Collaboration With Stakeholders
In some form or another, there’s an almost guaranteed chance you’re working with stakeholders. How you deal with that will depict how great or (honestly) miserable you will be.
What you can’t do is ignore it. Or, as Yoda probably said to Luke in a 1:1 “Ignore stakeholders, you can not”
In my situation, SpareBank 1 is an alliance of 12 banks that are stakeholders to what we (SpareBank 1 Utvikling) do. This is of course massivly simplified, because there’s internal sections, departments yadayada but that’s not the point here.
The point, or rather the goal, is dead simple: You want your team to have full aunotomy of what is prioritised. Not just for a period of time, but it to be a constant.
To achieve this, you need to collaborate with the stakeholders, because:
- They also want success
- They usually have a lot of good insight and experience
The unsexy truth on collaborating
I don’t think there’s one way of collaborating with stakeholders, because there’s so many types of stakeholders and products. However, I have worked both in agencies, with my own company and now here and I’ve tried multiple ways of working with stakeholders. With that, I’ve found this set up to work really well — for the needs of my team.
Every other week, I have three seperate 30 min meetings with a contact in three of the largest banks.
In those meetings, we usually go through:
- What are we focusing on now and why?
- In what we are working on, what are the upsides and what are potentially pains?
- What are we not focusing on now, but we think will be smart in the future?
- How are our experiments going?
There is never any power point slides or polished pitches. Usually I simply share our Miro board and we go through the points over.
In those meetings, the stakeholders will get full transparancy on:
- Insight into all our solutions
- Data on what works well and what can be improved
- Pains and barriers we have
- All of the things we can do, and what we choose to do
What we get from this is:
- Way better and honest communication, since we have full transparacy
- Great insight that the bank(s) can provice
- Great sparring sessions
- The contact person becomes an advocate for our joint mission in their bank
- More focus for the team, because we don’t get any random orders
That’s it...
No sexy framework for collaboration.
Just consistent communcation — every other week for 30 min.
It’s just people, man
The word “stakeholder” is used so often that it’s become an entitiy of it’s own (much like the word “silo”), when it’s actually just people. Individuals who wants success just like you, so the product get’s better.
The major difference is if you’re working for or collaborating with stakeholders. The latter is obviously what you want.
Conflicts can happen when there’s not a joint agreement or understanding of what success actually looks like. And, even if everyone agrees on the goal, the road to get there can also be filled with subjective opinions.
The key to fix that, and to any good collaboration for that matter, starts with clear and honest communication.
The major key is consistency
If you need a multiple hour workshop to “work with the stakeholders so everyone is aligned”, you’re really trying to fix a problem that has gone to far.
Sometimes it’s necessary to gather key people in a room, but often it’s a political move. An illusion of collaboration and movement forward.
I’m not hating on all workshops, but I have sat in my fair share of grueling workshops where you’ve spent 2 hours too long in a conference room, waiting to hang up your obvious post-it notes, only to have all the work whisk away in the wind. Those workshops, I hate.
So, to sum up:
- Collaboration is communication.
- Stakeholders are people.
- Communicate more with people.
Nice, you made it to the end! 🎉
P.S. On a related subject, check out On Writing Descriptions.
P.S.S. You can of course follow me on Medium, and Linkedin or Goodreads.
If you would like more stories like these, check out Failing Forward.
