Stakeholder Analysis

Winning Support for your Projects

As you become more successful in your career, the actions you take and the projects you run will affect more and more people. The more people you affect, the more likely it is that your actions will impact people who have power and influence over your projects. These people could be strong supporters of your work – or they could block it.

Stakeholder Management is an important discipline that successful people use to win support from others. It helps them ensure that their projects succeed where others fail.

There are two major elements to Stakeholder Management: Stakeholder Analysis and Stakeholder Planning. Stakeholder Analysis is the technique used to identify the key people who have to be won over. You then use Stakeholder Planning to build the support that helps you succeed.

The benefits of using a stakeholder-based approach are that:

• You can use the opinions of the most powerful stakeholders to shape your projects at an early stage. Not only does this make it more likely that they will support you, their input can also improve the quality of your project.
  
• Gaining support from powerful stakeholders can help you to win more resources – this makes it more likely that your projects will be successful.
  
• By communicating with stakeholders early and often, you can ensure that they know what you are doing and fully understand the benefits of your project – this means they can support you actively when necessary.
  
• You can anticipate what people's reaction to your project may be, and build into your plan the actions that will win people's support.
  

How to Use the Tool:

The first step in Stakeholder Analysis is to identify who your stakeholders are. The next step is to work out their power, influence and interest, so you know who you should focus on. The final step is to develop a good understanding of the most important stakeholders so that you can work out how to win their support. You record this analysis on a stakeholder map.

After you have used this tool and created a stakeholder map, you can use the stakeholder planning tool to plan how you will communicate with each stakeholder.

The steps of Stakeholder Analysis are explained below:

1. Identifying Your Stakeholders:

The first step in your stakeholder analysis is to brainstorm who your stakeholders are. As part of this, think of all the people who are affected by your work, who have influence or power over it, or have an interest in its successful or unsuccessful conclusion.

The table below shows some of the people who might be stakeholders in your job or in your projects:

Your boss	Shareholders	Government
Senior executives	Alliance partners	Trade s associations
Your coworkers	Suppliers	The press
Your team	Lenders	Interest groups
Customers	Analysts	The  public
Prospective customers	Future recruits	The community
Your family

Remember that although stakeholders may be both organizations and people, ultimately you can only communicate with individual people. Make sure that you identify the correct individual stakeholders within a stakeholder organization.

2. Prioritize Your Stakeholders:

You may now have a long list of people and organizations that are affected by your work. Some of these may have the power either to block or advance it. Some may be interested in what you are doing, others may not care.

Map out your stakeholders on a Power/Interest Grid as shown in figure 1, and classify them by their power over your work and by their interest in your work.

For example, your boss is likely to have high power and influence over your projects and high interest. Your family may have high interest, but are unlikely to have power over it.

Someone's position on the grid shows you the actions you have to take with them:

High power, interested people: these are the people you must fully engage with, and make the greatest efforts to satisfy.

High power, less interested people: put enough work in with these people to keep them satisfied, but not so much that they become bored with your message.

Low power, interested people: keep these people adequately informed, and talk to them to ensure that no major issues are arising. These people can often be very helpful with the detail of your project.

Low power, less interested people: again, monitor these people, but do not bore them with excessive communication.

3. Understanding your key stakeholders:

You now need to know more about your key stakeholders. You need to know how they are likely to feel about and react to your project. You also need to know how best to engage them in your project and how best to communicate with them.

Key questions that can help you understand your stakeholders are:

• What financial or emotional interest do they have in the outcome of your work? Is it positive or negative?
  
• What motivates them most of all?
  
• What information do they want from you?
  
• How do they want to receive information from you? What is the best way of communicating your message to them?
  
• What is their current opinion of your work? Is it based on good information?
  
• Who influences their opinions generally, and who influences their opinion of you? Do some of these influencers therefore become important stakeholders in their own right?
  
• If they are not likely to be positive, what will win them around to support your project?
  
• If you don't think you will be able to win them around, how will you manage their opposition?
  
• Who else might be influenced by their opinions? Do these people become stakeholders in their own right?
  

A very good way of answering these questions is to talk to your stakeholders directly – people are often quite open about their views, and asking people's opinions is often the first step in building a successful relationship with them.

