Building High Performance Teams - Engaging Key Stakeholders

A stakeholder is anybody who is critical to your project’s success, can block your project, or will be impacted by your project. Acknowledging that--just like in “Six degrees of separation from Kevin Bacon”--everybody quickly becomes a stakeholder one way or another, we are focusing on key stakeholders who can have the most serious impact if you ignore them.

The key to engaging stakeholders is to see your project from their perspective, then involve them in how you will involve them. 

Start by being clear:

• Why are they key stakeholders?
• What is their current attitude toward your project and what do you need it to be? (Remember, sometimes neutral is good enough.)
• What do you need from them?
• What are their likely concerns about your project?
• What would they say would be wins for them from your project?

Based on this, what is an involvement strategy that may mitigate many of their concerns and possibly give them some of their desired wins? But that is only the first step. 

More importantly, discuss your assessment with them…what you think their concerns are and what they would like to get from the project. Validate them--you may get a valuable surprise.

Discuss how you would like to involve them. Knowing that you care about their concerns will go a long way towards getting them on board. 

You can also work with the team to create a collaborative process roadmap for the project. This roadmap supplements the task-oriented Gantt chart by providing an approach for how people will collaborate to accomplish project objectives. 

This perspective helps the team plan for how key stakeholders are to be involved in the process (including who’s involvement may be limited to certain roles), the key agreements to be reached between specific groups or individuals at each stage to keep the project on track, and the results to be produced as an outcome of the collaboration.

Comments

[Simon Heap]

Thanks for this series of posts on teams, I found them interesting. Really liked the team charter idea in your last post.