Liaising with stakeholders

To manage stakeholders, you need to be aware of the categories of stakeholders you may encounter in your role as a team manager and leader and understand the relationships between you and these stakeholders. 

Who are your stakeholders

A business stakeholder is someone with an interest or concern in your service who can affect or be affected by the successes and failures of that business. That interest may be linked to the financial stake they hold in the business (i.e. whatever the business is monetarily worth to them) – the size of the stake will dictate their level of interest. 

Likewise, a stakeholder’s financial stake in a business might dictate their level of influence over the business. 

The four main types of stakeholders are: 

• Internal stakeholders – people within your team and organisation, for example, team members (educators, chef, cleaners), team leaders, managers from other relevant departments and, depending on the project, company directors and owners. 
• External stakeholders – people outside of your organisation, for example, families and children, suppliers, investors or shareholders, regulators, funding body or government officials, subcontractors such as incursion representatives, parent committee and union representatives 
• Indirect Stakeholders – external stakeholders, such as investors, community members, and potential families of service. These stakeholders are concerned, most of all, with the finished product or outcome, as opposed to the process behind it. 
• Direct Stakeholders – internal stakeholders, such as employees, team leaders and managers, who are directly affected by projects and who directly affect projects 

Direct stakeholders are responsible for the day-to-day activities related to a project. 

The type and level of interest and influence held by stakeholders largely depend on the type of stakeholder. Those with the most interest are known as ‘primary stakeholders’, and those with less interest are known as ‘secondary stakeholders’, but there are other classifications too. 

Understanding needs and expectations

No matter how diverse the stakeholders are, stakeholder relationships are formal, strategic and mutually beneficial connections between two or more stakeholders in a business process. In other words, they are business relationships. 

These relationships vary in purpose and nature and govern the full range of internal and external business transactions and processes and transactions between the organisation and its clients. 

Different types of stakeholders tend not to have the same expectations and requirements for a project and may not require (or offer) the same support. Some may want a different outcome from what has been agreed upon, and others may have their own agendas for the outcomes and processes of projects or work. 

You must foster healthy business relationships with all of your stakeholders, as this will help you understand what to expect from them, what you can ask of them, what they may ask of you and how you are required to engage with them. 

Stakeholder management is the process of identifying stakeholders’ level of influence and interest in your projects, determining their needs and expectations and planning how to engage stakeholders.

By plotting your stakeholders on a grid that describes their level of interest and power, you can determine what needs, and expectations might exist about communications and relations with that stakeholder moving forward. 

Watch

Watch the video Stakeholder Analysis: Winning Support for Your Projects by MindToolsVideos to learn more about stakeholder analysis. Duration: 3:11

Once you have plotted your stakeholders on a grid according to their power and interest, you will have a clearer idea of their needs and expectations about communication: 

Stakeholder management and stakeholder engagement are critically important for project delivery but are often thought of as fringe activities – this is a mistake. 

Stakeholders can be understood, and communications with them can be planned, but they can rarely be actively manipulated or persuaded (as the term ‘management’ sometimes can imply), and as you will learn, they all have minds of their own. 

Note: The key to working with your stakeholders is to understand their differences and tailor your communication with them to be effective ((i.e. fostering your business relationships with them). Remember, they are all just people. 

The key stakeholder relationships you may need to develop in your role as a team manager and leader are: 

• Employee Relationships 
• Customer Relationships (families, children and community members) 
• Partnerships 
• Investor Relationships 

Watch

Watch the video How to build and maintain successful business relationships, Robert Half Recruitment, to learn tips about building business relationships. Duration: 3:27

Gain stakeholder support

Stakeholders can help to shape a project, and their opinions matter. So, it is vital to identify all stakeholders at the start of a project and communicate project details to them to gain their support. 

You must ensure they understand the project’s vision throughout its development and completion and that all relevant stakeholders agree on project deliverables and role definitions. You may need their support and input throughout the work, including agreeing with them on what the finished project will look like. 

Gaining stakeholder support may help you obtain more resources for the team. When changes are needed, for example, when deliverables or timelines change, get consensus from your stakeholders on how to handle the changes. 

Note: Anticipate stakeholders’ reactions to events as the work proceeds. Engage them throughout the project and keep them up to date. Consider different groups of stakeholders, their own goals and how they might think the project will impact them. 

Build employee relationships

Employee relationships are the strategic connections between a service and its employees. 

It is by virtue of these connections that all intra- organisational transactions take place. If these relations are flawed or uncultivated, business processes and productivity will likely suffer greatly. 

