Managing Your First Tuck-In

Self-paced course designed for first-time integration project managers folding small acquisitions into a network of commercial service companies. These PMs walk into a 14-person shop where no one reports to them, the seller is grieving a business he spent decades building, and the integration still has to move. The course teaches the judgment no checklist can cover: reading the room, diagnosing quiet resistance, and holding people accountable without authority.

This excerpt shows four design decisions:

• Tabbed content builds the seller's emotional reality (pride, grief, protectiveness) into the structure of the lesson, so empathy functions as instruction rather than a disclaimer.

• A worked example contrasts escalating as a complaint with escalating as a decision request, then names exactly what made the second version work.

• A diagnostic drill converts a stalled file handover into four testable hypotheses, training PMs to investigate before they push.

• And the knowledge checks assess prioritization under realistic pressure, asking learners to choose where their energy goes on a Friday afternoon, not to recall what a module said.