Managing stakeholder commitments means getting the people who said yes at kickoff to still act like it when budget or schedule pressure shows up. Most of that work happens early. A commitment nobody revisits slides back into bare compliance, and that is where trust starts to slip. You have a lot going on and barely have enough time in the day as it is. You’re probably looking at this post wondering what the heck this is even for.
We get it. Stakeholder engagement just seems like more fluff. But we promise it’s not. If anything, a lack of intentional stakeholder engagement can really wrench your operation. It can make you seem untrustworthy to those who have to have faith in you the most, which will slowly dissolve your project until it’s just a bitter-sweet memory.
This post will walk you through the basics and explain why this principle is so important while giving you tips and strategies for improving your stakeholder relationships in real-time.
What is Stakeholder Management?
Before we can add new ideas, we have to refresh your memory of the old ones. Stakeholder management is the process of monitoring, controlling, and organizing the relationships and expectations of those involved or impacted by the project. In practice, this looks like a lot of influencing different groups but not manipulating, as some like to think.
The key to stakeholder management is managing expectations and needs. When you let these run wild, everyone can suffer.
So many of the processes and practices involved in project management can be hard to discuss because they are so theoretical. Until plans are executed, so much of what we discuss is just paper, data, and ideas. Stakeholder management is no exception, but when you evaluate project success, accuracy, and profitability, it’s not hard to see how poor stakeholder management might negatively impact those metrics.
This practice is extremely useful in minimizing risks presented to the project in the form of uncontrolled expectations and needs, which anyone with management experience will know is a very real thing.
What is stakeholder engagement & why it’s important?
But what does “engagement” have to do with it? Stakeholder engagement is all about identifying how you manage the expectations, needs, and interests of each stakeholder or stakeholder group involved in your project. If you are on a small project with few interests, stakeholder management might boil down to weekly meetings with the owners and daily meetings with the team.
Yet, with any increase in size or scope, the process of “engaging” people gets way more complicated.
Successful stakeholder management entirely relies upon successful stakeholder engagement, which depends on implementation and commitment. So often, managing stakeholders just looks like writing down who is in what position and what power they have. That kind of stagnation promotes issues between the expectations of the project and what gets delivered.
That “list it and leave it” attitude also places too much emphasis on the organizational structure and not the political or unofficial structure. It assesses commitment to the project but no plan for developing additional commitment.
The ability to plan how you’ll cultivate commitment is crucial and makes stakeholder engagement worthwhile. You create an accurate and intuitive plan based on the following four principles.
- Bottom-Up
- Continuous Updates
- Process-Focused
- Sensitivity
Each of these principles is explained in detail below.
1. Bottom-Up
When working out how to engage stakeholders, you should start by considering those with the most power and interest, then work your way down. But that isn’t always the best way.
Sometimes, you should flip it around and prioritize those most affected by the project, not those with the most power. Stakeholder management, at its worst, is a list that goes to die on a shelf, but at its best, it’s aligned with good stakeholder engagement, meaning you have to engage everyone.
Understanding the needs and expectations of those most likely to be ignored gives you better awareness of the political environment of the project. With that information, you are in a much better position to manage potential risks to the project that come from “the outside” or the bottom.
And let’s be honest, companies rarely ask “the little guy” about their experience or needs, even though those groups tend to be highly influential.
2. Continuous Updates
Stakeholder engagement, or how you engage with stakeholders, needs to remain flexible and change with the project. As often as necessary, you and your team must look at that list of stakeholders, your map of their positions, and how you’ve communicated with them and ADD any new information you’ve collected.
Also, note any changes to the political structure of the project, as those are often quite different from the organizational (or official) structure of the project.
3. Process-Focused
This is a marathon, not a sprint. That means you need to manage your resources and not burn anyone out, including yourself. Having a straightforward, clean process for handling communication, engagement, and management from your perspective is a great way not to hate your life.
