Three levels of stakeholder engagement planning… four if you count mine

I was discussing stakeholder engagement with a client recently and they asked me whether a full-on stakeholder engagement plan was actually worth the effort. Good question, I thought.

Certainly a stakeholder engagement plan is always part of any communications strategy that I develop. But of all the elements I think this is the trickiest one.

Why? Because it’s hard to do it well and simply. Most companies I’ve come across recognise the importance of engaging stakeholders but don’t know how best to go about it. A few others have had a go and then lost interest as other priorities take up their time.

Too simple and it won’t work; too detailed and it’s time-consuming and a pain in the proverbial.

So why bother?

Something is going to be different in the future. You need to tell people about it. If they have a role to play in this future, you need them to tell you what they think of it. So far so obvious, maybe.

But the value of stakeholder work is that it seeks out right at the beginning those people who aren’t front of mind but whom you ignore at your peril. Approaching them only once you become aware they are a potential showstopper means you have to go through the whole story with them – plus there is the added risk that they are miffed you are only just speaking to them now or wary because it’s all gone on without them so far.

What’s the solution?

Here’s a suggestion that you can tailor to most situations.

Level 1 – I’ll skip through this because you’ve probably done it (or similar) before… 

• Run a session with as many interested parties as you can muster and come up with as many possible stakeholders as you can – don’t dismiss any at this stage 
• Now you need to analyse or map them. Lots of ways to do this: suggest you start with the simple (1) high or low power/influence versus (2) high or low level of interest (you can refine later if you want – see below). Stick ’em in the appropriate quadrant
• Step back and review – chances are that everyone is aware of the high/high quadrant. It’s the high influence/low level of interest you need to focus on – plus of course any stakeholders that had been forgotten up until now
• Agree what action should be taken for all stakeholders. At the high/high end, this might be a briefing session for a specific group (who’s going to do that and when?) while at the low/low end it might be an intranet news article to keep people up to speed

Level 2 – variations on a theme

• If you want to go to the next level of refinement, you can do further analysis of each group and look at their  size and position relative to each other. Just gives you a better understanding of the overall stakeholder landscape and the size of the task
• Alternatively, you can go for a different sort of mapping that is particularly suitable for individual stakeholders rather than stakeholder groups. Rather than the four-quadrant tool suggested above you can look at the level of impact on them versus their current level of commitment to the change. One tool I’ve used shows three levels of impact (high, medium, low) and six levels of commitment: resistance, compliance, agreement, personal buy-in, personal participation and full commitment
• When you place people in here then review it will be clear where you need to focus your efforts (anyone in the resistance/high impact column is an obvious one)
• It’s worth mentioning at this stage that the relationship with individual stakeholders needs to be managed at an appropriate level. If you need to work on a Board member to shift him/her along the commitment axis you’ll need to persuade someone of equal seniority who is directly involved in the change to go speak with them

Level 3 – here’s the rub

• This is all useful and a good start if you haven’t done it before. But there’s a big but…
• To do this really well you also need to look at where they are compared to where you want them to be – people don’t stay in the same place, and indeed they shouldn’t if you are expending some effort in engaging them
• So this type of stakeholder plan needs to account for their current level of engagement and your desired level of engagement for them. Interestingly, you sometimes find that there are some people you would actually like to be less engaged
• And having done that, you need to re-visit the plan regularly to see what progress (or not) is being made and take action as appropriate (and track those actions)

You can end up with a mega-spreadsheet that covers all of this and if there is appetite to review this regularly within the group then that’s great. Alternatively you can review it on your tod and highlight any concerns with the appropriate people.  Personally I most often go for a lighter touch and maintain a fairly simple stakeholder contact tracker. It lists all the stakeholders and stakeholder groups, then has columns for who last contacted them, when and how. Then at least I can see pretty quickly if we have dropped the ball.

Next time I’ll share some thoughts on how to achieve that engagement….