Day 52 — Stakeholder series 7/7: “Advanced Techniques”
When dealing with stakeholders, what are some particularly hard situations? What are some advanced techniques to handle these situations?
Previously in this Stakeholder series, I shared my experience & knowledge in the following areas:
- Knowing Who, When, and How to Engage
- Managing Expectation
- Managing Scope
- Defining Success Criteria
- Interview for Success
With these knowledge, we can manage to sail through most of the scenarios. However, not everyday is a easy peachy day; there are times that the unexpected happens and you’ll have to tough up to deal with unpleasant situations with stakeholders. Therefore, in this article, I’m going to share my experience dealing with stakeholders in the following structure:
- Situations and Resolutions
- Precaution and Prevention
- Advance Techniques
Situations and Resolutions
Unclear project direction
Arguably the biggest problem for project management. If we can’t clearly see the vision, it’s hard for us to efficiently plan the route and achieve the ambiguous goal. Resolution: Host an OKR session to help all stakeholders clearly define their Objectives and (measurable) Key Results. Make it clear that the team won’t be effective unless there’s a clearly defined goal for the team to strive for.
Unclear stakeholders’ intention
Sometimes when we receive instructions from stakeholders, they are not necessarily clear about what they really want. This could result in misinterpreting direction and waste time & money on unwanted effort. Resolution: As Simon Sinek often says: start with Why, use root-cause analysis techniques like 5 Whys, or Fishbone Diagram to understand their intention before jumping into solution mode.
Unpleasant communication or history
Unfortunately this happens once in a while, it could be because of all sorts of reason: not meeting the expectations, personality conflict, conflict of interest, or pure communication issue. Resolution: If we’re not clear about what happened, have a honest conversation in a comfortable environment to remediate the relationship. However, if we know what the causes of the issue and determined that there’s no point to amend the relationship, try to find some win-win solutions, or decision/progress we can make alone, so that we’re not blocked by the stakeholders.
Precaution and Prevention
Early on in the stakeholder interview stage, if we can identify certain difficult personality types, then we can plan our engagement strategy in order to minimize the risk and optimize the efficiency. Here are some typical difficult personality.
1. Mr. Yes & Mr. No
Mr. No seems straight forward, the rejecting personality is never easy to work with. You might be curious, why is Mr. Yes listed here as difficult personality? Well, when you identify someone as Mr. Yes, that might indicate this person could be either over optimistic, or doesn’t they are easy because they don’t have “skin-in-the-game”. Either way, it’s not helping when you need clear answer and strong support.
Prevention: Once you identify Mr. No, try to acknowledge what they have to say and believe they could be right. As long as you build the empathy with them, ask for their help to together come up with solutions that might work. On the other hand, if we find your stakeholder is Mr. Yes, we’ll need to quickly determine whether they’re the optimistic type or simply don’t care about our success. The best way to do deal with optimistic type is to provide suggestion and ask for sign off. And as to the stakeholders who don’t care, just make sure we include them in the process so that they don’t feel like they’re left in the dark.
2. Mr. Maybe
In my opinion, Mr. Maybe is the hardest type of stakeholder to deal with. They simply don’t show their hand because they have their own plan in mind, and not bringing in others onboard unless they feel they can trust them. The negative impact from stakeholders is huge, because lack of clarity leads to trial-n-error and wasting time & money.
Prevention: The first thing we can try is to build relationship with them, make sure they understand that we’re on the same side. If we’ve tried hard and not making progress, then we know that they’re not ready to be on our side, or maybe never will be. We’ll have to leverage other’s help to understand what’s in this stakeholders mind, give it a try, and see how s/he react.
3. Mr. Whiner
Not only whining bring down the team morale, but also requires lots of management capital. Whiners tend to have certain (unreasonable) level of expectations, but not truly putting effort to verify or achieve the goal. “It’s always somebody else’s fault.”
Prevention: Similar to Mr. No, first carefully listen to what Whiner has to say. Don’t react right away, but listen and acknowledge their complaints. Ask how they arrived at their opinions, and how they could solve it if they would. This technique of shifting responsibility back to them help them understand the importance of providing constructive feedback. If you have a close personal relationship, you can play a fun game called “Whine and Cheese Board”. The rule is simple, whoever on the team whines, they have to donate a bottle of wine to the team. (And whoever says a cheese joke, donates a cheese).
Advanced Techniques
Transform Unreasonable Request
When dealing with unreasonable request, first seek to understand where that request is come from and what’s the reason behind it. Sometimes seemingly unreasonable request could be miscommunication due to cultural difference, emotional/exaggerated words, “telephone game”, insufficient description, etc. Truly understand what’s really being asked and how it aligns to the greater goal can help you demystify the situation.
There are scenarios that the request seems unreasonable because the requestor has doesn’t have the same knowledge as we have, and requesting something that doesn’t make sense to us. As I learned that most of people “judge based on their best knowledge”. Bridging the knowledge gap could be a very helpful way to resolve conflicting interest and unreasonable request.
Predict and Prepare
If you have never worked with a new set of stakeholders, best thing to do is to ask others who have previous experience with them.Try to identify what they care/hate about, their value system and their pet peeve. If you have no one to ask, then the first several meetings with you new stakeholders should focus on understanding besides the project itself, what’s important to them, and what they are concerned about. Also learn about what kind of pace suits them and how detailed they’d like to know/communicate. Identify their behavioral patterns will help you better prepare yourself when the tough time comes.
Conclusion
- When encountering unclear situation/requirement, take time to understand the root cause and the human factors involved, so that the proposed solution is bullet-proof.
- “Keep you friends close, keep you enemies closer” might sounds like a cliché, but effectively managing stakeholders is about understanding what they think and plan/adjust accordingly.
- “Assume good intend.” People often judge based on their based knowledge, so bridging the knowledge gap often helps resolve the conflict.
Have you encountered some tough situations with your stakeholders? How did you resolve the situation? I’d like to learn from your experience, and I hope you enjoy this article!
ABC. Always be clappin’.
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The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author. They do not represent current or previous client or employer views.
