How to manage stakeholders for professional success
What use is hard work if your stakeholders don't know about it?
Do you feel your manager has a bad impression of you? Even worse, she has no impression of you at all. Does your client escalate to your boss even after you have delivered on all project requests? If you are not able to get due credit & respect from your stakeholders - then I might have a solution for you.
Great CEOs do not always have the best skill in a company, but they still lead a big team of skilled workforce. How? Because they manage their stakeholders well. The same is true for any leader at any level.
13 years ago, when I was a fresh intern, I made mistakes with my stakeholders. I would complete all my work, but I wouldn’t send an update. I would be ready with my work plans, but I wouldn’t show them. Then I would wonder, "Why is my manager pissed off even when I am working so hard?” I was sincere toward my work. However, it never occurred to me that my manager is also a human being. He would be waiting for a response, and he deserves to know. I definitely didn’t know better then.
In the last decade, I have learned some tips and tricks from my managers, peers, and even my reportees. I've condensed my learning into a set of steps for anyone starting from scratch or looking to improve relationships with stakeholders.
Know the department’s 5Ws (Why this department exists, what it does, For whom, where, and when)
Know your stakeholders: Exactly whom do you interact with?
Know the order of influence of each
Make a system to collect relevant information for each of the stakeholders
Make a system to communicate this information on a regular basis.
Make a system to connect 1-1 and get feedback from each stakeholder
Make a system to know the plans for next months
If you are just starting your professional journey, I would suggest reading this real-life example. Through this example, I would show how I developed this system along with my teammates. Names, credit for ideas, and details have been changed to protect identity.
I hired Mahesh as a digital marketer for an e-commerce company. I had already established processes to ensure smooth collaboration with all departments. Mahesh adopted them well and brought his own processes to the team. With our strengthened stakeholder-management systems, we were the favorite department to work with.
5 W ‘s of the department: Within 1st week of joining, Mahesh started enquiring about “Why, what, when, where, and whom” for our department.
Mahesh thought like this - the CEO wants more revenue, so CEO needs more customers to come to this website, so CEO would need Mahesh to do marketing. If CEO knows that Mahesh is able to bring in more customers, then CEO would know Mahesh’s role in the company’s growth. If his role in growth is clear, he would be rewarded. I was blown away by such mature thinking from a junior. What was I doing when I was 28? I would just complete the work assigned to me and nothing beyond that.
Mahesh reported to me so he asked me explicitly - do I like a detailed report or just key metrics? I was dumbstruck - it had never occurred to me to ask something to my seniors. It felt empowering as an employee.
Mahesh was going to use Google ads and needed to pay for ad spending. He identified his point of contact in the Finance team and learned the processes for payments. When I look back to my own beginner years, I used to get into fights with my finance counterparts. If only I knew how to manage them <sigh>
Mahesh also needed to change a few things on the website as per Google’s policy. So he got in touch with the technology team and spent time understanding the tech systems of the company. I had never bothered to even learn their names. What a loss!
Mahesh quickly befriended his own peers, who were my other reportees. This way he could exchange learnings, and ideas and have a good time in the office. I like a team that likes working together.
I asked Mahesh to make an organization tree with exact names and designations. It helped my entire team to understand who is who and how they impact our work.
Influence-wise: we realized that the order is CEO> CMO> Senior manager> Software engineer> Finance manager> facebook-manager.
I had already developed a system to collate relevant information. This required 3 setups
Basic information system: We used an excel sheet to make a table that has all the data for every day.
For CEO, CMO—> I had already built dashboards and visual graphs from the information table for top leaders. Mahesh automated them.
For repoting managers (me): Mahesh understood my style, and he set up an alert in his calendar to send me “orders per day” every week and call out the top 3 reasons for growth. He would be ready with details like actual ad images, experiments he did, results, and next steps. Who wouldn’t like such a reportee?
For the finance person: I had already made a separate table to record date-wise spending. Mahesh requested a storage drive where he would store all invoices in a single place. This saved time in scrambling for invoices in email.
For the Technology team and software engineers: Mahesh built a table of the team’s tech requests, which he updated with status regularly. This helped us in following up on requests and getting things done from a team that did not report to us.
Building this system took us 2 weeks because the company was small. In other companies, I have taken 2 months to integrate bigger tools, train teams and set up processes with SOP documents.
Communicate effectively: This was the key step that helped my team build strong relationships
We developed a template to give updates weekly. The format was supposed to be email-friendly, short, and linked to detailed work. Mahesh customized these for different stakeholders keeping the reader in mind.
I would put calendar reminders for all teammates to prepare the updates and reminders to send.
I have seen 100’s of professionals now and my learning is that - People without a “system” to capture information and a “planning tool” to prioritize and put reminders - struggle a lot with their work. They are always busy, always confused and difficult persons to work with.
1-1 Feedback: Mahesh requested meetings with all the stakeholders that he identified in steps 1 and 2. We had set up reminders in the calendar and follow the cadence with discipline.
Future plans of stakeholders: I would ask leaders from other departments - “What is the plan for next month, how can my team help”. New employees also learned this practice. This helped us plan ahead of the company for resources, research, and budgets.
Mahesh followed my advice and improved with his own empathetic thinking. He has been killing it from day one. I have to decline requests from other departments to shift Mahesh. No way, Sir, keep your hands off my star reportee!
Stakeholders are the threads that hold the fabric of our professional lives together. As a senior leader now, I would like to see regular updates without following up. It will save me time in figuring out how much progress was made, by doing what, and by whom? Won’t I reward a person whose role is clear in the company’s progress?
How to manage stakeholders for professional success
Nicely written and explained.