Hope is Still not a Method - Stakeholder Management

Or why the stakeholder problem won't just go away if you keep your eyes closed long enough!

Some years ago Gordon R. Sullivan and Michael V. Harper wrote a book called "Hope Is Not a Method: What Business Leaders Can Learn from America's Army". It's a good book about strategic planning, but when I was reflecting on the problems of managing stakeholder commitment in change projects I was reminded of the cleverness of the title and its relevance to the way I see some change teams desperately trying to ignore stakeholders because managing them is just too hard.

All change projects are a failure in the middle

The fact is that change projects are simply not easy to manage and as this heading says, despite the best will in the world, all the talk of low hanging fruit and quick wins rarely produces the goods quite as soon as some key players would like to see it. As a consequence, if you want to avoid your change process becoming derailed at one of these critical points, it pays to maintain top cover so that if the flack flies you have powerful friends to weigh in on behalf of goodness and light! And that means that the concrete messiness of managing stakeholder commitment has to be accepted as an issue critical to success, even if it isn't as sexy as defining the perfect solution or building the new intranet.

Good, quick & cheap

At this point I'll let you into a critical trade secret: even changedrivers can't deliver miracles. Changing long held beliefs and attitudes doesn't happen overnight, you have to be in it for the long haul unless you don't really need their commitment. And as this heading suggests you need to think about what kind of change you are delivering, what you can afford and how quickly it needs to be delivered. You can only have two of the three, because 'good, quick & cheap' simply doesn't exist. So you can have good and quick, but not cheap, quick and cheap but not good and so on. Whatever you need to do, the stakeholders need to support the choice and will only do so through the skill of your commitment engineering.

Why should you bother with all that crap?

So why can't we just tell them how it's going to be? Well under certain circumstances you can just tell them, but you've got to know it's the right choice selected because of the circumstances. Why should you care?

The Risks

If you don't engage appropriately with stakeholders then you will put your entire change process at risk. The key opinion leaders will not engage and not communicate when you want them to. Those they influence will be asking questions like, 'Why would I follow you if I don't trust you or your motives?' Leading executives might support the logic of your business case initially but your support will die away and you will see them changing horses in mid-stream. Some very structured project managers follow what I call a 'label and checklist' approach, using the right language and ticking off the stakeholders as they go through motions of engaging them but it has about as much long term value in managing change risks as reading chicken entrails.

If your change process is in an industrial environment then the impact of the risks is likely to be substantially higher. This is especially true in Australia where the norm is closer to confrontation than the partnerships in organisational development that are now regularly seen in the UK. So you need to follow a clear plan, engage all parties, assess risks and understand what quid pro quos are available for bargaining.

One of the critical keys to change project success

You will have gathered by now, then, that for my money stakeholder commitment management is one of the critical keys to change project success. So what is involved? The key steps begin with defining the critical stakeholders and what I call the topography. In other words where do they sit in relation to your problem, the one you have to tackle and transform for organisational improvement? This means identifying allies and enemies and defining their WIIFMs. The acronym (if you haven't come across it) means 'What's In It For Me?' This doesn't mean to infer that everyone is mercenary; simply that everyone has personal motivations (many of them laudable, moral and organisationally focussed) that drive their behaviours. So if you want them to change what they think and do, you have to communicate the alignment of their goals and yours to obtain their buy-in, build their commitment and ultimately develop advocates.

The tools

Managing Stakeholder Commitment is not rocket science, but it pays not to be reinventing the wheel with what could be the difference between glorious success and abject failure of a change process critical to your organisation's future. So here is a selection of tools that changedrivers applies to provide rigour in this challenging and amorphous environment.

Change Impact Mapping: A method of understanding where the fallout of the change you are driving is likely to fall and therefore who you need to consider if you are to avoid risk of failure.
Friend & Foe Analysis: Smart tool best employed in a closed workshop environment to understand the relative position of key individuals and groups in relation to the commitment you seek, and enable planning for stakeholder management.
Influence Mapping: Process for refining the range of stakeholder management activity and ensuring that limited targeted efforts reach all the key players.
SEAMLEsS Communications: Framework for planning effective and efficient communications throughout a change project. This generally is done pretty poorly, so we may well be writing more about this one soon.
Engagement Process: The nuts and bolts of initiating the relationship with stakeholders with a view to pro-actively managing them in relation to your project. This includes defining Baseline Positioning, Communications Preferences and Hot Buttons.
Commitment Management: This is the core ongoing process of ensuring that early work with stakeholders is reinforced and that their support is there when you need it. Consequently this involves elements of Planning and Implementation.

The skills

Can anybody manage the commitment of stakeholders? We believe that given the right tools and skills anyone can. But it is important to understand that to get it right requires an awareness of nuance and subtlety of language. Words are both the friend and the enemy of the stakeholder manager. To obtain and maintain consent requires careful engineering, managing the language and the perception, because as everyone must eventually realise, everyone's perception is reality. You have to treat stakeholders like customers, and if you have to change their minds, you must do so slowly and subtly ensuring that they believe their WIIFMs are being satisfied by your strategies.