Managing Change Without Authority

For the past few months, I have been my department’s lead for an integration project. We were acquired a few years ago by a much larger company, but only now we are being fully integrated. Note, I am not leading the integration at a corporate level, but simply at the department level (i.e. integration of processes, systems, functional onboarding, etc). In my experience, the overall integration efforts have been quite disorganized: not enough has been communicated to staff of both companies, decisions that should have already been made are still to be made, staff has been placed in an environment of high uncertainty for too long,etc. I have often escalated my concerns to more senior leaders but have seen no improvements. So I would like to hear from others who have been asked to execute specific integration efforts with very little guidance and/or authority, and not enough support from the business. Any tips would be greatly appreciated!