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Top 5 Ways To Engage Stakeholders
How to leverage stakeholders to make change happen. Understanding that the "one size fits all" approach doesn't apply to stakeholder management.
Stakeholder management is an easy step to miss out when conducting a project. The value of it isn't always obvious right at the start of our project, it's only when we get to implementing our solution that we realize the importance of engaging and managing stakeholders right from the very start of our project.
Engaged stakeholders are key to any successful project, not just from a communication perspective, but also from the knowledge obtained from their expertise and experience, which they will offer to us over and over again if we take the time to involve them right from the start.
Beware, no two stakeholders, or groups of stakeholders, are the same.
Each stakeholder is different, they will be at different levels of understanding and appreciation of the need for the change and their expectations of what the post change state will look like will certainly be different.
This article outlines 5 Key Ways to engage stakeholders to ensure that solutions are implemented first time, every time.
1. Understand Them
We all make assumptions around people and the teams that we work with on a daily basis. We assume that we know them well enough to make decisions on their behalf and we assume that they will welcome any logically thought through change with open arms.
However, it is inevitable that any team will face some kind of resistance from different stakeholder groups, purely on the basis that we are proposing something that is different to what is done now.
There are four main types of resistance that we can face, but there are also some strategies we can employ to overcome these types of resistance
Resistance Types : Download Now
If we can understand the reasons for resistance from different stakeholder groups, we can employ effective strategies to overcome this resistance.
We must also consider the diverse nature of these groups and as a result, need to understand their specific needs in terms of communication (both preferred media and frequency) and the types of information they want to receive during the change lifecycle.
We must not make the assumption that the more we communicate; the more engaged our stakeholders will be. For some stakeholder groups, this will certainly be the case, for others it will actually disengage them
2. Involve Them
When conducting a full stakeholder analysis we can sometimes be surprised by the sheer number and diversity of our stakeholder groups. It can therefore, be difficult for us to see how we could actively involve all of these groups throughout the change cycle.
Conducting a "Level Of Influence" analysis on your stakeholder groups can help to identify the key groups that you will need to engage with more than others.
Level Of Influence Analysis : Download Now
This analysis works by employing four key steps
a. Identify all of the key stakeholders of the project
b. Determine each stakeholder's "Level Of Influence" within the organization, whether this is positive or negative
c. Determine their perceived current "Level Of Support" for the project
d. Determine the impact on the stakeholder of the proposed change
From this analysis we should be focusing on moving stakeholder groups from left to right on the grid, specifically the people who fall in the top left hand box, who are low supporters but are highly impacted by the change.
Conversely, stakeholder groups who fall into the top right hand box on the grid, and are "High Influencers", should be leveraged to provide support for the project.
3. Create the "Burning Platform" for the Change
If we want to implement a change and take people from their "As-Is" state to a new "To Be" state, the most important question to answer for all stakeholders is "Why"?
If we can effectively articulate why we need to make the changes we are proposing, implementing that change will be considerably easier. However, our stakeholders don't always see the need for the change as clearly as the project team does.
To generate the momentum we need to make the change happen, we create a "Burning Platform" for change. This is a statement that clearly articulates the need for change.
This burning platform could be:
"We are going to lose our major customers if we don't implement this change"
"We are going to incur a 20% increase in costs if we don't implement this new process"
"We are not going to win that new contract with a major Blue Chip corporation if we don't improve our fixed cost base"
The burning platform is a real "Sit-up and Listen" statement that should make the consequences of not implanting this change clear.
4. Resolve any "What's In It For Me?" Issues
There is also an element of personal impact when dealing with stakeholders. When a change is proposed, self preservation kicks in and people will initially look at the change from a very personal perspective as opposed to taking the wider view.
It is impossible to cater for every single individual requirement of every single stakeholder. However, there will be commonality in their requirements and commonality in their "What's In It For Me" requirements.
Personal anxiety is a natural by-product of any change and resolving these "What's In It For Me" issues can go a long way to reducing them.
5. Demonstrate Success
Sometimes, the best way to engage stakeholders is to "Show" them what the change will look like once it comes.
We can do this by showing examples of similar projects run within our own organization, real life examples, or case studies of other organizations that have implemented a similar change.
Alternatively, if this is the first kind of project run within the organization, a great way of engaging stakeholders on subsequent projects is to demonstrate success in the first set of projects.
Stakeholder engagement takes time and is a Critical Success Factor for any project that wants to implement its changes successfully.
Stakeholders have a lot of knowledge and experience to offer a project team, and any project team looking to be effective should make use of their stakeholders.
Poor stakeholder engagement leads to elongated lead times, extra time spent on multiple levels of communication and resistance to the change at the "Coal Face" of the organization
Effective Stakeholder management leads to reduced implementation lead times and right first time implementation of solutions.
For further information on tools and techniques for stakeholder management please see the Green and Black Belt courses on offer from SigmaPro
Author Biography
Paul Martin - Six Sigma Master Black Belt
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