A Quick Fix for Your Team’s Stakeholder Problems
Four easy steps to getting your team unstuck and breaking down silos
I can’t count the number of times someone on my team has become stuck because of a ‘stakeholder problem’. Aka, another team doesn’t help out.
Each time, the story goes something like this: My team is responsible for pushing forward a project and needs the help of another team. Slowly I realize things are stalling. When I ask why, they tell me they can’t agree on a way forward with the other team.
I’ve tried lots of approaches in the past: telling them to try harder (you can guess how that worked), giving my team strategies for getting buy-in, and talking to the managers on the other team.
But I’ve landed on one technique that helps my team get unstuck almost every time and doesn’t require that I jump in to solve the problem.
Why do stakeholder problems exist?
You might be rolling your eyes and saying “ugh, bureaucracy”. It’s not bureaucracy that’s the problem.
In my experience, 90% of problems with other teams are a result of competing priorities. No matter whether you have a team of 10 or 1,000, you’ll always have competing priorities.
The problem with competing priorities is that they put people in a defensive mindset rather than a creative mindset. The solution then is to have your team be experts at disarming this defensive mode in other teams so that both parties are free to think creatively of a solution.
A quick example. My team was looking into how to enter a new market that would require changes to our payment processes. At first, we just needed a few temporary workarounds to create an early MVP. From earlier discussions, we knew these workarounds were easy to do, but would take some manual work.
My team was working closely with the payments team, but we kept finding that payments were significantly delayed. When I asked my team why, they didn’t know but suspected that the payments team wasn’t spending enough time on the project because of other priorities.
What’s going on here?
- Competing Priorities: You have two teams that have different goals & incentives, meaning some type of trade-off needs to happen.
- Lack of Decision Power: The people who are trying to find a solution can’t decide on these trade-offs themselves. My team can’t tell the payments team to spend more time on our project, and the payments team wasn’t just going to change their priorities without talking to their manager.
- Defensive Frame: Both teams are too busy pushing their own goals that they forget to step back and look at solutions that require compromise or trade-offs. My team was pushing the payments team to do more work and the payments team was pushing back saying that this wasn’t a priority.
Reframing the Problem
The challenge is that both teams are in an all-or-nothing mindset. To solve the problem they need to get into a mindset where they feel free to identify new options.
Whenever my team bring me a problem like this, I coach them through these steps:
1. Acknowledge competing priorities (be peers, not adversaries)
Acknowledging that there are competing priorities helps break the us-against-them frame. It shows the other team that you understand where they are coming from and frames you as peers instead of adversaries.
When you stop being adversaries, it allows the other team to drop their defences. That’s the first step to getting a solution.
“I think we’re having trouble moving forward because we need your support to make this work, and your team has other priorities”.
In the example above, my team might say, “I think we’re having trouble moving forward because we need your support to make this work, and your team has other priorities”.
2. Reframe the decision-making process
If there are competing priorities, someone needs to make the call on what trade-offs are going to be made.
The problem is that the people doing the work are often not the people who make the decisions. This can put people in a defensive position where they only say what they know what their manager will sign off on.
One way to relieve this pressure is by agreeing to change how the decision is made.
Instead of framing it as a decision that needs to be made by the team, reframe it as a decision that managers or a leadership group should be part of. The goal here isn’t to abdicate ownership but to free the other team to think of alternative ways forward. When they don’t have to make the decision, they’re free to think of options.
“Because there are competing priorities, I don’t think we’re the right people to make this decision. What if we have our managers weigh in?”
Back to the example above, my team might say, “Because there are competing priorities, I don’t think we’re the right people to make this decision. What if we have our managers weigh in?”
3. Ask “What would it look like…”
So the other team has been made into a peer and has been relieved of decision-making responsibility. Now we need to get their help in creating an alternative way forward.
At this point, my team would want to ask something like, “What would it look like if both our managers agreed that we needed to go forward with this” or, “What would it look like if your manager took something off your plate so you have time to do this?”.
“What would it look like if both our managers agreed that we needed to go forward with this”
The goal here is to have the other team help create a plan for how they will support your team’s project.
This is not a commitment, just a sketch of what might be possible. Because the other team are now peers and don’t have the pressure to make a decision, they’ll usually be happy to outline a plan.
4. State next steps
Last is a commitment to next steps. “Let’s talk to both our managers to see what they think about this potential way forward.” Once they’ve agreed on this, they’ve opened the door to a solution.
“Let’s talk to both our managers to see what they think about this potential way forward.”
Ta-da! You now have the other team going to their manager with a recommendation for how they’ll help you.
Hopefully, this makes it easy for their manager to say yes. If they say no, there are probably larger issues of misalignment in the organization that’s going to require some elbow-grease on your part.
But either way, you have a clear picture of the necessary trade-offs and a working recommendation on the way forward that both teams agreed would be feasible. That should make your job a lot easier.