It allows you to understand how you’ll engage the team and stakeholders, giving you space to evaluate groups adequately and clarity in deciding how to engage with different people as the project goes on. On top of that, having a good process can help you cast a larger net, giving more people more room to participate.
4. Sensitivity
Because the politics of the project so easily sway the project, you’re plans and processes need to stay flexible to that as well. In that same vein, you are collecting a lot of personal data during this process, so you must be very careful of how and with whom you share that information.
Understanding Influence
Each party has some level of influence over the project. Some have a lighter pull than others, but the point remains.
As the project manager, you must use organizational tools, logistical understanding, and management skills/influence to complete the job. That bit about “influence” is always seen in a strange light. People tend to see it as something you have. Your years of experience, age, and position equate to your influence.
But influence can also be something you do. A project goes better for everyone when the management sees this as something to be done, something to earn. Stakeholder engagement is much easier when this attitude is taken from the get-go.
Commitment vs. Compliance
Another concept we should discuss is the difference between having someone’s compliance and having someone’s commitment. Project managers are the face of all the things a stakeholder needs to accept and do. There will be discomfort, especially if that stakeholder doesn’t have the most fantastic opinion of the project.
And at this point, you have two options.
You can 1) use your assumed influence to push people to comply with your needs and expectations, or 2) you can cultivate commitment.
Compliance is very shallow. It doesn’t do much, have much power, or last long. Commitment, on the other hand, is incredible. It’s founded on trust, mutual understanding, and respect, which are all things a project manager needs to navigate the unstable environment that is a project.
Influence and commitment are also based on the value offer you hold as the project manager. Few think about what that looks like from the stakeholder perspective, which is a mistake. Without understanding how your requests, needs, and general “vibe” strikes a stakeholder, you could open yourself up for a misunderstanding you never intended.
Simply put, they don’t know you, so how can they trust you?
How We Map Power and Interest
A good stakeholder management plan covers all of the following:
- The influence of each individual stakeholder or group
- The interest level
- The details surrounding the project manager’s communication with stakeholders, including the frequency, channel, and type of information shared
A tip for stakeholder mapping we always recommend is placing each stakeholder in one of four quadrants:
- High power, high interest
- High power, low interest
- Low power, high interest
- Low power, low interest
Those who are later determined to be positive or negative stakeholders can be color-coded to display that difference.
High Power, High Interest
If their bearing on the project is positive, you’ll need to look after their interests and needs. They are important to the project’s safety, and you’ll need to ensure they know that. You cannot ignore them.
When it comes to high-powered negative stakeholders, they can be really dangerous to the project, so you must find ways to sway them. At the very least, you should attempt to relax their disdain. Sometimes resistance to projects can be caused by a lack of information or poorly sourced/incorrect information.
High Power, Low Interest
These types of stakeholders are dangerous. Any change in their level of interest can drastically change their impact on the project. Try to understand what is important to them. Be proactive about communicating changes to them because it’s possible that other types of negative stakeholders will go to them to block momentum.
Low Power, High Interest
When this class of stakeholders is also positive, they can be incredible allies. Treat them with care and give them information as often as possible.
But if they are negative, you must be careful not to dismiss them on account of their low power. That position could change, and then you’ll have lost your opportunity to make this relationship positive or, at the very least, neutral. Negative stakeholders with low power cannot take all your time, and some will try with all their calls and mile-long emails.
Low Power, Low Interest
Keep everyone in the loop to some extent. Ignoring anyone, even the little guys, is not in your best interest. Make sure this group is regularly updated and has access to current information.
5 Strategies For Better Stakeholder Engagement
We believe you have to earn the right to influence stakeholders and team members, rather than assume you have that right. You do that by paying a higher price than passive participation in stakeholder management. You earn it by committing to them.
How you earn that right, that trust is what we discuss in the five strategies below.
