Why you need to engage stakeholders (and how to do it well)

If you fail to give everyone affected by a project the opportunity to take part in it or be listened to, then expect trouble ahead, warns Elizabeth Harrin, who gives a fail-safe guide to viewing your stakeholders as your partners, and not people to be controlled.

Early in my career, I had a call from the post-room manager. She was confused – and angry. Bags of extra mail had arrived, she didn’t have the staff in to sort it and she had heard that it might be something to do with me. It was. I was happy that my project to in-source a service had completed as expected. All the redirections were working – including the post. The only problem was that the post-room staff had never been on my radar. I’d never considered the impact on them.

That was my first ‘real life’ lesson about the importance of stakeholder engagement. But what is stakeholder engagement? Engagement helps drive action on projects. As it is people who do the work, it is critical to getting tasks done on time, to the required scope and at a level of quality that results in stakeholder satisfaction. It can be defined as: the systematic identification, analysis, planning and implementation of actions designed to influence stakeholders. Essentially, it’s about working with people to build support to achieve the intended outcomes.

Helping people take part in the project

Why do we bother with stakeholder engagement? With a strong business case, people will do their jobs and contribute because it’s the right thing to do – right? It doesn’t work like that. People are busy and your project probably isn’t a priority for them. When you engage a stakeholder, you are helping them take part in the project and encouraging action-taking. Engagement serves two aims.

First, it creates, uses and sustains positive interest in the work. Where stakeholders feel positively about projects and changes, engagement makes it easier for them to take part. Second, it minimises or removes negative interest. Where stakeholders feel negatively about projects and changes, engagement helps understand their position and influence their perception.

Engagement is hard work. There is a lot of discussion and talking to do. It’s time-consuming, but it’s worth it because people’s actions contribute to project failure, sometimes intentionally and sometimes unintentionally. You probably don’t need to be told of the risks of not engaging stakeholders. You might have even lived through a couple of tricky situations where lack of support from stakeholders caused things like these:

People don’t pay attention to the change, resulting in rework or benefits that fail to be realised.
People don’t do what you need of them, so projects are constantly delayed.
People don’t complete their tasks on time, to the required level of quality, to the approved budget or perhaps at all.
People aren’t committed to delivery, so projects drift on and on without ever achieving anything the business considers valuable.

These issues can often be addressed by spending more time on stakeholder engagement.

Beyond the interest and influence grid

For a long time, project management theory and practice focused on stakeholder management. There was a process to follow: filling in a stakeholder register and plotting someone’s interest and influence over the project on a matrix. Stakeholder management implies that a stakeholder’s behaviours and actions can indeed be managed – predicted, planned, organised and controlled – which is both arrogant and inaccurate. Anyone who has ever tried to get anything done with a group of people will realise that, when humans are part of the equation, you can’t expect things to go as per the documented plan.

The profession has been challenging the terminology of management as it relates to stakeholder behaviour for some time now. The vocabulary and sentiment have gravitated towards engagement as a preferable model for building relationships and partnerships with the people who help you deliver the project. Stakeholder engagement presents a significant change in how managers and teams think about the people involved in the project.

When stakeholders are to be managed, there’s the risk that they are considered resources to be moved, used, shaped and controlled to our will. When you seek to manage and control behaviour, you don’t let people have a say. They aren’t partners in the change. Rather, they are someone to whom the change is done. Successful projects are the ones where stakeholders want to take part, are supportive and listened to, and actively contribute. Project professionals want stakeholders on board – championing, understanding and living the changes, not simply tolerating our projects.

When managers talk about engaging people, they elevate stakeholders to the role of valued partner. Engagement forces us to think about people as individuals with agency, preferences, interests and needs. It elevates our own behaviour so that we demonstrate leadership, motivation, coaching, influencing and teaching.

Switching ‘management’ for ‘engagement’ might seem like swapping one business jargon term for another, but if you reflect on what engagement means, you’ll see it is a richer term to express the relationship project teams want to have with stakeholders. If you don’t currently use the language of engagement, your challenge begins today: stop talking about stakeholder management activities and switch to talking about engagement. Give it a week and see what difference you’ve managed to create in your stakeholder communities and project teams.

How to do engagement

Beyond shifting your language, what else can you do to demonstrate engagement? The core aspects of engagement are:

understanding stakeholder perspectives;
building trusted relationships; and
taking action and influencing stakeholder perspectives to shape the work in the direction of the intended outcomes.

The formula looks like this:

Understanding + action + influence = engagement

Understanding
Once you’ve completed stakeholder identification, look at how stakeholders feel about the project and the effect it will have on them. This is emotional appeal (winning hearts). Consider how confident stakeholders feel that the work being done is the right work. This is rational appeal (winning minds).

Action
Be reliable, trustworthy, respectful, consistent, helpful and professional – and show gratitude.

Influence
Work with your manager and sponsor to influence up, with your team and peers to influence the project, and with people beyond your team to influence out across the business.

We also need to consider what we are engaging stakeholders in and how much effort we need to put into working with each individual or group. You will no doubt work with people who are motivated and whom you trust to get on with the work. You know they’ll follow through and deliver. You can choose to let those areas propel themselves forward with minimal check-ins. You might leave other individuals or teams to get on with things because you have no choice. Their work isn’t high priority and your time is scarce, or you aren’t empowered to engage with them. Another group might need more coaching, support or oversight.

Set aside time regularly to take stock of how engagement is going. Ask yourself: What did I do this week that engaged our key stakeholders? Did it work? How do I know? Why do I think that? If you feel confident that your engagement activities are having the desired effect, do more of what’s working. If you tried something and it didn’t work, stop doing it – there’s no point investing more energy in it.

Projects, programmes, portfolios and change are all easier when stakeholders are engaged, but sometimes it will feel like you can’t plan the engagement, or it feels unnatural to try to engineer a relationship with someone for the good of the project. When we work with people it can feel iterative, messy, uncoordinated, rushed and stressful. Don’t worry. Even if it feels awkward for you, your stakeholders will see someone who cares about their views, wants the best for the organisation and the project, and is trying hard to make a positive difference.

Finally, remember that you and the stakeholders are people first, and project resources second (or third, fourth, fifth or more). We all have good days and bad days; be kind to each other.

Elizabeth Harrin is director of Otobos Consultants, a project communications consultancy, and a Fellow of APM, as well as an award-winning blogger behind GirlsGuideToPM.com. Her new book, Engaging stakeholders on projects: How to harness people power, will be published in September by APM. Visit apm.org.uk/book-shop/ to find out more.

Five easy engagement ideas

Say thank you: People appreciate being acknowledged for their work.
Expectation mapping: Review each stakeholder’s expectations for the project and check they can be achieved and don’t conflict with anyone else’s expectations.
Invite feedback: Change your email signature to include a link to a project email inbox or ‘contact us’ form.
Be seen: Drop in to working sessions like system testing and find out how things are going, getting feedback from people doing the work.
Learning styles: Flex your communication approach to suit the learning preferences of stakeholders.

Download Elizabeth's book here