Internal GR stakeholder management
Half of GR work takes place inside your company
Stakeholder management is usually regarded as an exercise to be applied to external GR contacts — government officials and the like. In the best case, such stakeholder management is done in a systematic way.
One of the peculiar blind spots of GR management is the failure to apply the lessons of external stakeholder mapping to your own organization: You achieve results if you have specific goals in mind. Positioning GR with the corporate leadership is as complex as anything GR does externally. Time to apply the same rigor to it!
Introducing “GR empathy” (R)
Stakeholder mapping is sometimes regarded as a self-centered, almost abusive exercise: Identify how you can use people to achieve your goals. Well — if this is the way you operate, you have a mindset problem, not a stakeholder mapping issue.
Here is an alternative interpretation: The whole idea of stakeholder mapping is to think about the priorities of your counterpart and identify how you can help. Let’s call this “GR empathy”.
A good stakeholder map basically applies GR empathy systematically. Before we get to the famous mapping exercise, a couple of fundamental questions need to be addressed:
- What is top of mind of your internal stakeholder right now? Spoiler: Most likely, his main occupation will not be GR-related — and that’s OK. It might be M&A, sales compensation, investor relations, a supply chain problem, or a lawsuit. We all like a company that recognizes the importance of GR — but having GR topics top of mind of your CEO is usually a bad sign.
It is key to distinguish between short-term problems that can be solved quickly and systemic challenges. It is the latter you want to focus on. - How can GR help? Which pain points can GR help solving? It seems to be a rather straightforward question — however, most GR planning exercises start from the opposite end: How can an executive help solving your GR challenges? Try to flip the focus of planning exercises.
- What are your engagement goals? OK — time for the mapping. On a very abstract level, your goals are the development of a relationship that might be mapped in the space of “What is the executive’s level of relevance to GR success?” on the one side, and “What is the level of interest of the executive in GR?” on the other side. Ideally, you develop the GR interest of those internal stakeholders that are important to you. Again, this sounds super obvious, but you might be surprised how much clearer your mental map becomes once you start actually populating the matrix.
4. “Lovable products”: How does the GR engagement plan look like? Finally, you could tailor specific engagement plans for each internal key stakeholder. It might be a political megatrends report for a supply chain executive, an analysis of labor relations in a specific country for HR, or a proposal on how to change a law that blocks market access. Plenty of opportunities to develop “lovable products”!
As always with engagement plans, it makes sense to designate responsibilities clearly. Ideally, you can assign leads for each of your internal stakeholders that match your vertical expertise plan in a functional or matrix team structure.
Finally…
Let us know how it works out!
