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Winning Support for Your ProjectsTry this out in our Interactive Screen App! |
Your boss | Shareholders | Government |
Senior executives | Alliance partners | Trades associations |
Your co-workers | Suppliers | The press |
Your team | Lenders | Interest groups |
Customers | Analysts | The public |
Prospective customers | Future recruits | The community |
Your family | Key contributors | Key advisors |
Note:
Stakeholders can be both organizations and people, but ultimately you must communicate with people. So, be sure to identify the correct individual stakeholders within a stakeholder organization.
2. Prioritize Your Stakeholders
You may now have a list of people and organizations that are affected by your work. Some of these may have the power either to block that work or to advance it. Some may be interested in what you are doing, while others may not care, so you need to work out who you need to prioritize.
You can map out your stakeholders, and classify them according to their power over your work and their interest in it, on a Power/Interest Grid (see figure 1). (Our Interactive Screen App makes this step easy to accomplish, or you can download a template of the grid by clicking on the "download template" button at the end of this article.)
The position that you allocate to a stakeholder on the grid shows you the actions you need to take with them:
- High power, highly interested people (Manage Closely): you must fully engage these people, and make the greatest efforts to satisfy them.
- High power, less interested people (Keep Satisfied): put enough work in with these people to keep them satisfied, but not so much that they become bored with your message.
- Low power, highly interested people (Keep Informed): adequately inform these people, and talk to them to ensure that no major issues are arising. People in this category can often be very helpful with the detail of your project.
- Low power, less interested people (Monitor): again, monitor these people, but don’t bore them with excessive communication.
Your boss, for example, likely has high power and influence over your projects and high interest in them. Your family, however, may have high interest in them, but won’t have power over them.
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3. Understand Your Key Stakeholders
You now need to discover how your key stakeholders feel about your project. You also need to work out how best to engage them, and how to communicate with them.
Questions that can help you understand your stakeholders include:
- What financial or emotional interest do they have in the outcome of your work? Is it positive or negative?
- What motivates them most of all?
- What information do they want from you, and what is the best way of communicating with them?
- What is their current opinion of your work? Is it based on good information?
- Who influences their opinions generally, and who influences their opinion of you? Do some of these influencers therefore become important stakeholders in their own right?
- If they aren’t likely to be positive, what will win them around to support your project?
- If you don't think that you’ll be able to win them around, how will you manage their opposition?
- Who else might be influenced by their opinions? Do these people become stakeholders in their own right?
You can ask your stakeholders these questions directly. People are often quite open about their views, and asking for their opinions is often the first step in building a successful relationship with them.
A simple way to summarize the level of backing you have from your stakeholders is to color-code them. For example, show advocates and supporters in green, blockers and critics in red, and those who are neutral in orange. See the diagram, below.
In figure 2, you can see that a lot of effort needs to be put into persuading Piers and Maureen of the benefits of the project, while Janet and Amanda also need to be managed effectively as powerful supporters.
Example of a Stakeholder Analysis
You can create your own example of Stakeholder Analysis at work – whether for your current role, a job you want to do, or a new project.
Conduct a full stakeholder analysis. Ask yourself whether you are communicating as effectively as you should be with your stakeholders. What actions can you take to get more from your supporters or win over your critics?
Add your stakeholders to our free Interactive Screen App below. You can move your stakeholders around, or change their color, depending on what your analysis reveals.
Adapted from Mendelow, A.L. (1981). 'Environmental Scanning - The Impact of the Stakeholder Concept,' ICIS 1981 Proceedings, 20.
Key Points
As the work you do and the projects you run become more important, you will affect more and more people. Some of these people have the power to undermine your projects and your position. Others may be strong supporters of your work.
Stakeholder Management is the process by which you identify your key stakeholders and win their support. Stakeholder Analysis is the first stage of this, where you identify and start to understand your most important stakeholders.
The first stage of this is to brainstorm who your stakeholders are. The next step is to prioritize them by power and interest, and to plot this on a Power/Interest grid. The final stage is to get an understanding of what motivates your stakeholders and how you need to win them around.
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