Managing Through an Acquisition

I spent seven years at Cerner and then Oracle. Running underneath all of it, on the volunteer side of my life, was Wood Badge, the Boy Scouts of America’s adult leadership program. I took the course in 2015 and stayed with the program through 2022, teaching and mentoring after my own training was done. The curriculum covers team development, situational leadership, conflict management, change management, and underneath all of it, servant leadership.

The most useful thing I picked up from Wood Badge wasn’t in the official curriculum. Every time you sit down with a Scout about how they’re progressing, you close with the same question:

What can I do to make your experience better?

I started using it as a Scoutmaster two or three years before I joined Cerner. By the time I had direct reports of my own, the question was instinct. I asked it at the end of every one-on-one I ever ran with a designer who worked for me. Not only when something was wrong. Every time.

I didn’t know how much I was going to need it.

I moved into design management in early 2022. I’d managed small design teams at agencies years earlier, but that wasn’t enough to prepare me for twelve reports across six locations, three continents, and a company going through a $28 billion acquisition.

For the next year, I learned corporate middle management on the job. At its largest, my team was twelve designers across three continents, in time zones that never all overlapped: three in Kansas City, one in New York, one in North Carolina, one in Florida and one in Belgium for a while, and five in India. The Oracle acquisition closed that June, and for a while nothing changed: same team, same work, same cadence. I’d gotten the rhythm to where all twelve were taken care of.

Then in March 2023, Oracle reorganized the company. The Cerner UX team got absorbed into the larger Oracle design org, and Oracle’s management culture was vastly different. At Cerner, managing designers was the job. At Oracle Design, it was something you did on the side of your “real” work. 20% to be exact.

The role wasn’t the only thing Oracle shrank. The pay had been frozen since the day the acquisition closed in 2022, company-wide, and it stayed that way until 2024. I still had to run performance reviews and not have anything at the end to offer for exceptional work. People who had genuinely earned recognition were getting neither. They knew it. I knew it, and there was no version of the conversation where we could pretend otherwise.

All I had was the question I always asked: what could I do to make their experience better? Most of the answers were things I could actually do. Shift a project. Push back on a meeting cadence. The things a manager can do unilaterally, I could still do.

Asked once, it’s a gesture. Asked in every one-on-one for years, it goes invisible. Nine times out of ten the answer is “nah, nothing, everything’s fine,” and you both move on. But the routine is the point: the one time something is actually wrong, the channel is already open, and they don’t have to build up to using it. A report would use it to tell me they were hitting a wall, or that the promotion drought was doing real damage to how they thought about their career, or that they needed me to advocate for something they couldn’t advocate for themselves.

During that same window, my manager and I got three of my reports promoted, with pay raises. We built airtight justification packages and pushed them through layers of new leadership who had no context on how good these three were.

All three were excellent, and all three had been frozen out twice. Cerner stopped promoting in the run-up to the acquisition, and the day the acquisition completed, a whole separate freeze started. It took documentation, elapsed time, and asking again every time the answer came back “no,” none of it about their work. Three to four years after they’d earned it, all three got through.