An Intro to Stakeholder Engagement
How do you eat an elephant?
One bite at a time.
(Yes, I have a side business in 'dad' jokes.)
Over the past couple of years I've worked with clients who have stepped into a new, more senior role, and have become overwhelmed with the quantity of new relationships that they have to manage. Who do they need to talk to? How often? What information do they need to provide and/or collect? Where does that information come from? Who does it go to?
This can feel like a lot, so it's important to break it down. One bite at a time.
I recently wrote about how you can build good relationships as a leader. This article is a bit of a follow-up - how to manage a portfolio of stakeholders and make sure the right people are getting the right communications at the right time.
To do this we'll follow a pretty simple three step process:
Identify stakeholders
Understand stakeholder needs
Map stakeholders
This will give you a base to work with, so that you can feel a bit more in control.
Identifying your stakeholders
Who you actually need to consider as stakeholders could be as varied as your role - there are lots of places to look. Here are some ideas but depending on your business, team, and role there might be other individuals or groups, both internal and external, to consider:
Your manager
Executives
The Board
Customers (internal or external)
Other teams
Other department heads
Legal and/or compliance
Finance
HR
Suppliers
Media
Shareholders
Make yourself a list - use names where you know them or titles / groups when you don't. Start with the most obvious and work your way out from there. These are the people that you need to connect with for some reason as part of your role, your team's function, or any projects or initiatives that you have going on.
Herding dogs rather than cats
Understand your stakeholders' needs
The next step is to start building those relationships. As I mentioned before, one way to approach this is to consider:
What are their needs? What are their key drivers, goals, and objectives?
What does success look like for them?
How can we help?
In other words, what do we need to do to satisfy them?
The best way to find out is to ask. This could be in the form of a survey, or with more senior profiles it might be better to do a 1:1 tour - spend a little bit of time getting to know them and seeing where and how you can help.
Bear in mind that this might change over time, and specific projects or initiatives might affect who the stakeholders are, or the level of interest and involvement of existing stakeholders.
Deliverables could be in the form of work product related to your function, reports, newsletters, KPI summaries, periodic presentations, or specific items related to projects or initiatives.
Mapping your stakeholders
Once you know who you're talking about and what they need, you can move on to analysing those stakeholders to evaluate how much care and attention they might need.
Stakeholder map
One way to do this is to map them out using the above grid, according to their power and influence, versus their interest or involvement.
For low power and interest: Keep an eye on them. Don't spend too much effort in this area but perhaps consider including them in general communications.
For low power and high interest: Keep them well informed - make sure they know what's going on perhaps via regular update meetings or communications.
For high power and low interest: These stakeholders need satisfying - perhaps they have specific requirements you need to fill or similar. Spend a bit more time here as the ramifications of losing their support could be significant.
For high power and high interest: This is where you'll want to spend most of your effort. Regular update meetings, 1:1s, and perhaps custom communications should be considered.
If you have a good understanding of who lands where, you can design your communications accordingly - and also consider this might involve regular reports, newsletters, meetings, or a myriad of other things dependent on the needs.
You might also want to consider the relationships between different stakeholders, as this could have an impact on what you need to deliver to whom, when, also.
This is an exercise you'll want to repeat on a semi-regular basis, and perhaps add to or edit when a project or initiative starts or ends, as that might change the level of engagement of certain stakeholders or add new people that you haven't connected with previously.
Now get out there and meet some folks..!
When you're ready, I offer 1:1 coaching for leaders who are looking to take their life and career to the next level. Send me an email and we'll set up a time to have a chat.
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