talked to kind of what that announced the sale and now Now you've got another period of time when somebody is being bought. And now you know who your who your partner is, you know, who, who it's going to be. And now you've got people throughout the organization who are kind of trying to look down and say, Hey, am I going to have a job? I know there, I've got a counterpart that does the same thing I do. They're looking to bring companies together and get economies based on scale. So what's going to happen with me? And it's gonna take a little bit of time for that to shake out?
Renee Rogers 32:46
Absolutely.
Patrick Kothe 32:48
How much time is too much time? And and how do you manage manage people in that period,
Renee Rogers 32:55
what always feels like longer than, you know, uncertainty always feels longer than it really is. One of the things I always said to people was, companies don't move that fast. So you're not walking out the door tomorrow, you're you're most likely to get a an agreement that's going to incentivize you to stay probably longer than you want to stay. When that happens, then you have time to think about what you know, what's your next step is to how do you bring more short term stability to what is going to be a very uncertain process. In an acquisition, people do not get led to the door and pushed out immediately. And the other thing that always happens in acquisitions is you have way more money than you have during any other time. They make the deal. And they put in money for the integration.
Patrick Kothe 33:46
What is that money for? How is that money deployed,
Renee Rogers 33:49
they structure a financial deal. And they know there's going to be costs of integrating and letting go redundant people and that that's not free. They so they factor that in, we got relatively speaking, because we always ran on a shoestring a lot of money with the zipper acquisition, because we didn't have any systems and they literally put millions of dollars in to build the systems. So it was the access to resources that we never really had. Yeah, don't say you'll have the same job. I'm not saying you'll get a promotion. I'm not saying you'll even be here. But it isn't going to happen overnight, you're gonna have plenty of warning. And I think the more you can really say that and have people work with the process. A lot of times people realize they don't want to be with a new company.
Patrick Kothe 34:41
That's another really interesting point because I've been a part of, I've been bought. I've been sold, I bought so so I've been on both sides of this thing. And what I've noticed with myself as well as other people, you know, when Someone is able to make the transition. And when people are not able to make the transition, and I know that about myself, there were certain certain acquisitions when I was acquired, and I said, You know, I, this is, this is not gonna work for me, and I need to go and find find something else. And at the same time I as managing people, I've seen people who were not going to be able to make the transition right there, their mental attitude had just gone down
Renee Rogers 35:28
a fine, we're so soured by the process, or they could see that it was going to be operating at a scale that they weren't comfortable with, they much prefer the smaller, more relaxed environment.
Patrick Kothe 35:43
So as somebody in organizational development or HR, what counsel would you give to people that are either managing groups and saw that happening or to the individual.
Renee Rogers 35:55
I mean, I think the big issue for companies that go through those transitions is keeping the talent that they have. Now that doesn't mean they're never gonna keep everybody. But sometimes your best town is what walks out the door, because they've got a lot of options, companies have to really care about retaining the talent half, half the time when they make an acquisition, it's to get talent that they didn't have, that was a big motivator behind the the biomat. acquisition, we have to be reminded that you care about that. And that if you're not connecting with your team, is say, if you're a manager, and you're not connected with your team, and you're not having one on one conversations with the members of your team, in the absence of those interactions, even if you don't have any concrete information to give them, they will be making that stuff up. They will be telling stories to themselves and to each other. I think that's the bigger challenge for companies is keeping people keeping people long enough to find out if this is really something that could work for both sides,
Patrick Kothe 37:02
you're really that's the bottom line is when you're acquiring a company, what's a company a company is not products, a company is a people that build a product, that's the lifeblood of any company. And as you said, the people with the most options, the most valuable people in the company, can walk out at any point in time
Renee Rogers 37:20
lately, and they do and maybe they've been wanting to work out. And this is like a good, you know, a good excuse for that. So you know that keeping your talent is the biggest challenge of every company right now.
Patrick Kothe 37:31
So you mentioned something earlier, and it's probably one of the biggest issues that that, that you have with with any acquisition, and that's managing the cultures bringing the cultures in together, because every company regardless of what they put on their on the wall for their mission and vision and, and what their culture is all about. It's different in the actions of the people that are in there. So the culture kind of develops out of the people and how the company manages different situations. And every culture is a little bit different in every every company. So you're bringing in different cultures, and they come together. And very often, they don't mesh very well. Tell me about meshing cultures.
