According to global M&A insights, between 70% and 90% of mergers and acquisitions fail to achieve their intended value. Despite meticulous financial modelling and market analysis, the overwhelming majority of deals underperform.
The issue is rarely about the numbers. It’s often about people.
The hidden variable in deal success
Most transactions focus on commercial, legal and operational due diligence. Yet deal outcomes are fundamentally shaped by the humans leading and integrating them. Research from Paumen et al. (2022) highlights that the composition of the deal team, its diversity, experience, and decision-making balance, has a statistically significant influence on overall success.
Put simply, who leads and how they lead matters as much as what is being acquired.
Leadership under pressure
A recent large-scale study in 2025 analysed over 40,000 M&A transactions spanning four decades. It identified nine leadership competencies that consistently correlated with integration success.
Among them: adaptive thinking, clear communication, resilience, and the ability to inspire across cultures.
These findings echo what many integration veterans already know, M&A leadership is a unique test of judgment under pressure. It requires balancing speed with empathy, precision with adaptability, and control with empowerment.
The cost of overlooking people and culture
When leadership alignment and culture are treated as secondary, integration becomes chaotic. Teams lose trust, decision cycles slow, and the merged entity underperforms. Research found that in underperforming deals, cultural misalignment and poor leadership communication were cited in more than 60% of cases as the root cause of value erosion.
Value doesn’t vanish at the deal table it dissipates in the weeks and months that follow when leaders fail to engage, align and motivate people through change.
Closing the gap
At CJPI, we work with boards, investors and deal teams to bridge the human gap in M&A. Our M&A strategy advisors combine deep transaction experience with leadership insight, assessing and developing the capabilities that drive post-deal performance.
Whether supporting integration planning, executive hiring or coaching newly combined teams, our focus is clear: turning strategic ambition into tangible, sustainable value.
