The Best Kind of Culture Shock: Integrating ScholarOne & Silverchair

There has always been an elegant dialogue between what the scholarly publishing community thinks of Silverchair and the felt experience of working here. We are good partners, we are told, empathetic and creative. We remain curious and open in the face of obstacles, and we embrace purposeful innovation. We assume positive intent, and we are committed to the integrity that comes from bravely speaking the truth.

Our values have meaning for us individually and collectively. Our allegiance to these principles is not blind or dogmatic, but rather the product of thoughtful application and reflection. It still delights me when one of our people invokes the values in the context of a complex or contentious conversation. These principles are immensely grounding and clarifying, reminding us to push through conflict courageously, trusting that we and what we offer to the community we serve will be enriched through the experience. 

Silverchair's Core Values

This time last year, I wrote about Silverchair’s newest core value: Innovate with purpose and adaptability. The creation of this fifth value was a response to the significant shifts we predicted for our industry and ourselves as AI had started to disrupt our ways of working and developing products. We had no idea how important our commitment to purposeful innovation would become as we navigated the ScholarOne acquisition.  

An acquisition—especially one of this magnitude—places strain on the culture of an organization. According to a 2021 study published by Mercer, 47% of mergers and acquisitions fail to deliver value primarily due to unanticipated people risks.  

Key aspects of people strategy that derailed deals when left unaddressed

With this sobering figure in mind, we committed to a people strategy that would allow us to not just retain talented ScholarOne professionals but also make meaningful investments in leadership and culture. This process—which is a work in progress as I author these words—has served as an unyielding reminder of the importance of self-awareness, planfulness, and humble values-driven action. 

First, Know Yourself

The deal started to come into focus for us in May as representatives of Silverchair and Clarivate began to facilitate active dialogue between the Silverchair and ScholarOne leadership teams. We enjoyed our conversations and became increasingly excited about what could be possible if we worked together.  

We spent incalculable hours as a leadership team discussing how we might onboard our new Silverchairians to the existing culture while at the same time creating an opening for our new colleagues to shape what being a Silverchairian means. We first endeavored to refine our definition of what it means to work here, upgrading our Culture Code, first published in February 2024, to be a more faithful reflection of our norms. 

Think of the Silverchair Culture Code as the things that normally go unsaid in an organization: The commitments we embrace for how we relate to one another. This was an evolution of the Hybrid Work Norms we developed collaboratively during our pandemic re-emergence in 2021, which were memorialized in The Scholarly Kitchen. We updated our Culture Code to clearly define how we put our values into action, making connections between our five core values the commitments we make to one another: 

• We hold ourselves and others accountable. 
• We take extreme ownership. 
• We pull problems toward us. 
• We have a bias toward action. 
• We adopt a client mindset—both internally and externally. 
• We are bold and courageous in pursuit of continuous improvement. 
• We embrace change and we challenge with curiosity. 
• We maintain high standards and a future focus. 
• We communicate clearly, thoughtfully, and transparently. 
• We commit to continuous development and self-awareness. 

Each of these “values in action” was derived from internal conversations with Silverchairians across roles and levels of seniority in our organization. We knew, heading into the ScholarOne acquisition, that we were clear about who we are and what we most wanted to preserve. 

Set the Table

We also knew that merely being clear about who we are would by itself be insufficient to create the bridge our ScholarOne colleagues needed to feel secure making the choice to join us. It was never a foregone conclusion that the people supporting ScholarOne at Clarivate would all become Silverchairians. Instead, each person had an opportunity to consider and accept Silverchair’s offer of employment.  

Together with their offers of employment, everyone who was included by Clarivate as part of the deal received a copy of the Silverchair Culture Code and an invitation to a town hall where members of our leadership team would answer any and all questions from the mundane (When will my Silverchair email be active?) to the sublime (What is your strategy for the combined organization?). We hosted in-person meetings in the U.S. (Charlottesville, Virginia), in Serbia (Belgrade and Novi Sad), and in the United Kingdom (London), and we met one-on-one with dozens of people to answer their questions and disposition their concerns. 

We were hoping that many our offers would be accepted. We were stunned when 100% were signed. 

As one of our first acts following the November 12th closing, we brought the entire global Silverchair people leadership team (including people managers who had just joined us from ScholarOne) to Charlottesville, Virginia for two days of leadership development.

December 2024 People Manager Summit

We had been planning this event for months as we understood the vital importance of cultivating a unified perspective and a sense of mission among those who have the most direct impact on our people. We explored what it means to operate with a “One Silverchair mindset” and how we might invest in building our people manager competencies. We empowered our people leaders with tangible steps they can take to create more moments that matter for our people and our customers, and we discussed how people managers shape culture, which in turn informs business performance and team dynamics. We thus ended 2024 with strong leadership alignment regarding what it will take to build and nurture the type of organization we need Silverchair to be. 

Live the Values

All of this, as it turns out, was mere preamble to the good, hard work of harmonizing the cultures of two distinctive – albeit consonant – communities of people. 

In the onboarding process, we took great pains to ensure our new Silverchairians experienced community and connection – assigning everyone an onboarding “buddy” and enrolling the entire combined organization in Coffee Pals, a Microsoft Teams app that randomly matches coworkers for one-on-one social encounters. We posted (and re-posted) FAQs, we hosted ongoing orientation sessions on a range of subjects, and our PeopleOps (HR) and TechOps (technical support) teams diligently answered all requests for help as quickly and thoroughly as possible. 

Many of our new colleagues expressed appreciation for the warm welcome they received, and we heard repeatedly that people were experiencing “the best kind of culture shock.” 

At the same time, we got some things wrong, and we had to quickly pivot to address the legitimate concerns of our new people. As our new colleagues have reached out with questions and concerns, we’ve been reminded of the importance of living our values, doing our best to “solve [their] problems with creativity and empathy” while being “honest and constructive” in our feedback about what is feasible. As we continue to merge our communities, we also commit to “innovate[ing] with purpose and adaptability” in the types of benefits and other rewards we offer.  

In February, we will be launching our annual organizational health survey, and we will be eager for the candid feedback and insights that process will yield. We can already see that the pre-acquisition Silverchair culture will be enriched by our new colleagues in specific ways. For example, ScholarOne brings immense rigor to safeguarding the architecture of their products, following routines that ensure long-term stability as they integrate enhancements. We can envision a world in which Silverchair as whole more fully and systematically embraces this natural tension between stability and innovation.  

Silverchair leaders visiting with the ScholarOne teams in Serbia

We have also noticed that our ScholarOne colleagues bring an impressive sense of ownership to their work. Having operated with great independence within a much larger organization, our new colleagues have learned how to survive and thrive as the landscape around them shifts. At Silverchair, we have only just begun to experience the types of changes that have been commonplace at ScholarOne for nearly two decades. The perspective and maturity our new colleagues bring will only make our culture stronger and more resilient.  

And, of course, we have come to appreciate the many ways in which we are a lot alike: goofy and irreverent; open-minded and curious; hardworking and committed. We could not have asked for a more perfectly matched community of people to join our noble quest. 

 

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