Framework for mapping & communicating with stakeholders

Why this article?

While transitioning from an individual contributor to a leadership role, your perspective would change from “How do I make an impact?”, “how do I leverage others’ expertise to make an outsized impact?”. So, at leadership levels, the importance of stakeholders increases multifold. Given this importance, a leader needs to meticulously assess each stakeholder in multiple dimensions and align everyone to achieve the common goals of the company.? This post is about how to go about this.

To get the best out of this article, I recommend doing this exercise (with a pen and paper or notion) as you read along. Alternatively, you can save this post and do this exercise in the future.

Step 1: List down all your stakeholders?

Few pointers here to ensure you are not missing all the relevant ones -?

1. List both upstream and downstream stakeholders. Upstream ones are ones whose inputs/decisions influence your work (i.e.roadmap/vision/features). Examples are business teams, operations, executives etc. Downstream teams are ones that use your inputs/decisions for their work. Dev, QA, design, support, etc would be your downstream teams.??It is not uncommon to have few teams that are both upstream and downstream.
2. If you are working with stakeholder X regularly, consider adding X’s manager to the list. Decide based on how important your/your team’s work is to X’s manager.
3. Include stakeholders whom you need to talk to to get high-quality feedback about the PMs under you.?
4. There might be stakeholders without a goal alignment or working relationship but may have an influence on the management (e.g. long-timers) or have a say in the appraisal process (e.g. HR). Include them as well.?

Step 2: Expectation & scoring each stakeholder

1. Write down what each stakeholder expects from you??
2. What do you expect from each of the stakeholders??
3. For each of the following parameters, rate each of the stakeholders identified in the previous step. Use either 1 to 10 scale or High/Medium/Low scale to rate.?

a. Goal dependency: How much does achieving your/your team’s goals depend on this stakeholder (e.g. engineering, design, QA, research etc would score very high).??

b. Difficulty: How tough is it to handle this stakeholder? Recall aspects like - saying too many ‘No’s, hard to convince personality, not turning up for crucial discussions, poor delivery, etc to decide how tough is this stakeholder to handle.?

c. Influence: How much influence does this stakeholder have on others/management? You need to observe meetings, chat/mail threads to know the influence level of each stakeholder.?

Step 3: Rank the stakeholders?

Add up the three ratings for each of the stakeholders and have a score for each one. Rank the stakeholders based on the scores.?

Once you do the above exercise, you get something like this -

Incomplete Sample

Step 4: Plan of action using this data:?

Using (1) in step 2, you can work on yourself and your team to meet the expectations of the stakeholders.?

Using (2) in step 2, you would know what to expect from each stakeholder and evaluate their contribution against expectations. This would help keep them accountable.

Thirdly, you will use the scores to prioritize the time you spend with stakeholders, as simple as - the higher the total score, the more work/time/communication you need to spend with that stakeholder.?

Scenarios based on scores:?

Stakeholders who have high scores in goal dependency but low scores in difficulty are people who are very important to your goals and are collaborative in nature. You would want to keep them informed ( a weekly product update would do) and check in with them once a month by a short 1:1. The check-in frequency needs to increase if they are not able to meet your delivery expectations (or vice versa) so that you can help them out or receive help.?

Stakeholders who have low scores in goal dependency but high scores in influence need to be evangelized. You can share important updates, exciting stuff with them once in a while. You may also consider catching up with the stakeholder once a month or two months for general discussion and getting feedback.?

Stakeholders with high scores in goal dependency and difficulty need to be aligned. You should have a weekly (preferred) or biweekly catch-up with them.??

You may consider conducting general update meetings where you can cover common elements that you want to discuss with multiple stakeholders. However, they are not always a replacement for personalized 1:1 discussions.?

Representation of action to take based on scores:

What to do in the 1:1s:

1:1s are to align a stakeholder. Consider some of the following to get the required alignment

a. Seek feedback - Get feedback about your team, your leadership etc.?

b. Talk about Vision & Strategy - Ask them if they are clear and completely sold on your vision & strategy. Use the answers to clarify and/or sell your vision.?

c. Understand their motives, goals, and challenges (use active listening instead of listening to respond).?

d. Identify differences in opinions/understanding and plan to reconcile them (either during the meeting or later)

e. Identify opportunities where you can help them and where they can help you?

f. Get to know more about each other as individuals?

What not to do in 1:1s: Discussing project-related stuff can be avoided altogether since they are being discussed in other numerous meetings and day-to-day interactions.?

Concluding remarks: Most often than not -? frequent disagreements, stalemates, lack of progress, inadequate resourcing, etc are all symptoms of lack of alignment with the stakeholders. Planning the strategy & allocating time to handle each of your stakeholders can save you a lot of your effort and energy in addition to helping you move fast towards your goals.

If you learned something useful today, you can +Follow me on Linkedin for more such learnings. Previous posts on stakeholder management that led to this framework -> 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6,