Successful stakeholder engagement – you’ve planned it; how do you achieve it?

Identifying key stakeholders and stakeholder groups is one thing – in some ways that’s the easy part. What’s much harder is successfully engaging them on a continuing basis.  I think stakeholder work is similar to doing strategy – breathe a big sigh of relief once the plan has been done and then get on with the day job…

But nasty things happen if we lose sight of stakeholders. What’s that stat about how many programmes are regarded as being successfully completed? I’ve seen a few estimates over the years but all of them say the percentage is pretty low. I’d bet that a lot of it is due to losing track of where the stakeholders are at.

So what can we do about it? Here are some things:

• Treat stakeholder groups and individual stakeholders differently. Since we can’t communicate with everyone individually we can gather some people into a group and work out how best to keep them informed – and maintain a dialogue if necessary. This is not going to be the one-on-one relationship that you need for the really important stakeholders (the ones whose individual support you really need for success)
• Use a range of channels for your stakeholder groups – a mixture of one-way comms that provide the consistency of message and two-way so that they get tailored messages that are specific to their situation (answering the ‘what-does-it-mean-for-me’ question)
• Enlist the experts to maintain the one-on-one relationships. This can be easier said than done, since both parties are likely to be busy. You can facilitate it by seeing if you can provide them with a good reason (latest update?) to maintain that contact – and it can be just a short phone call, it doesn’t need to be a big briefing session or anything time-consuming
• You can also use this call to ask your stakeholders what’s new at their end. They may not be aware that something changing in their world will have an impact on yours
• Match people up – for example, marketing people tend to have a different focus than the techies. And also, if there are technical changes, a techy is more likely to spot if there will be an impact on you (or vice versa)
• If your work is not already on the agenda of senior level meetings see if you can get a short update on there – even a half-pager that can be handed out if not read out. It’s better if you can have someone in there face-to-face but that’s not always possible
• Don’t rely on the fact that having stuff on the intranet or Sharepoint or whatever will keep everyone up to speed with progress. It won’t
• Keep re-visiting your stakeholder map to make sure that programme changes haven’t shifted where people sit on it. It’s often the case that things don’t quite go as expected, however much you try and manage risks or anticipate problems (sorry, challenges). You might find somebody has become more influential than you expected (e.g., there will be more of an impact in their area), and that’s dangerous to ignore. I’ve never worked on a programme that went from beginning to end as we expected it to, not ever ever
• Remember that it’s easier to get people’s attention at the beginning than some weeks down the line, when something else new and shiny has come along that may seem to be more interesting. That’s just human nature. See if you can find a different angle to bring something fresh (do an interview with one of the team?) – and this is where social media can help as well…

Anyway, hope some of that helps. As always, I’d be interested to know what you have found that works well – or didn’t if you’re happy to share!