A smart approach to stakeholder engagement

Every project manager – especially those who are at an early stage in their career – knows that engaging with stakeholders can be daunting. You must figure out not only which stakeholders are most important to the success of your project, but also who its champions and detractors are.

And what about those invisible stakeholders who hold real influence? It’s one thing to be presented with a list of names on paper, but quite another to know who you need to spend your attention on and how stakeholders connect with each other in the messy real world.

It’s all about the bigger picture

This stuff matters. Projects are about people – and knowing who holds decision-making power and how you can tap into this influence can make all the difference to successful delivery and outcomes. Having the ability to view your project from all its stakeholders’ perspectives, and therefore appreciate the bigger picture, can be a big help, argue consultants Ian Cribbes ChPP and Phil Macey, co-authors of the upcoming APM Short Guide How to see connections between stakeholders using systems thinking.

“The stakeholder situation is messy and complicated. Stakeholders are not machines, but people who react differently to circumstances. They have different values, cultures, backgrounds and opinions,” they say.

“Systems thinking is a way of understanding complex situations by looking at the whole system, rather than reducing it to its individual components. It looks for connections between things and the wider environment, and it assists in seeing a situation from the perspective of others and where friction or conflict might lie, which makes it the perfect tool for getting stakeholder engagement right.”

Does this sound useful? Then here are some tips to putting it into practice:

Identify who your stakeholders are. On paper, these are those formally identified with the project and those affected by it, but there are also the hidden stakeholders who might hold influence or power, but who you’ll only discover once you get to know who is involved.
Ask questions. How does each stakeholder influence the project? What are their roles and motivations? Who do they interact with? Who holds the decision-making power? Where do frictions lie? You can do this by asking some specific questions (mentioned in the APM Short Guide) that will shed light on what the stakeholders think the project is about and what it will achieve, versus the reality of the situation.
Visualise what you’ve identified. Simply use sticky notes on a white board and draw the relationships between stakeholders. You’ll quickly spot where the connections between stakeholders lie, where points of conflict might exist and which stakeholders are the important connectors.
Uncover the issues. Create a similar chart with sticky notes on a white board about the issues surrounding the project. Who are the supporters or blockers of your project?
Prioritise building relationships with the important connectors among your stakeholders. Identify three to five priority stakeholders to engage with first, then as the life cycle of the project progresses, focus in on the stakeholders who are particularly important to the success of the project, before zooming out to the bigger picture.

The APM Short Guide gives 12 questions that can be used to ask stakeholders about their views and beliefs and spot tensions between opposing perspectives, which allows you to compare the expectations each has versus yours as the project manager, and also how expectations differ between stakeholders. The questions cover four areas:

What is the project all about?
Where are the necessary resources and power located?
Where is the required expertise and experience, and is it available?
Can the project’s outcomes be justified and defended?

This framework will help you look at the project and the stakeholders as a whole and start to see the different perspectives. The questions can be used to explore and evaluate the situation, check findings from one group of stakeholders with another group, and check the motivation of different groups to identify potential points of friction. What you find out can prompt you to further explore what needs to be resolved or what action needs to be taken.

Rapport = influence

Rapport is useful for understanding the politics of a project and uncovering issues that might be important to a stakeholder. Remember, the success of your project hinges on the relationships you create with every stakeholder and understanding their needs and priorities.

“If you don’t build rapport with your stakeholders, you’re not going to get anywhere. Once you’ve built rapport and they can trust you, then you know things will run more smoothly,” says Cribbes.

“You’ve got to be able to build a relationship in order to influence someone, especially if you’re a contractor and you’ve got a lot of work to do,” agrees Macey. Take time to build a relationship with them and have regular chats, whether that’s a coffee on-site or a Teams catch-up call. Engagement is about being a constant presence, even if it’s just to say everything is going smoothly or to ask what their thoughts and concerns are while you get to understand who their connections are with, and to make sure that there are no blockages to the project moving forward.

“I’ve often come out of meetings and thought: why was it so hard in that meeting? And behind the scenes, there may have been some political actions. Internal politics is huge in projects,” adds Macey.

Also, if you’re new to project work, don’t be afraid of a stakeholder disagreeing with you. Try not to take it personally, and don’t ignore what they’ve said. “You’ve got to get past that. It’s not an affront to you. It’s a disagreement with the change that you’re trying to bring forward,” says Cribbes.

The APM Short Guide How to see connections between stakeholders using systems thinking is coming soon.