1. Reputation
It sounds funny, but the importance of your personal brand (also known as your reputation) cannot be dismissed. Another way to look at the concept of a personal brand is the power of your promise. Your personal brand is representative of your guaranteed delivery (or lack thereof).
A strong personal brand can open up doors and hand you opportunities that escalate over the course of your career. A weaker or unstable personal brand will close doors and limit what things come your way. The way you need to look at your brand is like your greatest asset. And like any asset, its value can either increase or decrease over time. You’ll see it deplete if you don’t work to improve it.
If you’re realizing you’ve never really considered or worked on your personal brand, know that there are three ingredients.
- Capability – how able your colleagues perceive you to be.
- Character – how you handle yourself in official and unofficial capacities.
- Commitment – your determination or lack thereof to see the project completed within the expected standard of the organization.
2. Understand Them
You have needs, expectations, and goals when you go into a project. You know what you’d like to see and what tasks you value more than others. The trick to good stakeholder engagement is understanding all those aspects of the people you want to influence.
Not only does that help develop your connection, but that also helps you detect more risks to the project than if you just asked them some questions and left it that.
You have to recognize that every participant in the project had a goal in mind that may or may not align with yours. You can mix those goals with yours and tap into their desires by understanding what they’re looking for. You can also use the SCARF method, which includes
- Status
- Certainty
- Autonomy
- Relatedness
- Fairness
Keep in mind that during every interaction, you either express or seem to lack each of these elements.
3. Multiply vs. Diminish
Most people will say that there are two types of bosses in the world, and we’d have to agree. There are those who multiply and those who diminish.
Multipliers do just that. They value the powers of the group, lift people up, and try to expand on their team’s strengths. Ultimately, they uplift the collective enabling individuals to unlock their potential. On the other hand, there are diminishers who do all of those things in the reverse.
They believe they are the smartest. They regularly tear people down, deter collaboration, limit team capabilities, and rarely look beyond their own talents and capabilities. You can see how this would rub stakeholders the wrong way.
Those who are the best at engaging stakeholders are multipliers, so do that. Lean on people, delegate, and look for opportunities to support and encourage growth. Compliment a job well done, and try to incite growth rather than always pointing out what people did wrong.
4. Your Thoughts Lead The Way
As the project manager, you end up making a lot of decisions. Each of them has an impact, sending a ripple effect through the rest of the project. But for stakeholders to be able to trust you to make those calls, you need to remain largely objective or unbiased.
The issue is that you are human, and that is almost impossible.
So, we encourage you to pay attention to your thoughts. Specifically, you need to watch how you think under stress. When we enter a rough patch, we tend to get more impulsive and cut a lot of context out of the situation. For example, when something goes wrong at school, and your kid seems to have made a big, reckless mistake, your brain starts yelling, “THIS IS BAD. THIS IS VERY BAD!”
That noise might cause you to snap at them when you don’t really mean to. You might have to remove yourself and calm down. During that cool-off period, you can regain your perspective and see that things aren’t as dire as you thought.
What happened above is a normal response to stress, changes, and unfamiliar territory that happens at work just as much as at home. We tend to let that first system decide how things will go and how we should respond, but that first system rarely takes in the whole situation. It simply can’t, so don’t force it to. You need to be curious, learn, and take in all necessary info well before you make a judgment. This was of being will dramatically improve stakeholder engagement.
5. Process vs. Event
No one said that this was easy. Also, no one said that this would be quick. As much as we’d like to wrap this whole process up in one meeting and call it a day, we can’t. Investing your time is part of earning the right to influence those around you. So, to do that, we recommend you do so in the following order.
- Connect with People. Start the conversation, introduce yourself, and get to know them. Learn about their background. Understand their needs and expectations by coming right out and asking what they are. Listen to everything.
- Show Up. You don’t want to open a line of communication and never use it, but you also don’t want to jump into business without building a foundational relationship. During this step, you can either command them (rarely works), persuade them to see your perspective or sell them, negotiate (find a compromise), or help them see their spot in the vision. We recommend you do less telling and more showing.
