The People Side of M&A Isn't Soft. It's Due Diligence With Different Data.

Almost every deal I've seen has a people slide. It usually sits near the front of the kickoff deck and says something like "people first." A People & Culture workstream gets a lead and a tracker. And a few months after close, someone sends out a survey to find out how everyone is feeling.

None of that is the work.

A post I read recently, by Ruchi, put it better than I could:

"People-centric integrations aren't created by having a People & Culture workstream or because someone declared 'people first' at kick-offs. They're reflected in our deliberate and consistent choices."

I agree, and I'd go one step further. Choices only become deliberate and consistent when they're tied to the same machinery as everything else in the deal.

Why the people side still feels soft

Think about a working-capital adjustment. Nobody calls it soft. There's a target level, someone owns the number, there's a date when it's measured, and there's a mechanism that moves the price if it comes in off target. A TSA works the same way: a defined list of services, a duration, an owner on each side and a plan for the exit.

Both started life as uncertainty. They became ordinary deal mechanics because someone turned that uncertainty into a question with an owner and an answer.

The people side feels soft for one reason: nobody does that translation. "Culture" stays a word on a slide. So it gets discussed in the abstract, parked as too sensitive to touch before signing, or handed to HR after close.

Christine Graeff, who helped lead Credit Suisse's integration with UBS as its global head of people, makes the reframe plainly in a recent I by IMD piece. Talking about slow decisions, unclear accountabilities and two cultures running as separate systems, she says:

"Those aren't 'people issues' after the deal. They are execution risks inside the deal thesis."

If they're execution risks inside the thesis, they belong in diligence. Asked at the same stage as everything else, by people who are accountable for the answer.

Four questions that turn it into deal work

The first is which parts of the deal thesis depend on a small number of teams, and what would put that delivery at risk. Every thesis rests on a handful of capabilities. A cross-sell synergy depends on two commercial teams learning to sell together. A cost case depends on a finance team running a system migration while still closing the books. The question isn't about any one person. It's about which capabilities carry the plan, and what would stop those teams from delivering: a new reporting line, a migration scheduled on top of quarter-end, a decision they used to own and no longer will.

The second is how decisions actually get made on the target side, and who makes them when the org chart is wrong. Org charts show reporting lines, not decision rights. Most targets have approvals that quietly run through someone two levels away from where the chart says they should. If the integration plan assumes the chart, the first month gets spent discovering the real one. Graeff's point on unclear structure applies directly: "That has an impact that you don't see in the financial model."

The third is how much spare capacity the acquired team really has. The same people run business as usual, answer a steady stream of diligence questions and then absorb the integration, often in the same quarter. Plans count heads. They rarely count hours. A synergy timeline that assumes capacity nobody has is a timeline that slips, and it slips quietly.

The fourth is what changes for each team on Day 1, and who tells them. Not one all-hands announcement and an FAQ, but a team-by-team view of what changes in reporting, tools, approvals and customer contact, with a named person responsible for telling each team. As the IMD piece notes, if leadership leaves that vacuum open, people fill it themselves.

None of these are exotic. They're the kind of questions a good operator asks informally anyway. The difference is whether they get asked before signing, written down and acted on.

What this does for a deal

Here's the picture when the people side is genuinely operationalized.

Each question has an owner on the deal team, a deadline in the process timeline and a decision it feeds. The answer to the first changes how synergies are sequenced and how conservative the timeline is. The answer to the second shapes the governance model and who actually sits in the steering committee. The third can change the Day 100 plan, or the scope and length of a TSA if the target can't carry the extra load. The fourth becomes the Day 1 plan itself.

That's the shift. The people side stops being a commentary on the deal and starts changing it, the way financial and legal findings already do. It can move price, structure, sequencing and the plan the integration team inherits. And the integration lead gets a thesis with its assumptions tested, not a slide that says "people first."

Where AI helps, and where it stops

Graeff makes another point I keep coming back to: "AI can generate the signal. Leaders still have to interpret what it means."

That's how we think about it at HumanaQ. We work at team level only, in groups of five or more, with nobody named. What that gives a deal team is where to look and what to ask: which teams the plan leans on, and where decision habits on the two sides look different enough to test before the plan is locked. It isn't used for selection, retention, pay or performance decisions, and it doesn't replace judgment. The questions and the decisions stay with the people accountable for the deal.

There are limits before close, too. Competition law and data protection rules restrict what a buyer can see about the target's employees before the deal completes. Team-level work fits inside those limits far more easily than anything aimed at individuals.

The question behind the questions

The IMD piece closes with a line that sums up the whole argument: "The financial model tells you why the deal should create value. The organization determines whether it actually will."

The four questions are how you find out which organization you're buying, before you've paid for it.

The people side isn't soft. It's just usually unasked.

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This piece is part of the AI in M&A series running through the Under the Hood of M&A newsletter.

Source: I by IMD, "For M&A success, bring HR into the room" (November 9, 2026).