Chaos to calm: Managing stakeholders S2 E6

Who are your stakeholders? Why do you need to manage stakeholders? What happens if you don’t?

In this episode, Jenni explains the risks of not mapping all interested parties, gives you four key questions to help identify who your stakeholders are and talks through tools to model different stakeholder groups critical to your success.

Things that will help you go from chaos to calm:

Blog: How to manage stakeholders

Blog: How RASCI can help you gain clarity and calm

Podcast: Chaos to calm: Organisational growth S1 E10

You can continue the conversation with Jenni on Twitter and LinkedIn

Transcript for this podcast:

Hi and welcome to this episode of Redefining Comms with me, Jenni Field. Today, I’m going to be talking about managing stakeholders. Now, a stakeholder is someone who has an interest in something, and in this instance I’m going to be talking about organisations. Now, the importance of managing stakeholders comes from a need to make sure we’re aware of them, all of them, and how they interact with us as an organisation. So, we can explore this also as a team. So, you know, who are the stakeholders for the operations team, who are the stakeholders for HR, who are the stakeholders for communications?

It doesn’t just have to be for an organisation as a whole, but for this episode I’m going to focus more on the organisation as a whole and the stakeholders linked to that. But what I want to do in this episode is explore what happens when we don’t manage stakeholders and the chaos that can come from that. And then I want to explore a few models to help you manage stakeholders effectively. 

Now, that’s a bit different to other episodes where I usually give you five things or six things to consider, but the models here are quite detailed, so I want to go into them and just help you think about how you might want to spend a bit of time just getting to grips with your stakeholders. 

Why do we need to manage stakeholders and what happens if we don’t?

So, let’s start by thinking about why we need to manage stakeholders and what happens if we don’t. Now, as I said, a stakeholder is someone who has an interest in something. Now, already we know that we need to have some sort of relationship with them because they have an interest in what we’re doing. 

Now, this interest could be financial, it could be because we need something from the organisation, the interest can come from many different places. But what we immediately know is that there has to be a relationship with our stakeholders, kind of whether we want there to be or not, and that’s sometimes one of the hardest things to acknowledge. 

But if we don’t take the time to work out who these stakeholder groups are or these groups of interested people are, then we’re going to find ourselves in situations that can take up time and money for teams. And I’ve seen this happen where we haven’t gone through the exercise of mapping our stakeholders and not acknowledged a group, and it’s just caused a huge amount of chaos and time and money investment from the team to kind of unravel that miss. 

So, if we don’t know who our stakeholders are, there are a few risks that will come up. Risks that we will do something that has a negative impact on that group and we won’t be aware of it. You know, risks that we will make a decision that doesn’t consider that group, and that’s really important when we’re looking at belonging or inclusion. Risks that we won’t take people with us on the journey because they just won’t know, because we haven’t had any kind of conversation with them.

We could also miss opportunities to tap into influencers who could help us with our calls or our messaging or whatever it is that we’re trying to achieve. And then the last one is that we’re not being open to conversations or critique about activities. If we haven’t identified our stakeholder groups, we can become very blinkered to our own agenda, and it’s easy to become very sort of tunnel vision or very siloed if you’re not talking to stakeholders that have an impact or an interest in what you’re up to. 

Now, this isn’t just about financials. There’s also some reputational risks here to think about, and all of that links back to the organisation, your strategy, what you’re trying to achieve. So, stakeholders are really important when you’re looking at your business strategy, when you’re looking at leadership, whatever it might be that you’re looking at.

Now, we can make sure we’re managing stakeholders by taking the time to work out who they are. So, this means that you’ll need different people in a room to help you map out who are the different stakeholder groups. Now, the big watch out here is that you can easily make this huge groups. 

You know we can easily say oh my stakeholders are employees and suppliers. Now, that’s huge. If you’ve an organisation that’s got a thousand people, even if you’re an organisation with 500 people, that’s 500 people in one group. So, there is a need to kind of narrow that down a bit and break down your stakeholders into more detail through different characteristics like location, age, all different sorts of characteristics you can look at for them as a group. But there’s there’s probably a few questions that I would ask in terms of those different stakeholders.

And there’s four questions that I come back to when I’m working through the stakeholder groups that I’ve got. 

Now that last question feels a bit uncomfortable, possibly, or a bit loaded, but we have to be realistic about interest and relationships. And if we’re looking at our stakeholders because we have a big change project going on or there’s significant business transformation happening, if we’re not being real about what those relationships are or what the interest is, then we’re going to come unstuck quite quickly and find ourselves in even more chaos than we might be in already.

How can we map out stakeholders?

Now, I want to come into looking at how we map stakeholders. So, I’ve got a couple of models here as well as the RASCI model that I’ve mentioned before but I want to delve into that in a bit more detail. Now. 

