Stakeholder Management Via Learning Styles
Stakeholder management is often talked about in today’s workplace discussions, and rightly so. It’s a skill that transcends not only across professional, but even personal spectrums of our lives. Understanding and acing inter-personal relationships comes naturally to some, and scares the wits out of others. I have personally struggled with it, and the fact that no one teaches it you at school or at home makes it worse. This has led me on a journey to really de-jargonize it and make it usable in my daily life.
I have been a teacher for a short while. The process of teaching and learning fascinates me a lot. I keep drawing parallels from my teaching days to my current work and personal life. One of the models that I find extremely applicable to stakeholder management in my current job is Kolb’s learning theory.
David Kolb ’s learning styles model was developed from his experiential learning cycle theory in 1984. These theories have largely to do with the inner cognitive processes of one’s mind. Kolb believes that effective learning occurs by a cyclic process of experiencing, reflecting, thinking, and acting; which he elaborates through his 4-stage experiential learning cycle theory (1974)
4 learning styles according to Kolb’s
- Feeling: Learning from specific experiences and relating to people. Sensitive to other’s feelings.
- Watching: Observing before making a judgment by viewing the environment from different perspectives. Looks for the meaning of things.
- Thinking: Logical analysis of ideas and acting on intellectual understanding of a situation.
- Doing: Ability to get things done by influencing people and events through action. Includes risk-taking.
According to Kolb’s learningy cycle, true learning happens when all these areas are covered. But for the stakeholder-management issue at hand now, we’ll use Kolb’s theory of dominant learning style as mentioned below.
Let’s picture a really bad meeting scenario — the stakeholder has no idea what you’re explaining and vice versa. Both of you are pushing your agendas, but aren’t getting anywhere. More often that so, it’s because either of you is speaking in a language the other understands and learns best. How do we get to know that you ask? here’s unleashing Kolb’s dominant learning styles for you my friend!
Remember the four learning styles mentioned above? Let’s take it a little further. Following is a definition of each learning style in each quadrants. Any stakeholder will have one of these dominant learning style:
Below are the dominant learning styles:
Accommodating (CE/AE): This feel and do style is a hands-on approach. It is suitable for people who are intuitive rather than logical. Such people rely on others analysis and thinking rather than their own. They are proactive, and are eager to take on and complete new challenges.
Diverging (CE/RO): The feel and watch style is for imaginative and emotional people. These people view a situation from several different perspectives and generate a lot of ideas. They are more people oriented and are deep thinkers.
Converging (AC/AE): This is a think and do style. People who are technical minded prefer this. They are accepting to new ideas and like to rely on their learning and thinking to find a solution to practical situations. They also bring up doable practices of theories and ideas.
Assimilating (AC/RO): The think and watch style is apt for people who are more interested in logical sounding theories and clear explanations over practical approaches. They value conciseness and logic.
Now think of one of the stakeholders you’ve struggled with the past, and another you’ve hit it off really well. Map them on one of these quadrants based on your experiences with them. Remember they mightn’t be a perfect fit too. Are you able to draw parallels to how you’ve been communicating with them/sharing documents with them to their learning style.
For example, after couple of conversations you’ve realised that the stakeholder has an Accommodating dominant learning style (1st quadrant), and we have been giving her documents and research to read, that won’t make sense to him/her. He/she’d rather see/attend a workshop/event or see a hands on demo (something that help us influence their imagination better). As opposed to an Assimilating learning type (last quadrant) who can be given more research and documents to read and influence.
Again, you can use the the Learning Styles Indicator test with them to nail down their dominant learning style, but you would need to gauge their actions to broadly determine their styles. This isn’t the most accurate way to go about it, but will increase your people judgement skills over time.
There’s a lot of research around this, and also ideas how do we take it to the next level. Experiment with this internally, and maybe one stakeholder externally and together we can refine it and make it better?