Maintaining healthy employee relations is central to optimal organisational performance. Never underestimate the potential of internal stakeholders, company employees and your team to influence project outcomes. 

The following table details key strategies for building positive relationships between you and your organisation’s employees: 

Watch

Watch the video Building authentic relationships with employees – your practice ain’t perfect -  Joes Mull, BossBetter with Joe Mull. Duration: 5:05 

As project manager and leader, you are responsible for ensuring that a project’s stakeholders get an accurate and positive impression of the work being carried out and of the people pulling the strings and doing the work. Your role also includes exemplifying the organisation’s principles and enhancing the organisation’s image for all stakeholders. 

Resource

Read

• 4 ways to impress your stakeholders at your next roadmap meeting from Indicative for valuable insights into how you can impress stakeholders in project meetings. 
• Building a leadership brand from Harvard Business Review to understand the effect of leadership brands to inspire employers and managers.  

Exceptional leaders develop general leadership capabilities and contribute to the organisation’s leadership brand, demonstrating the skills and characteristics that fulfil the customers’ and investors’ expectations. 

The following list details a few more tips and points about positively impressing your stakeholders: 

• Enhancing stakeholders’ impressions of a project requires effective, transparent communication. Give them the information they need when they need it, in the way that they prefer to receive it and be willing and ready to listen to their viewpoints and answer their questions. 
• When stakeholders have a positive impression of a project and the work, they will feel involved and valued and more motivated to support you and your team. 
• Try to be an ambassador for your project and organisation in the eyes and minds of all stakeholders. 
• Many of your routine project leadership tasks are critical for engaging with stakeholders, for example, project reporting and documentation, attending various meetings, making presentations and providing background information about concepts featured in work. 

You are the link between each stakeholder and the project itself – remember this!

To ensure that all of your services stakeholders ‘buy in’ to the potential of their stake or interest in your activities and the benefits you can offer them, you must apply a proactive and strategic approach to engaging with your stakeholders. 

The idea is to eliminate opposition (e.g. from parties who have a negative interest in your brand) and garner support in your endeavours. In this regard, a proactive strategy usually does the trick. However, there are times when a reactive approach to stakeholder engagement is more appropriate. 

A proactive approach minimises problems before they happen, whereas a reactive approach means responding to events after they happen. 

As part of project planning, you must make several decisions about communication with stakeholders. 

Communicating proactively means keeping stakeholders up to date, inviting their involvement and offering opportunities for them to ask questions and provide opinions. In other words, two-way communication is informed by your initial words and actions. 

Proactive communication means more time is spent on planning, preparing and conducting communication tasks, and less time is spent dealing with misunderstandings and objections because you are informing the direction of communication before making contact with stakeholders. 

Reactive communication is what will be required in response to an emergency, accident or crisis. 

When managers or leaders communicate with stakeholders regularly and proactively, the stakeholders’ reactions to receiving news about something going wrong are usually more supportive and action-focused because they have been fully informed and involved up to that point. 

Effective engagement

Public speaker Marcus Alexander Velazquez suggests effective communication is when one person, in a minimal amount of time, successfully passes on information that is accurately understood by another person without causing any emotional stress. Time is our greatest effort, and we can conserve our time by effectively communicating. 

The need for this type of efficient, pain-free communication during stakeholder engagement could not be more pronounced, as high-ranking stakeholders are invariably pressed for time and patience, while lower-ranking stakeholders generally crave simple clarity and need to get back to work as soon as possible. 

Some of the effects of inefficient and ‘burdensome’ stakeholder engagement include: 

• Productivity will drop, and money will be lost 
• Stakeholders will lose interest, and you will lose their support 
• Stakeholders may ask for staff to be replaced. 

Watch

Watch the video The Art of Effective Communication | Marcus Alexander Velazquez | TEDxWolcottSchool to gain more insight into the art of effective communication. Duration: 12:07 

When communicating with stakeholders, do not focus on more than one thing at a time. Think about how you intend to explain something beforehand and check your own grasp of the matter before attempting to communicate it. 

Effective communication involves: 

• Thinking skills 
• Speaking skills 
• Non-verbal skills 
• Listening skills. 

A helpful rule of thumb to keep in mind is that if you cannot explain something in simple terms, you will likely not have a firm understanding of it. 

Using the senses

Absorbing information occurs through our five senses: taste, touch, smell, hearing and sight. 