1. The four grid box

The first model is the four grid box that I have used before and this is where you have a box where you have impact on one axis and influence on another and then you’ve got boxes of high and low and you can start to map people on that grid whether they have high and or low impact and high and or low influence. So, you can map them in that four box grid.

Now, I appreciate in this episode I’m going to ask you to visualize quite a lot of things. So, I have popped a link in the show notes to a blog post that we’ve recently published on this because I just felt it needed to be seen. So, there is a link in the show notes to a blog post that will take you through this so you can see some of the visuals but stay with me because I assure you it will all it will all come together. 

2. The 3 elements of power

So, more recently I came across another model so we’ve got the four box grid impact influence and then more recently I came across a model from Mitchell Eitel and this came across my desk really when I was doing a course with the Institute of Directors. And in this model they explore three elements of power, legitimacy and urgency. 

So, if you can imagine a bit of a Venn diagram where you’ve got three circles so you’ve got power in the top left, you’ve got legitimacy overlapping that below and then sort of to the right and below overlapping both of those is urgency.

And as these overlap, we end up with seven different types of stakeholder. The first is dormant, and this is a stakeholder that’s all power, so nothing else, just all power. The second is discretionary. This is all legitimacy, nothing else. And the third is demanding, which I really enjoy, which is all urgency. So not legitimate, no power, all urgency is demanding. So, they’re your first three, which are kind of in the in the core buckets, then we get into where there’s some overlap. 

So we have a dominant stakeholder where they’ve got both legitimacy and power. We have a dangerous stakeholder which is power and urgency but with no legitimacy. Then we have dependent, which is where your stakeholder has legitimacy and urgency but no power. And then we have the core stakeholder, really, which is called definitive, which is all three. It has legitimacy, urgency and power. 

Now, as I said, I’ve popped a link in the show notes to a blog post that shows you this diagram, but I think you can start to see a bit of a picture of all those different groups and I like this model because it makes us think in a much narrower way about our stakeholders. It’s not just have they got high impact, have they got high influence, it comes into a lot more detail which allows us to think much more detailed about our stakeholders and kind of where they need to be. Now, once you’ve done this you can then start to map out what each stakeholder needs to think, feel and do and you can then start to work out the messaging that will be appropriate for each of them as well.

3. RASCII model

Now, the next model I want to talk about is the RASCII model, which I mentioned in episode 10 of season one, but it’s a great tool when it comes to managing stakeholders. And you know, I’ve often been in situations where people think they have one role and actually they have another, and this is a really helpful model to make sure everyone’s very clear. It’s usually that someone thinks that they have a right to an opinion or to influence a decision when actually that’s not their role. So it’s really helpful if you’ve got difficult stakeholders, but overall to help you manage them for a project or whatever it might be, the RASCII model is really helpful.

Now, I’ve also again popped a link to the blog post I wrote on this that’s in the show notes as well for you, but RASCII stands for:

Now, if you start with a table you can start to list out the tasks or the projects on the left hand side and then you want to create a column for each of the RASCI. Now, we can then plot the stakeholders or stakeholder groups into that grid. Now, importantly for this model to be effective, responsible and accountable can only have one name in those boxes. So, if you’ve got a task that’s around, I don’t know, setting up a venue for example, it could be that for an event and who is responsible and who is accountable can only be one name.

It could be the same person, but it has to be a name. It can’t be a team or a department. It has to be one, and that’s because if everyone’s accountable or responsible no one is accountable or responsible. So we have to have that one specific name in there. 

You can have groups or you can have several groups or several people under support, consult or inform. So that’s where you start to work out where some of those maybe trickier groups sit. You know, are you consulting them on the project? Are they supporting you or do you just need to inform them? And that’s really helpful because you can have some really difficult stakeholders to manage and it is that consult and inform column that’s usually the one that causes the most confusion. I’ll say where people think they should be consulted.

But you might have them in the inform bucket. So, important to have that conversation, but it’s a nice way to bring some of that stakeholder mapping into the ability to manage your stakeholders around how you’re going to get things done.

Now, I hope this helped. It’s a bit more complex because you’re visualising models but getting to grips with stakeholders and spending the time to map them out is important when it comes to any kind of business change or key project or any big piece of business transformation. 

Thank you for listening!

Now, in my next episode I’m going to be talking about building trust and credibility. No small topic there you know trust and credibility. Some quite big words and often quite loaded terms but whenever I’m speaking at events this is one that often comes up especially if we’re talking about leaders how can they build this with their teams but also how can we as individuals be seen as credible you know no matter what level you are no matter what role you’re doing being seen as credible is sometimes really important to us because of integrity really. So, that’s the topic for next week.

As always, thank you for listening. I’d love to continue this conversation on Twitter or LinkedIn. So please connect, ask questions, share your thinking with me, check out the links in the show notes, and details are in the show notes of how to stay in touch as well.