Keep your friends close and your stakeholders even closer
Stakeholders are not just interested in your work; they are invested in it. Your success reflects upon their success, and vice versa. Whether they provide your funding, represent you on boards, depend on your work, influence your career growth, or follow your leadership, they are integral to your journey.
Without their support, engagement, and buy-in, the road to success becomes significantly steeper.
Simple Steps to Engagement
An engaged stakeholder is more than just a passive observer. They back your cause, stay updated on your progress, understand your needs and risks, and trust in your clarity of purpose and objectives. Crucially, they prefer not to spend substantial time on engagement activities. So, how do you ensure their engagement with minimal time and effort?
- Identify your stakeholders.
- Understand their communication preferences.
- Determine their preferred feedback mechanisms.
Know your stakeholders
Identifying your stakeholders involves understanding their importance, interest, and proximity.
Importance, or influence, involves considering whether they fund your work, play a significant role in decision-making, or have the power to ease or create hurdles for you.
Interest refers to their stake in your work. Are they genuinely invested, or are they merely curious? Do they depend on your work to succeed?
Proximity entails evaluating how close they are to your team. Are they directly involved in your day-to-day activities? Do they understand your work lingo? Or are they far removed, possibly in a different department, with little grasp of your team’s operations?
The demanding stakeholders (and focus of this blog)
The most challenging stakeholders to engage often have high influence, high stakes, and are far removed from the work. They may seem demanding, impatient, out of touch, and have limited time for engagement.
It’s crucial to remember that they still support you and want you to succeed. They’re juggling multiple projects, and they may not understand your work's technical details or processes.
But they’re still in your corner.
So what can you do?
Clear, concise, and consistent communication is essential in keeping high-stake stakeholders engaged. Avoid technical jargon and unnecessary details. Instead, stick to straightforward bullet points, graphs, and transparent reporting.
Consider keeping your project report to one page. Use bullet points and diagrams rather than lengthy paragraphs or tables of information. A good tip for maintaining brevity is to imagine you’re explaining the project update to a non-technical person, like a parent. Keep it simple, clear, and factual.
Reporting ‘Secret Sauce’ (it’s not a RAG status)
It’s very true what they say. A picture (graph, doodle, diagram) really does say 1,000 words.
A map is more straightforward in explaining a route than using words. The diagrams from the Lego set are more helpful than a paragraph. A blueprint can articulate precise and complex details over a verbose explanation.
You have complexity. I am sure graphs, diagrams, and pictures can describe the progress more clearly than words ever could.
At the nuts and bolts, stakeholders want to know the progress. How far have we come, how much more to do, and ideas on how long to get there? My personal favourite is a burn-up chart, but there are many ways to express progress clearly.
Burn-up charts clearly convey how far we’ve come, how far we have to go, and - all things being equal - roughly how long it will take to our next milestone.
Side note: Nothing conveys information worse than “Red Amber Green”. They are ideal for traffic lights but miss any helpful detail on tracking progress, any cause or effects, and what (if any) actions are needed.
Feedback loops
I’m a firm believer in FBR (Fast, Bad, Rong) when reporting. Get something together quickly and regularly check with people about how to improve it. If you spend a lot of time generating something you believe to be perfect, it’s likely to miss a mark or two.
So building on this:
- Identify a friendly stakeholder, preferably in the camp of high stake, high influence, and far from the work. Before even starting, have a five-minute conversation and listen to what they need.
- With your insight into the project and their needs, draft something fast.
- Sample this with some folk, clearly describing what you’re trying to articulate. Bake in and refine the feedback.
- Rinse and repeat a couple of times and you will end up with a report that people understand, takes you low effort to maintain and keeps people engaged.
At relevant opportunities with stakeholders (programme review meetings, steering meetings, etc.), bring up the report and ask some questions:
- Does everyone clearly understand the progress and risks of this report?
- Does it provide the appropriate level of transparency?
- What can we change in this report, or the information flow, to improve it?
Concluding
Simplicity is the key to successful stakeholder communication, especially in a complex project. Regular, clear, and succinct updates will enable your stakeholders to support your work better. It might take some practice, but mastering this skill is a significant step towards your success.
