Tips on Using the Power-Interest Matrix for Effective Stakeholder Management

Stakeholder management is a critical aspect of any project, program, or business change initiative, and the Power-Interest Matrix is one of my “go-to” tools. In this post, we’ll be looking at various ways of using this tool more effectively.

The Matrix

To use this tool, you need to map all your stakeholders against a grid based on their interest in your initiative and their power to influence it. This will help you select the appropriate actions for each stakeholder group:

• Minimal Effort: stakeholders with low interest and low power require minimal communication and management efforts.
• Keep Informed: stakeholders with high interest but relatively low power need regular updates and communication to keep them satisfied.
• Keep Satisfied: stakeholders with high power but low interest must be kept happy to prevent dissatisfaction.
• Key Players: The key stakeholders with high interest and power require significant time and effort in stakeholder management. These people need to be managed closely and should take a lot of your attention.

Remember that the Power-Interest Matrix is not static over time, and stakeholders may move around within a box or even from one box to another due to external or internal changes. So keep engaging and researching to ensure you are working with up-to-date information.

What About the Attitude?

One mistake people often make is just plotting stakeholders into a quadrant. Whilst it's useful to know who your Key Players are (for example) you are missing vital information if you don’t know whether these people are with you, against you or neutral.

Okay, I am being flippant by making it sound like a binary “with me or against me” choice but you need to know whether stakeholders have positive or negative attitudes to what you are planning to do.

This can easily be marked with a (+) or (-) against each name (at the very least for those key people and groups in the High Interest half).

Do Some Quadrant Shifting

Another common mistake in using this tool is treating it as a spectator sport, where you do the mapping, and keep it up to date, but don’t try to make any changes to where people are or what their attitudes are.

It’s crucial to keep adjusting your approach to stakeholder management as the situation evolves. You can shift stakeholders’ attitudes or move them to a different quadrant of the matrix as required. For example, you can try to turn stakeholders with negative attitudes into supporters by addressing their concerns, or you can reduce someone’s interest in your initiative by moving them to a different quadrant, e.g. making them realise it affects them much less than they feared (reducing their interest) or taking steps to mitigate their ability to influence what you are doing.

Give Them a Good Listening To

Active listening is also crucial in effective stakeholder management. Instead of simply talking to stakeholders, listen to them actively to address their concerns and build trust. This approach can help you turn potentially troublesome stakeholders into powerful supporters.

Typically people change attitude or quadrant because:

• They didn’t understand enough about what you will or won’t be doing with this project
• Something has changed inside the project that makes them more or less interested
• Something else has changed in the company or in the market that makes them more or less interested
• You have engaged your supporters and increased their number, to reduce the influence of your detractors

You’ll only be able to make progress here by giving them space to talk and taking the time to listen.

I remember a case where we heard rumblings from a key stakeholder who felt the concerns of his team weren’t being taken into account. Our project sponsor quickly called in the comms manager and it was agreed to arrange a meeting with the stakeholder and prepare a “deck” of slides showing him all the ways we had listened to his team.

I advised against this but didn’t make my case well enough to avoid a first disastrous meeting. I was able to prevail to enable a successful second meeting. My advice used an old military expression where you get called in to see the commanding officer knowing that you will have to give them “a damn good listening to….” People forget the power of this active listening in a less hierarchical setting.

The flaw with the first meeting was that the concern raised was “nobody is listening to me” and we reacted by delivering a scripted “talking to” rather than risk listening. If somebody wants to be listened to it’s usually much more effective to listen to them.

This listening approach can be disarming — I remember meeting a group of potentially troublesome stakeholders, who were notorious for never being satisfied with a project outcome. It was on their patch; they’d ensured there was a screen and a projector available in the meeting room and were taken aback when I just took out my notebook and a pen. One even said, “but surely you have a PowerPoint?” I said “No, I just want to understand what’s worrying you and listen to what you need.”

In this case I kicked off with the single question “If we were to deliver an excellent project, how would you describe it?”. The meeting went better than I ever hoped for and I was able to change their (-) marks into (+) marks on the stakeholder map in a short space of time. In this case we all kept to our words — we delivered in the way they asked and they rated the outcome as “excellent”, previously unheard of from this group.

Honesty and Openness Often Pay

Finally, honesty and openness are essential to build trust with stakeholders. Be transparent about your initiative’s goals, progress, and challenges to build a positive relationship with stakeholders.

I remember being involved in one difficult project that involved relocation and redundancies. We engaged early and regularly with the unions and the staff and had worked through a lot of options. Many were against sharing all the hard work on options appraisal and related “management stuff”, preferring to focus on the end result. Luckily, I was able to prevail and we held several very open (still difficult though) meetings where we shared a lot about what we had considered.

In the end the relocation was agreed but several of the affected staff came up afterwards and made comments that have stuck with me for years. Although they were being made redundant they felt, having seen all our workings, that we had been more open and done more to help them than their union.

That’s not a union bashing point, it just leads me into another key point — don’t forget you aren’t alone in trying to change the minds of your stakeholders — many of the powerful people on your map will also be trying to influence other people on your map.

A Key Tool, but Not the Only One

In conclusion, the Power-Interest Matrix is a valuable tool for effective stakeholder management, but it’s crucial to use it in conjunction with active listening, attitude adjustment, and honesty to build a positive relationship with stakeholders.

I hope you have found this useful and will help you use the Power-Interest Matrix to your advantage in the future. Stakeholder management is such a big area that this is just one tool and one approach.

I’d love to hear your comments, ideas and experiences with the Power-Interest Matrix.

About the Author

Peter Stansbury is a Principal Consultant with Version 1 focused on business transformation generally and digital transformation in particular.

If you have any questions about stakeholder management, then do get in contact — peter.stansbury@version1.com.