When presenting information, proposals and concepts to your stakeholders, it can be very useful to remember that the total information absorption via the five senses is divided approximately as follows: 

It is important to understand how much information is gained through the activation of different senses, as this should influence how presentations are developed and delivered to stakeholders – appeal to the senses to truly reach the minds and hearts of your stakeholders. 

Note: According to statistics, information is best retained when received through hearing and sight, but with sight being so predominant, it may be a good idea to deliver as much information as possible, and complex information in particular, via visual media. 

As discussed in the previous section, a strategic, proactive approach is vital to maintaining effective stakeholder engagement, as is having optimal, open communication with all stakeholders at all times. We will now examine the strategy behind that proactive approach. 

Communication Planning and Design 

Your stakeholder engagement strategy is effectively a communication plan that drives daily events and actions. It should be designed to make the best use of available and appropriate communication methods and technology. 

When developing a communication plan, you must consider the following: 

Creating a cooperative framework 

The communication plan aims to create a cooperative framework between the team and other stakeholders, manage differing expectations about the project and ensure everyone’s ongoing support. 

Determining specifics 

Developing engagement and communication strategies includes determining the following: 

• With whom communication must be established (stakeholder types/groups) 
• The purpose of communicating with them 
• What information needs to be given to them 
• How often must stakeholders be engaged (e.g. daily, weekly, monthly, milestone-specific) 
• Appropriate communication methods for events and items (e.g. face to face, phone calls, emails, online updates, online Q&A sessions, social media posts, newsletters, surveys) 
• Appropriate methods for formal project reporting 
• Requirements for team members raising issues (e.g. routine periodic reporting and logging issues, email for urgent work matters, the process for personal issues and conflict between team members). 

Developing a strategic plan 

Developing the communication plan allows you to look at relevant organisation processes and policies and ensure that requirements for the project can be met within their scope so you can identify and address any gaps beforehand, avoiding possible dangerous missteps down the line. 

In summary, the communication plan describes how the communication process will be implemented: 

• What are the proposed communication events and schedule? 
• Who will be responsible for each event? 
• Which methods are to be used for specified events? 

Once the plan is agreed upon with stakeholders, it becomes a blueprint for carrying out the ongoing communication effort. 

As a team leader, you should monitor the communication tasks and plan to know whether any additional communication may be needed if something unexpected happens. 

The rules of engagement 

You should consider and apply these rules of legality, timeliness and consistency regardless of the type or group of stakeholders you are dealing with because all of your stakeholders matter to your business. 

Communication methods and mediums 

You can ensure that the appropriate methods and mediums are chosen for effective stakeholder communication by: 

Discussing needs with stakeholders 

Discuss stakeholders’ needs and wishes with them and respect what they tell you. 

If it is not practical to use a requested method (e.g. face to face), explain why it cannot be used and arrange for basic training and support for your preferred method for the impacted stakeholder/s. 

Selecting the most appropriate communication method 

Make the most of the latest technologies in communication and information transfer. However, consider the availability of your chosen technology for all stakeholders, as well as its convenience, safety, practicality and usability. 

Also, when selecting technologies, information is far more effective when relayed through a combination of sensory mediums. Consider how the senses are used to absorb information, and ensure the technologies you use incorporate the senses (especially sight and hearing) to help deliver your messages effectively. 

One of the most innovative practices for communication with stakeholders in an Early Childhood service recently has been the change from hard copy children’s portfolios to online platform portfolios with Apps such as Storypark. 

Inviting feedback 

Invite and allow constructive feedback from stakeholders and be prepared to change communication methods if practicable. This can be done through verbal conversations, official surveys or email surveys. 

Following up with stakeholders 

Follow up with stakeholders to determine the effectiveness of your communication. 

Ensure that selected methods allow for accuracy and consistency of message delivery while meeting requirements for version control and file storage in case you plan to use these methods frequently. 

The process for handling unresolved stakeholder issues is different depending on the type of stakeholder that raises the issue. 

For unresolved issues raised by team members: 

• Log and communicate work-related issues to your team and your leadership where relevant. 
• Address solvable performance issues and team conflict promptly and appropriately. 
• Estimate and communicate the possible impact that any remaining unresolved issues may have on the project and its outcomes. 
• Follow up with management and inform other stakeholders as agreed and as appropriate. 
• For unresolved issues raised by other stakeholders: 
• Throughout the entire project process, ensure you log and communicate issues that arise. 
• Investigate these issues and any motives or influences behind them. 
• Seek relevant advice from line or senior management if necessary. 
• If other factors prevent or delay issue resolution, log the details of the issue and refer it to the line or senior management for further action.