Making Change Stick After a University Merger or Acquisition: A Practical Guide for Leaders
More UK universities are entering new institutional arrangements as financial pressure grows, from shared services and close collaboration to full mergers and acquisitions. Completing the legal and regulatory process creates a new formal structure. Making that structure work depends on whether people across both institutions understand the new organisation and trust its decisions enough to change how they work.
This guide is for executive teams and for the managers across academic and professional services who turn integration plans into everyday practice. It builds on themes from Completing a university acquisition is not the same as making it work, a recent article by Charles Knight, Strengthify’s Higher Education Sector Engagement Lead, and turns them into six practical steps for use during planning and after completion.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Why integration plans stall after completion
Structures can change on paper long before working practice follows. Staff may adopt new processes while still identifying with their previous institution, which makes it easy to mistake compliance for commitment. The HEPI and AHEP report The invisible majority also highlights how professional and support staff carry much of the weight of repeated restructuring, often with limited development support. These are frequently the colleagues who will translate any agreement into new systems and services.
Integration tends to stall for a handful of practical reasons: authority is unclear, valuable expertise is lost through standardisation, services change without anyone considering their dependencies, and managers are asked to lead change they have not been prepared for.
Name the arrangement honestly
The word “merger” covers arrangements that vary widely in practice. Where one institution decides which systems survive and who fills senior roles, the arrangement works much more like an acquisition, whatever it is called publicly. Staff usually work this out quickly, so a description that does not match their experience costs credibility early.
What to do
- Agree a short internal statement of where authority sits, covering decision rights and which institution’s processes will become the default.
- Test the statement with a small group of managers from both institutions before it goes wider. If it reads differently on each side, rewrite it.
- Use the same language in board papers and in staff briefings.
- Revisit the statement at each major milestone, as authority often shifts once integration is under way.
Map which decisions people can influence
Managers cannot embed change if they do not know which decisions are fixed, and trust falls quickly when decisions that have already been made are presented as open for consultation. For each workstream, a simple decision map sorts decisions into four categories:
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Decided: communicate the decision and the reasoning behind it.
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Open to challenge: explain who reviews challenges and by when.
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Open to shaping: set out the options and how input will be used.
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Delegated: confirm what local managers can decide themselves, and within what limits.
Share the map with managers before they brief their teams, so they can answer questions with confidence.
Decide what should survive
Standardising on the acquiring institution’s systems can look efficient. Financial difficulty, though, says little about the quality of an institution’s people or services. The acquired university may hold specialist knowledge, trusted external relationships, distinctive provision or services that work better than their equivalents elsewhere in the combined organisation.
What to do
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Ask each service lead in both institutions to name what would be hardest to rebuild if it were lost.
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Ask leaders in the acquiring institution which capabilities they currently lack and could gain.
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Record key relationships with partners, employers, local communities and regulators, and name who holds each one.
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Treat difference as a question to explore before assuming it is inefficiency.
Connect the people who will implement the change
Decisions that look sensible within one function can create workload or risk elsewhere. A change to a student records process, for example, may affect admissions and finance at the same time. The people responsible for implementation need to be connected across institutional boundaries before new structures are imposed.
What to do
- Form cross-institution working groups for each major service, with members from both sides and from neighbouring services.
- Map dependencies between services before agreeing timelines.
- Give working groups protected time and clear authority to raise risks.
- Create a route for issues to reach decision-makers quickly, with a named owner for each response.
Prepare managers for the conversations ahead
In the acquiring institution, managers need to judge where consistency matters and where local practice should continue. In the acquired institution, managers are often asked to reassure their teams and keep services running while their own roles are uncertain.
Briefing packs rarely prepare anyone for this. Managers need realistic preparation for difficult conversations, time with peers who have led similar change, a clear picture of what is happening across the wider organisation, and an understanding of how they and their new colleagues work best. Shared language about strengths and working styles gives new teams a quicker route to trust, particularly when colleagues have never worked together before.
What to do
- Run peer sessions that bring managers from both institutions together early, before structures are finalised.
- Rehearse the hardest conversations, including role changes and the loss of institutional identity.
- Brief managers on the decision map from Step 2 so they know what they can commit to.
- Make time to ask managers about their own workload and wellbeing as well as their teams’.
Listen beyond the executive team
Senior leaders need an honest view of how integration is landing across the organisation. Four signals are worth tracking: whether people understand the change, where confidence is weakening, which capabilities may be at risk, and whether managers have the authority to act.
Collect these signals through short, regular check-ins that help teams reflect and improve, and share what you learn with the people who contributed. Feedback that is used to monitor individuals quickly dries up. The comparison below can help leaders judge whether new ways of working are taking hold.
| Change is being followed | Change is becoming embedded |
| New processes are used, but local workarounds persist. | Teams suggest improvements to the new processes. |
| Staff still describe themselves by their former institution. | Staff explain the combined institution’s purpose in their own words. |
| Managers escalate routine decisions. | Managers act confidently within their delegated authority. |
| Issues surface only when something fails. | Cross-service teams raise risks early. |
Frequently Asked Questions
In a merger, institutions come together on broadly equal terms and share decisions about the combined organisation. In an acquisition, one institution holds most of the authority over systems and senior appointments. Many UK arrangements described as mergers work more like acquisitions in practice.
How Strengthify can help
Strengthify works with universities to build the leadership and team capability that integration depends on. Our programmes and workshops, including Discovery Workshops and the Management Development Programme, help managers and teams from both institutions understand how they work best together. The Strengthify Profile gives each person a current snapshot and starting point for reflection, and Strengthify Engage keeps strengths and working styles visible in everyday work, giving leaders a clearer sense of how teams are adjusting.
If you are planning or leading an integration, talk to us about where your teams are now and what support would help.