Managing Difficult Stakeholders - The Overbearing and the Poor Stakeholders

 

Managing Stakeholders

Have you ever heard the phrase “the stakes are high"? When we talk about “stakes,” we are referring to the important parts of a business, situation, or project that might be at risk if something goes wrong. To hold a stake in a business, situation, or project means you are invested in its success. Every successful team needs strong leadership and membership and program managers need to be able to manage stakeholders successfully as project managers need to deal with the specific tasks and activities of the project itself. Technical problems are not hard, people are hard and it’s inevitable that we run into a situation when we need to deal with difficult stakeholders.

Let’s review quickly the steps for managing stakeholders:

Steps for Managing Stakeholders

Step 1: Identifying and analyzing stakeholders which is the process of identifying and analyzing the people, teams, or organizations that could impact or be impacted by a decision, activity, or outcome of the project and analyzing their interest, involvement, interdependencies, influence, and impact on the success of the project.

The program manager identifies and analyzes the stakeholders connected to the program and to its supporting projects. How do they do that? They follow the money, the resources, the deliverables, the signature, they ask team members, look for informal stakeholders, and review organizational charts. For example the RACI chart. The RACI model — also known as the RACI matrix — is a tool to help manage relationships with every key stakeholder. The acronym RACI stands for responsible, accountable, consulted, and informed. By filling out the RACI chart or asking the project managers to do it, program managers will be able to identify the four types of participation.

Pro tip: when filling out the chart, use roles rather than names. Roles can change and you also remove bias.

Step 2: Once you identify all the stakeholders, you need to analyze their potential impact on the program.

Remember that high-power stakeholders have the power to kill the project.

Step 3: Manage stakeholder engagement:

This means the process of communicating and working with stakeholders to meet needs/expectations, and address issues as they occur, and foster appropriate stakeholder engagement in project activities throughout the entire lifecycle of the project.

• Communicate and listen to them. Try to understand where they are coming from and don’t forget to praise them. By building relationships, you will build credibility and trust and also minimize the distraction around the project.

• Meet them one-on-one

• Find out their motivations

• Find a common ground

Next, for the sake of this presentation, we will talk about difficult stakeholders with a focus on the overbearing and the poor stakeholder.

Overbearing Stakeholder:

• Because of their power position, they can be domineering or put the project at risk

• Make sure they don’t destroy relationships or teams

• Defend and insulate project managers from them

• Build the team: Tolerates but largely ignores the overbearing stakeholder; let the group decide.

• Seek help: look for another stakeholder with equal or similar power.

This last happened to me once when I was working as a donations project manager for a company some years ago. I identified a pain point and I wanted to offer a solution to increase revenue. I presented my idea to some high-power stakeholders and naturally, I ran into a wall. They were resisting the change. I realized that the project is at stake if I don't come up with a solution, so I looked in a different direction and identified a similar high power stakeholder, and convinced them to help me and back me up. The next time I met with the initial stakeholders, I invited my ally, and the resistance was much less, or at least it was not expressed. They gave me the green light to do some more research and present more details on the project. In the end, the project itself did not succeed, I could not overcome the resistance but it was a good lesson learned how you can utilize high power stakeholders to influence similar stakeholders in decisions.

Poor stakeholder:

• Has an interest in and it's impacted by the project but has no budget authority

• May play politics in order to gain influence

• Avoid ignoring them.

• Understand their objectives. This will predict their future behavior concerning future issues.

That was my short presentation about stakeholder management.

Don't forget that understanding people and context is key for program management.

Thank you for watching.