Have you had difficulty handling stakeholders or did you avoid talking to stakeholders? Well, not anymore!
Let us look at the thumb rules and basic principles for handling different stakeholders and winning their trust.
Disclaimer: These are just the basic principles and will work for most scenarios. Also, this article is not about influencing or managing the conflicts with the stakeholders. I intend to keep the scope of this article limited to understanding the mindset of stakeholders, essentially learning how to and not what to.
Principle 1: Know Who?
The first thumb rule even before managing your stakeholders is to understand who your stakeholders are. You should also understand their interest and influence level for your product.
Once the stakeholders are identified, shortlist the stakeholders who have High Interest and High Influencing Power. Remember the states of the stakeholders might keep changing as we progress with dealing with multiple stakeholders and over time interest or influencing power of the stakeholders may also change. So, the best way is to keep a tab on the stakeholders frequently possibly every sprint with the entire team.
Principle 2: The Key
When a team starts engaging with the stakeholders, one understands that the stakeholders are at point zero with the product details or the implementation i.e., they are unaware.
There are various stages that a stakeholder goes through in an engagement:
Unaware -> Aware -> Neutral -> Supportive -> Leading
And the objective here is to make the stakeholders aware of the product and move them to the leading state. Well, how do we do that? This brings us to our second principle of stakeholder management “Relationship Building” and “Trust”. Staying authentic to our stakeholders and having frequent catchups formally or informally might help in having the base.
Disclaimer: Relation building is very tricky and would vary from person to person and situation to situation.
Listen and Understand: Sometimes just hearing them out and understanding their point of view might just help. This would also ensure ruling out the assumptions. Ensuring that the stakeholders are also on the same page as you are is the key here.
Principle 3: Cracking the Nut
Aristotle has given us the 3 modes of persuasion — Ethos, Pathos, and Logos. These are how a person can win over their audience. As we have already mentioned that not every person is the same and not the same trick would work for everyone. However, these 3 modes can be tried by various individuals and one can identify the best technique to convince or influence the stakeholders.
Note: Having open-ended questions at the beginning of the conversation might help in unfolding the nature and culture of the stakeholders.
Ethos (Credibility), Pathos(Emotions), and Logos(Logic) are also known as Rhetorical appeals. You can read more about them here. Once we unlock the trick, all we have to do is find the right balance between the three modes and present the idea accordingly.
Principle 4: The Process
As we deal with multiple stakeholders, we are bound to take certain decisions. Stakeholders always want more and have weird asks. How do we make such decisions and have a win-win call? Well, the process of how these decisions are taken, counts. The mantra is to be agile and stay empathetic to stakeholders. Make stakeholders the hero in their journey and ensure that have the last word.
Disclaimer: Being agile does not mean that we say “yes” to everything that stakeholders ask. It’s about collaboration and maintaining sustainability.
What's in it for me? — Every individual on this planet or maybe outside as well (if it exists) always thinks about the self-benefit first and then about others. Remember to talk about the benefits the stakeholders will get rather that the features of the product. You may have awesome features, fancy screens, the latest technologies, and everything but if none of these brings benefit to the stakeholders then the product is just like a Showpiece.
This takes me to talk about 6 Principles of Persuasion that once can use to persuade the stakeholders:
- Reciprocity: This works on the principle of returning the favors to people who have in turn done something in the past.
- Liking: The principle behind “Liking” is to be a little biased towards the people we like. Building a great rapport and trust develops the liking among the people
- Commitment: Ensuring that one has delivered what was said or committed. Commitment is all about achievements.
- Authority: Gaining confidence via authority. Essentially, people are likely to trust a credible and widely known source more easily than an unknown source.
- Social Proof/Consensus: Following the leader. This works on the principle of the fact that if something is working well for others, then it would work for me too.
- Scarcity: People tend to value things that might be going in scarce or maybe less available.
Principle 5: Being Mean
Yes, that’s right…! Be mean and make use of existing stakeholders with whom you have built your trust to open up connections with other stakeholders. As I mentioned earlier, one must keep a tab and be mindful of the state of various stakeholders. This also helps in understanding where our stakeholders lie and who can we ask for favors to open up gates to other high-interest and high influential stakeholders. Remember, we have also talked about that there would be stakeholders whose interests and influence would vary based on time and situations. At the same time, we might also have stakeholders incoming and outgoing. In a nutshell, be mean and leverage the existing connection to build new connections.
Before wrapping up, I would like to introduce you to the Types of Stakeholders we deal with in our day-to-day activity who are part of the Decision-Making Unit(DMU).
- Decision Maker: One who has the final say in an organization
- Influencers: These are the ones who persuade others or make recommendations based on experience and their knowledge of the product.
- Gatekeeper: Gatekeepers are the ones who have the authority to press the stop/to go button and provide their inputs to the decision-makers.
Voila! You now know all the tricks to understand the mindset of stakeholders and the key mantras to manage your stakeholders better. Apply these principles and do let me know in the comment section how this has helped in managing your stakeholders.
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