Renee Rogers 38:20
And of course, you have different cultures, within a company, you can have certain functions that have a certain culture, a kind of kind of approach to formality versus informality, an approach to working remotely versus having to be in the factory approach to the way the manager is referred to or not. That complexity is, is in the organization. And then you bring two organizations together and you have it multiplied, it's doubled. This is one thing I did conclude the shadow of the leader is powerful. I really kind of tended to minimize it. Because I'm a you know, I'm a parent of the people in power. But Bob, let's you know, let's get everybody I grew to understand that leaders make all the difference in terms of how the culture is perceived by their teams. And it's not what you say, it's what you do. It's important what you say, mainly because it's important that you communicate that you think it's important as a leader, you know, it's like, I want to talk about how we're relating to each other. And I think that's important for us. I want to talk about how we run our meetings. I want to talk about how people are empowered to do their work. I want to talk about how are we manifesting our values. So I think that's important if managers communicate that by spending time on it. That begins to shape the culture, but again, what they do is way more powerful than anything they say.
Patrick Kothe 40:00
It's like you said manifesting the values. That's that's it's not what it's not the values that you just throw up on the wall. It's how do you manifest values? Because, you know, honesty is is a value. And I think we all agree, hey, that's a that's a great value one we should have, but to what level and frankness. How does that how does that tie into honesty? And are you a culture that you are brutally honest or you're a culture that's honesty, through kindness Are you know, there's there's all kinds of different ways of doing that. And that kind of defines who you are as a company.
Renee Rogers 40:36
And what's important is that people talk about it and spend time on it. Now, a lot of companies and I've facilitated many, many of those meetings where it started with people to talk talking about what they want their values to be, that was primarily important for the people who talked about it, then we extended the conversation, and it became important for people who were able to have an opportunity to reflect on and share how they perceived these things, you can't be too rigid about what you put up on the wall. Because what you put up on the wall is really just the starting point, for the quality of interaction that you have to really show that you care that what people's opinion is, when people are working together in a really, really intense way. Having like an X after action review, having a time where you sit down after you've had this very intense experience, maybe a big success, maybe a big failure, and talk explicitly about what you did, right what you did wrong, and how, you know, the values played out in that can be a huge learning experience. And, and can really affect the morale of people. Because when we're really asked to reflect at that deeper level, you can't help but feel involved and valued and respected. And that that's an important thing to do. So you can make time for it. This is the whole point, you've got to make time for this kind of thing. But it isn't necessarily a formal training program, it isn't executives going off and creating some kind of manifesto that they put on the wall. It's really about ongoing conversations. And eventually we get that purpose is not manifested by what we say. It's by what we do, it becomes clear, you know, all the aspects of our purpose, and what it means to be purposeful is manifested, and how we show up every day, how we interact with people.
Patrick Kothe 42:29
So you've been part of two major acquisitions. You're talking about reflecting so let's reflect on those. What did you learn that you that that surprised you? through those two major acquisitions?
Renee Rogers 42:46
I think, Well, the first one, as painful as decisions can be, for example, let's shut down the whole manufacturing operation at Austin. Not only that people survive, but they actually thrive, we can sometimes kill people with kindness, because life is not all exactly as we think it should be. Or as we plan it to be, you know, working with people to go through this kind of change and helping normalize it. I mean, this kind of change is just the way of the world right now. Believing yourself that everybody can thrive no matter what the circumstances. And then I think, then I think that helped me bring a kind of positive energy each day when I showed up with whatever it was, whatever hard decisions were going to be made and whatever confusions we're working through. So that kind of optimism that we can show up. And we can be kind to each other. And but we can still make hard decisions. I think that that was maybe the lesson from and that was the center pulse person. So I was in the part of the organization that theoretically didn't win, right? Over the years, I've talked to so many people who run the center pro side, and they don't describe that part of their career as being traumatic or it's a big bad thing. It was just another step that they had, you know, in their career. So I think that was a big one. In the biomed. Zimmer, when it was more, it was really interesting, because not that many people laughed, it wasn't like they shut down hope parts of the business. They didn't downsize a bunch of the organization, a lot of people left of their own volition. It was harder. In many ways. People's identity gets really if you worked for a long, long time for one company, as you had with simmer. And as you have environment, people kind of start confusing their own identity with the attention of this company. And so for me, it was really learning about personal empowerment, about really leaders beginning to define themselves separate from the work that they did, and the company that they came from, and really some humility because honestly, you could go this Where you could go that way? Who knows, which is the right decision, you just, you know, pick a lane and start swimming, and learn, learn, learn learn.
Patrick Kothe 45:09
So if you're talking to someone who is an employee of a company who's going to be merging, bought or sold, whatever, what advice would you give to that person?