- Maintain. Understand that they are learning about you during every interaction. This step is about prolonging the previous one. You might help them change directions due to an unforeseen issue, reinforce what is working, and follow up with them.
Each idea we discussed in this section is often overlooked, and that just cannot be the case. When you invest in others, they will invest in you. Try to implement each of these steps into your stakeholder engagement process, and you’ll see huge improvements.
The Beginning Holds The Bulk of The Work
Your stakeholders’ influence is felt most during planning and again at closing, especially if they aren’t satisfied with you.
So, we will be honest and tell you that most of the stakeholder-related work happens at the beginning of the project. You are getting out there, collecting information, opening up new channels, refreshing old ones, and more. But, sadly, that is where many of our fellow management staff think the line ends.
We recommend the following tactics to prevent an aggressive drop-off in stakeholder engagement.
- Surveys – Gather information from a large pool of stakeholders (specifically stakeholders of all different kinds).
- Interviews – Meet with high-consequence stakeholders individually or in small groups to best understand their needs and expectations.
- Share Your Vision – Show people why you do what you do and show them their place in the end result.
- Follow Your Stakeholder Management Plan – especially the one mapped above.
- Hold “Town Halls” – Think of these as a press conference for your team and stakeholders to get an idea of what’s ahead, including issues, concerns, priorities, etc. Encourage the conversation, questions, and concerns to be aired there. You can do this at the beginning and end of the planning stage (or project).
- Curate Participation – You don’t need to include everyone, so you should consult other members of management regarding who to have in which event.
Stakeholder engagement is technically simple, but do not mistake this for easy. This is another branch of effective risk management that can benefit both your project and your career.
How We Hold Commitment Through the Middle and the Close
In the middle of your project, you’ll see a dip. Stakeholder influence relaxes a little at this point because momentum is much harder to shift than plans. Updating is the name of the game at this stage.
For those whose approval and input you have to receive, you should be meeting with them weekly, even daily. Make a concentrated effort to update investors, clients, management, and contractors that need information about 1) the current state of the project and 2) what considerations or hurdles lie ahead.
When the project is in full swing, you’ll be busy dealing with issues raised by negative stakeholders and keeping positive ones on side. Double-check with people and make sure their concerns are heard.
Closing is a tentative process. Everyone is gearing up for the next thing while trying to ensure they get what they want. Stakeholders being handed the (hopefully) completed project are checking off their lists to be sure they got everything they want.
End this part on a good note. Check in and define a clear closing or end date, whether that is the day the ribbon is cut or the day the final product is handed to the client.
Don’t Dismiss Stakeholder Engagement
Once you’ve laid out your plans, you need to follow them. Don’t waste your time, effort, and energy by letting your well-thought-out plans mold on the shelf like old bread. Setting up tasks and schedules (as best you can) ahead of time can be extremely useful here.
Lay out your plans in weeks. If the project is ten weeks long, assign yourself different types of communication, meetings, and tasks each week as needed. Then, on Monday (or whichever day you start your week), look at what is required and schedule it.
Stay ahead of stakeholder engagement, and try to be the first one to reach out as often as possible. Schedule your emails. Do whatever you have to do to show up for your stakeholders. Everyone will be glad you did.
Stakeholder work fails on capital projects when commitments stay verbal and nobody on the owner side holds the plan against competing agendas. That is exactly where owner’s representation and project control earns its keep, before ground breaks, not after the room fractures. Start with Construction Project Management That Thinks Before It Builds.
Let New Ideas Find You
Here at A.McBeth, Inc., we know it’s better to open our thinking caps, receive new ideas, and use them occasionally than act like we know everything. Project management is pretty uncomfortable with that attitude, which is why we are offering up new (and old) ideas all month long, so sign up to be notified the next time one pops up. You won’t want to miss it!