You can summarize the understanding you have gained on the stakeholder map, so that you can easily see which stakeholders are expected to be blockers or critics, and which stakeholders are likely to be advocates and supporters or your project. A good way of doing this is by color coding: showing advocates and supporters in green, blockers and critics in red, and others who are neutral in orange.

Figure 2 shows an example of this - in this example, you can see that a lot of effort needs to be put into persuading Piers and Michael of the benefits of the project – Janet and Amanda also need to managed well as powerful supporters.

Example:

You can create your own example of stakeholder analysis at work - whether for your current role, a job you want to do or a new project.

Conduct a full stakeholder analysis. Ask yourself whether you are communicating as effectively as you should be with your stakeholders. What actions can you take to get more from your supporters or win over your critics?

Key points:

As the work you do and the projects you run become more important, you will affect more and more people. Some of these people have the power to undermine your projects and your position. Others may be strong supporters of your work.

Stakeholder Management is the process by which you identify your key stakeholders and win their support. Stakeholder Analysis is the first stage of this, where you identify and start to understand your most important stakeholders.

The first stage of this is brainstorm who your stakeholders are. The next step is to prioritize them by power and interest, and to plot this on a Power/Interest Grid. The final stage is to get an understanding of what motivates your stakeholders and how you need to win them around.

Albert Mehrabian & Communication

Albert Mehrabian

Three elements of communication - and the "7%-38%-55% Rule"

In his studies, Mehrabian (1971) comes to two conclusions. Firstly, that there are basically three elements in any face-to-face communication:

words,

tone of voice and

body language.

and secondly, the non-verbal elements are particularly important for communicating feelings and attitude, especially when they are incongruent: if words and body language disagree, one tends to believe the body language.

It is emphatically not the case that non-verbal elements in all senses convey the bulk of the message, though this is how his conclusions are frequently quoted.

When delivering a lecture or presentation, for instance, the textual content of the lecture is delivered entirely verbally, but non-verbal cues are very important in conveying the speakers attitude towards their words, notably their belief or conviction.

 

Attitudes and congruence

According to Mehrabian, these three elements account differently for our liking for the person who puts forward a message concerning their feelings: words account for 7%, tone of voice accounts for 38%, and body language accounts for 55% of the liking. They are often abbreviated as the "3 Vs" for Verbal, Vocal & Visual.

For effective and meaningful communication about emotions, these three parts of the message need to support each other - they have to be "congruent". In case of any "incongruence", the receiver of the message might be irritated by two messages coming from two different channels, giving cues in two different directions.

The following example should help illustrate incongruence in verbal and non-verbal communication.

Verbal: "I do not have a problem with you!"

Non-Verbal: person avoids eye-contact, looks anxious, has a closed body language, etc.

It becomes more likely that the receiver will trust the predominant form of communication, which to Mehrabian's findings is non-verbal (38 + 55 %), rather than the literal meaning of the words (7 %).

It is important to say that in the respective study, Mehrabian conducted experiments dealing with communications of feelings and attitudes (i.e., like-dislike), and that the above, disproportionate influence of tone of voice and body language becomes effective only when the situation is ambiguous. Such ambiguity appears mostly when the words spoken are inconsistent with the tone of voice or body language of the speaker (sender).

 

Misinterpretation of Mehrabian's rule

This "7%-38%-55% Rule" has been overly interpreted in such a way, that some people claim that in any communication situation, the meaning of a message was being transported mostly by non-verbal cues, not by the meaning of words. This generalization, from the initially very specific conditions in his experiments, is the basic mistake around "Mehrabian's rule", and on his webpage Mehrabian clearly states this:

(...) Total Liking = 7% Verbal Liking + 38% Vocal Liking + 55% Facial Liking: Please note that this and other equations regarding relative importance of verbal and nonverbal messages were derived from experiments dealing with communications of feelings and attitudes (i.e., like-dislike). Unless a communicator is talking about their feelings or attitudes, these equations are not applicable. Also see references 286 and 305 in Silent Messages -- these are the original sources of my findings. (...)

Forming, Storming, Norming, Performing

The start of a ongoing post on group dynamics & Teambuilding.