Renee Rogers 45:20
I would say, take care of yourself. First of all, take care of yourself, how's your sleep? How are you eating? How are you managing stress, if you could do better in that regard, pay a huge amount of attention to that, you know, understand, you're not a victim. That doesn't get you anywhere in life. Honestly, in this day and age, the company needs you a lot more than you need the company. This is the reality of companies today. And so take back your power key, you know, don't give it away, take care of your family, look deep inside yourself around what's really important, what really matters.
Patrick Kothe 45:58
So you've been in the medical device field for a long period of time, but you're also HR organizational development person. I consider I came up in in the sales and marketing side of things, but I've moved into management and CEO roles. I consider myself to be a medical device person. Do you consider yourself to be medical device? Or are you organizational development person?
Renee Rogers 46:24
Well, you know, at this point, I'm, I see myself my Morison leadership coach, but I do have a huge loyalty and, you know, sense of accomplishment, but pride that I spent all those years in that context. I mean, it's a great field, we're making things that help people. It's dynamic, it's always changing. For the 27 years, I felt so lucky that I landed in that space, I felt like it was just an accident, because I had no, I wasn't a science person that, you know, landed there. I just accidentally because I got called when I was out of graduate school to go work for a little startup. And I feel really lucky that I got to stay with one entity. It was like a really long arc that I got to experience. And I feel like that's really unusual. In this day and age, I feel really privileged that it kind of worked out that way.
Patrick Kothe 47:20
Renee is certainly taught to talk and walk the walk when it comes to managing through an acquisition. A few of my takeaways. First, attitude is everything. Now, it's it's true at any time, but especially when you're dealing with an acquisition, you can fool a lot of people, but you can't fool yourself. You have control of you, nobody else has control of your attitude. It's all about you. She talked about taking care of yourself. And I think that that's kind of where it starts, make sure that you understand where your stress level is, are you getting enough sleep? Are you are you eating? Well, are you physically at the top because mentally you're going to be challenged. I kind of like the NFL and what you hear coaches say at the end of the game, I've got a 24 hour rule. And whether you win or lose, you got 24 hours to either celebrate it or to feel bad about it. And I think that we have to do the same thing. Give yourself a little bit of time to absorb what's going on. And then kind of put it away and kind of get back on the attitude that you need to have in order to be productive. Because you really don't know what's going going on, you can't predict what's going to happen, all you can do is just lose good time thinking about what could happen, not necessarily what's going to happen. Also, if you're a leader, act like one people are looking to you and taking cues from you on how they're supposed to behave. Make sure that your attitude is where it needs to be. Because if your attitude is not so good, you can bet that there's isn't going to be either and if you're a leader, that's a bad, bad thing for you to be doing to the people that you are responsible for. The other thing to keep in mind as people are watching, if you expect to be part of the solution, and part of the long term of this company and your attitude is bad. Guess what, you're not going to have the opportunity to be part of that long term, you're not going to have the opportunity to stay with that company and continue to build it. Your attitude is being seen and people are watching. The second thing is you're a valuable asset. Rene talked about good people end up walking out the door in an acquisition. And that's the last thing that the acquiring company wants to happen. That's the real problem is good people are walking out the door. So make sure that you recognize you're a valuable asset to that company or you may be a valuable asset. To another company. That's just kind of the reality of things. But you need to understand that you are valuable, you have valuable skills, and you're a valuable employee to someone else out there. And that really means that you need to be connected, not only to the company that you're in, but you need to stay connected and keep your network going, especially when you don't have the need. It's so difficult to establish a network when you really need it, you have to build that network when you don't have the need, and then rely on that network once you do have that need. The last thing is you have time, nothing happens on day one. Things don't move that fast with these acquisitions, the day that things are announced, is not the day that all of the plans are that have already been made. And they're going to implement those plans. So the day that that's announced the people above you several layers above you, they don't know what's going to happen either. So really, you have some time after this acquisition to let everything shake out. So what are you doing that time? Well, first thing is just do your job. If you want to have a future with a company, you have to do your job, you have to make sure that you are continuing to do whatever it is that you're responsible for, and do it to the best of your ability because people are going to be looking at you and they're going to be looking at the job that you do and the work that you have to the organization going forward. So make sure that you continue to do your job. Finally, the last thing I want to say is, you have control of your career. You are the person that's in control. Don't ever give that up to a company. The company is not in control of your career. You are you happen to work and participate in that company, but your career is yours. Thank you for listening. Make sure you get episodes downloaded to your device automatically by liking or subscribing to the mastering medical device podcast on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Also, please spread the word and tell a friend or two to listen to the mastering medical device podcast as interviews like today's and help you become a more effective medical device leader. Work hard. Be kind
