What Going Through Two Mergers Taught Me About Loyalty

Two mergers taught me that loyalty within corporate runs in one direction. I gave a company my hours, my health, and the best years of my career, and it taught me in return, deal by deal, is that results matter less than knowing the right person (or them knowing you) and playing politics. By the end I had gone from feeling like part of a family to understanding I was just a number or in my case, and example for my boss to position himself as someone who could make ‘tough decisions’ when he ousted me.

When I started my career, the first company I joined genuinely felt like a family.

Early on, the company felt like a place that saw me, that rewarded people based on hard work and meritocracy, that would look after the people who looked after it. I had a great boss, who had a fair boss, who had a fair boss, all the way up the chain. No, no one was perfect. But just like in a real family, people overlooked the quirks in others because everyone was on the same team, driving towards the same outcomes, and working in earnest towards a common goal: what was best for the company.  

I built my whole understanding of how work worked on top of those introductory years to corporate: You show up, you work hard (and if you’re female and want a promotion, you outwork the guys), you deliver, and the system takes care of you. For a while, that story held true. The awards came. The promotions came. The story looked true because it kept coming true.

Then that company got acquired.

Here’s what a merger looks like from the inside, once you strip away the press release.

People you respect start disappearing. Not the weak performers. Some of the best people I worked with, people who delivered, people who carried their teams, got walked out. And a fair number of the people who stayed were not the strongest ones. They were the most political or just happened to have the right position that looked good on paper. And when the music stopped, they were the ones still holding a chair.

That is when I started to understand the real rules. Not the ones printed on the values poster in the lobby. The actual ones.

I had believed that results alone were rewarded. The merger taught me that we are all just a number. And often relationships with the right people, at the right level, at the right moment, were the currency. Results were nice. But results alone don’t protect you from redundancy.

Then it happened again.

One year later, as a result of the first acquisition, my division was acquired and merged with another company. Second merger. Same lesson, but even more obvious now. More good people gone. More of the game. And I watched myself start to change in response to it, which is the part that is hard to admit. I got more careful. More aware of the politics. More conscious of how things looked, who was in the room, what got said and to whom.

I didn’t love who I was becoming in that environment. And it was exhausting.

I was still delivering. I was still pouring everything into my team. But I was doing it inside a system that was highly political and inauthentic. It honestly felt a bit like being in high school again – but with peoples’ livelihoods on the line.

I paid for those lessons with my emotional and physical health before I fully understood what was happening.

The last stretch of that career, I had a series of bosses who didn’t value what I brought to the table, mostly because I didn’t play the game. They were all highly political. In one case, genuinely toxic. I still showed up. I still delivered. And I did it with stress and anxiety, a sleep problem so stubborn I had to self-medicate just to rest, and a back that seized up so completely, on two separate occasions, that I couldn’t get out of bed.

Two times. Flat on my back. From stress.

That is what loyalty to a company that is not loyal back does to a person. 

And then, eventually, the system did to me what I had watched it do to so many others.

I will not call it a layoff, because that is not what it was. I was ousted. I had a vacation planned and booked that interfered with a leadership team meeting I was expected to present at. My boss wanted me to cancel it and present to the leadership team instead; it would look good for him, after all. I chose the vacation. For a political boss whose reputation depended on his people looking visibly devoted, that read as insubordination. It got reframed as a restructuring. A restructuring in which, as it turned out, exactly one person was restructured. Me.

By then I wasn’t surprised. In fact, my initial reaction was relief. I had watched the same thing happen to better people than me for years. Only this time it was me.

Here’s what I took with me from that situation and the years of stress and toxicity leading up to that moment.

Do not build your identity based on a role or title someone else controls. You can use the title. You can enjoy the promotions and perks, the recognition, the sense of belonging. But it’s temporary, and someone else can change the terms in a blink of an eye, and a reputation built on years of great work won’t stop them.

The family feeling was real while it lasted. It was also never a contract. It was a culture, and cultures get bought, merged, restructured, and rewritten by people who have never met you and owe you nothing.

I don’t say any of this to be bitter. I am genuinely grateful for that career. It built skills I use every single day now. But I would be lying if I pretended the mergers didn’t permanently change what I believe about handing an organization the kind of loyalty you can really only give to your own life.

I think about this constantly now, because the women I work with are almost all still inside it.

Senior. Accomplished. Trusted. Usually the person their team leans on and their leadership counts on.

And underneath the title, more of them than you would guess have already felt the shift I felt. They have watched a reorg take out someone who didn’t deserve it. They’ve noticed the politics getting worse and the loyalty shrinking. They’ve started to sense, in a way they can’t articulate yet, that they’ve become a number inside a place they once thought of as home.

It’s a feeling to pay attention to.

I knew for years during and after the mergers that things weren’t right. That something was off and out of alignment. My only regret is how many years I spent overriding my intuition before I finally listened.

Sarah Janzen is the founder of Her Big Leap, a program that has helped hundreds of corporate women across North America and Europe build thriving businesses on their own terms. She does all of it while raising two boys, which is the best proof she knows that “waiting for the right time” was never the strategy.