There are many subtleties to stakeholder management. It is easy to miss opportunities to increase the level of engagement with your stakeholders—and to make sure they are the right ones. To help keep you focused on deciding how to engage and whom to engage with, here are eight stakeholder management principles that, if followed, will move you faster towards your goals.
1) Consciously Engage
If you are reading this article you have probably already absorbed this principle. Stakeholder engagement is not something that just happens; if you want to maximise engagement and increase your likelihood and level of success, then stakeholder engagement must be sought and managed to some degree. You have to get out there and do it. It has to be a conscious process integral to your plans to maximise the perceived win-win scenarios and manage and reduce any win-lose scenarios for your stakeholders. Managed well this will impact the success of your current project but can also have a huge effect on stakeholder attitudes to future projects.
2) Identify all your stakeholders.
Firstly you need to identify all your stakeholders. That is anyone who has an interest (these can be positive or negative) in what you are trying to achieve. Anyone who is going to win when you win, or lose when you win, is a stakeholder. Even if their loss is simply having to do their job a different way, they could be a very important stakeholder. This can end up being a very large group of people.
3. Prioritise
Focus first on stakeholders who have the most power to help or hinder your goal. This narrows the field down to help you focus your engagement on the stakeholders who are most important. Remember: It is also a good idea to check out those stakeholders who have the greatest interest in your result—even if they don’t have the power, they might work quite hard on your behalf to make it happen (or not, as the case may be).
4. Build Trust & Be Honest
Underpromise and Overdeliver. Building trust is a vital part of stakeholder management and often missed out by people who are looking for fast results and short term gains. You can’t just focus on forcing through your current agenda with false promises or over optimistic outcomes. Stakeholder management is a long term commitment to build trust to ensure all your future endeavours get facilitated or green flagged not just the latest. A long term positive relationship with your stakeholders is invaluable.
5) Clarity
Be very clear about what you want from each stakeholder. You may not necessarily communicate your wants directly with them, but at least you need to know specifically what you are shooting for.
6) Connect their interests to your goals.
To engage positive stakeholders, you need to connect their agenda with your goal, and disconnect with negative ones. Those with a positive interest in your success will work harder for you if they can see how it serves their purpose and helps them achieve their goals. Conversely, with negative interest, you really need to remove yourself from their radar by showing them a) how you don’t negatively effect them or b) how by working with you you can minimise the negative effect and/or c) why the negative effect is still worth it.
7) Raise your goal’s priority
To achieve higher engagement, you need to increase your goal’s perceived priority in the minds of positive stakeholders, and lessen it with negative stakeholders. Yes, this is a marketing job. Curiously, you might gain quite a bit from proactively engaging those who have a negative interest. Rather than leave them guessing, show them how it doesn’t affect them.
8) Be creative with your approach
Don’t always deal directly with stakeholders. Often, the most powerful people will be hard to get hold of. That doesn’t mean they are not a stakeholder; it’s just that you have to be more creative in your approach. Seek out others who influence them and engage with them instead. Then, these intermediaries can influence on your behalf.
9) Understand your own Stakeholder buy-in Goal
Its great to have everyone in your corner but sometimes that is just not possible, there will be too many conflicting priorities between stakeholders. You don’t have to get all stakeholders to agree on everything—just enough to secure your goal. As a result, how you define your goal is an important nuance to consider. If you want to get a long-term sustainable result, you will need to get more stakeholders to agree than if your result is a simple one-off piece of work never to be repeated.