Forming

In the first stages of team building, the forming of the team takes place. The team meets and learns about the opportunity and challenges, and then agrees on goals and begins to tackle the tasks. Team members tend to behave quite independently. They may be motivated but are usually relatively uninformed of the issues and objectives of the team. Team members are usually on their best behavior but very focused on themselves. Mature team members begin to model appropriate behavior even at this early phase. Sharing the knowledge of the concept of "Teams - Forming, Storming, Norming, Performing" is extremely helpful to the team.

Supervisors of the team tend to need to be directive during this phase.

The forming stage of any team is important because in this stage the members of the team get to know one another and make new friends. This is also a good opportunity to see how each member of the team works as an individual and how they respond to pressure .

Storming

Every group will then enter the storming stage in which different ideas compete for consideration. The team addresses issues such as what problems they are really supposed to solve, how they will function independently and together and what leadership model they will accept. Team members open up to each other and confront each other's ideas and perspectives. In some casesstorming can be resolved quickly. In others, the team never leaves this stage. The maturity of some team members usually determines whether the team will ever move out of this stage. Some team members will focus on minutiae to evade real issues.

The storming stage is necessary to the growth of the team. It can be contentious, unpleasant and even painful to members of the team who are averse to conflict. Tolerance of each team member and their differences needs to be emphasized. Without tolerance and patience the team will fail. This phase can become destructive to the team and will lower motivation if allowed to get out of control.

Supervisors of the team during this phase may be more accessible but tend to still need to be directive in their guidance of decision-making and professional behavior. The groups will therefore resolve their differences and group members will be able to participate with one another more comfortably and they won't feel that they are being judged in any way and will therefore share their own opinions and views.

Norming

At some point, the team may enter the norming stage. Team members adjust their behavior to each other as they develop work habits that make teamwork seem more natural and fluid. Team members often work through this stage by agreeing on rules, values, professional behavior, shared methods, working tools and even taboos. During this phase, team members begin to trust each other. Motivation increases as the team gets more acquainted with the project.

Teams in this phase may lose their creativity if the norming behaviors become too strong and begin to stifle healthy dissent and the team begins to exhibit groupthink.

Supervisors of the team during this phase tend to be participative more than in the earlier stages. The team members can be expected to take more responsibility for making decisions and for their professional behavior.

Views seen before of members at the start begin to change as they know each other better. The team feel a sense of achievement for getting so far, however some can begin to feel threatened by the amount of responsibility they have been given. They would try to resist the pressure and resist reverting to storming again.

Performing

Some teams will reach the performing stage. These high-performing teams are able to function as a unit as they find ways to get the job done smoothly and effectively without inappropriate conflict or the need for external supervision. Team members have become interdependent. By this time they are motivated and knowledgeable. The team members are now competent, autonomous and able to handle the decision-making process without supervision. Dissent is expected and allowed as long as it is channeled through means acceptable to the team.

Supervisors of the team during this phase are almost always participative. The team will make most of the necessary decisions. Even the most high-performing teams will revert to earlier stages in certain circumstances. Many long-standing teams will go through these cycles many times as they react to changing circumstances. For example, a change in leadership may cause the team to revert to storming as the new people challenge the existing norms and dynamics of the team.

Quotes - Erwin Rommel

My first post in this blog.  This is all for my own use really, somewhere I can store random snippets of semi-usefulness.  Four quotes from the Desert Fox below, what a leader of men!  The first quote I first saw in the LRRP Handbook when I did a course at the ILRRPS at Weingarten Germany.  I think that if you have any responsibility over other staff or colleagues it is a great way to try to work.  To balance the great sense and sensibility of that first quote the last one is just a work of military comic genius.

"Be an example to your men, in your duty and in private life. Never spare yourself, and let the troops see that you don't in your endurance of fatigue and privation. Always be tactful and well-mannered and teach your subordinates to do the same. Avoid excessive sharpness or harshness of voice, which usually indicates the man who has shortcomings of his own to hide.

"One must not judge everyone in the world by his qualities as a soldier: otherwise we should have no civilization."

"In a man to man fight the winner is the one who puts an extra round in his magazine"

"In the absence of orders, go find something and kill it."