Key Stakeholders

A key stakeholder is anyone, inside or outside an organisation, who has a stake in the project under discussion.  E.g. A school’s key stakeholders are: students, parents, teachers/staff, administration, government, community/tax payers.

Typically you would ask the questions… “Who would be affected by this?”  “Who would lose/gain by this?”  The answers would be your stakeholders.  But here’s one that is often overlooked: “Who could derail this project, even if it doesn’t affect them?”  They would be stakeholders too.  For example, perhaps some local politician with influence could make it difficult or impossible for the city to implement it’s plan.  That politician would be a stakeholder, even if he or she were personally unaffected by it.  That politician would need to be managed.
The importance of Stakeholder Management is to support an organisation in achieving its strategic objectives by interpreting and influencing both the external and internal environments and by creating positive relationships with stakeholders through the appropriate management of their expectations and agreed objectives.  Stakeholder Management is a process and control that must be planned and guided by underlying Principles.

Stakeholder Management, within business or projects, prepares a strategy utilising information (or intelligence) gathered during the following common processes:

  • Stakeholder Identification – Interested parties either internal or external to organisation/project.   A stakeholder map is helpful for identifying the stakeholders and this forms a key component of many of our leadership, management and team development programmes and coaching interventions.
  • Stakeholder Analysis – Recognising and acknowledging stakeholders’ needs, concerns, wants, authority, common relationships, interfaces and aligning this information within the Stakeholder Matrix.
  • Stakeholder Matrix – Positioning stakeholders according to their level of influence, impact or the enhancement they may provide to the business or its projects.  This can be drawn as a stakeholder map.
  • Stakeholder engagement – Different to Stakeholder Management in that the engagement does not seek to develop the project/business requirements, solution or problem creation, or the establishment of roles and responsibilities.  It is primarily focused at getting to know and understand each other, at the Executive level.  Engagement is the opportunity to discuss and agree expectations of communication and, primarily, agree a set of Values and Principles that all stakeholders will abide by.
  • Communicating Information – Expectations are established and agreed for the manner in which communications are managed between stakeholders – who receives communications, when, how and to what level of detail. (Protocols may be established including security and confidentiality classifications).

Stakeholder Agreements (A collection of agreed decisions between stakeholders). This may be the lexicon of an organisation or project, or the Values of an initiative, the objectives, or the model of the organisation, etc.  These should be signed by key stakeholder representatives.

TLC favour transparent, honest and open stakeholder management processes and will help your people to develop in this area.