Walking a tightrope

Why effective L&D relies on balancing stakeholders effectively

Learning has the potential to transform individuals, teams, and entire organisations. We’ve seen it happen first-hand here at Thrive. But in the spaces between crafting meticulously designed initiatives and witnessing the "aha!" moment in a learner's eyes, lies the crucial task of stakeholder management. Your stakeholders are often the ones who impact the success of any learning programme. It’s why maintaining effective communication and bringing people along on the journey is so important.

How do you navigate this sometimes-tricky terrain, ensuring your project sponsors, leadership teams, executives and budget holders understand the value being brought to the table, and more crucially, how do you create true L&D champions as a result?

Start with empathy

L&D teams are innately curious. It’s a quality that is shared across every customer and every team we work with. As a result of this curiosity we often assume that others have a willingness to want to know more, but in many instances what drives other people is not a natural curiosity, but a focus on something else - like performance or simply getting the job done.

A great place to start when you’re trying to bring people along on a journey is by putting yourself in their shoes, and understanding what’s driving them. What do your stakeholders really care about? Is it the same thing as you?

Asking these questions will reveal some interesting insight that can help you to position any upcoming conversations, and by leading from a place of understanding you’ll quickly be able to establish more rapport.

Communication styles

Building on empathy, it’s crucial to recognise that everyone has different ways and means when it comes to communication. Some people prefer as much detail as possible, whilst others prefer the high level facts. Doing some work to understand more about each stakeholder is the first step to determining how to communicate with them in the future. Don’t presume everyone wants to be delivered a fancy slide deck, if all they really want is a 5 minute phone call. In other words, knowing who you’re talking to, and understanding the language they speak is essential to success.?

One of the reasons personality profiling, like Insights, is a useful tool or starting point for this is because it provides a quick summary of core traits and you can easily compare leadership styles across stakeholders (granted you can only do this if everyone fills them in…). As a result, you know what is driving someone and you can lean into this with your storytelling.

Tell stories with data

Once you’ve got a firm understanding of the communication styles and personalities you’re dealing with, you need to be able to ground your storytelling with data.

There are a few things worth calling out here.

First of all, data doesn’t always have to be quantitative, although sure that’s nice. It can be qualitative too. Pulse surveys or verbatim feedback can provide valuable data points too - things which are often dismissed because they don’t always present ‘hard’ facts. Engagement, wellbeing, critical feedback - these are all great sources of information for storytelling, particularly when we’re talking about human behaviour.

Secondly, the reason L&D teams need to be able to tell stories with data is because it can inform decision making. One day, in the not too distant future, we’ll end up in a place where data can help us predict behaviour. But until that time, we need to get better at interpreting results and making suggestions about the next move.?

Storytelling will capture people’s hearts, but storytelling with data will capture their minds too.

Balance demands

We all know that L&D teams have to be expert negotiators. Usually between people who have more traditional or conservative views of learning, and those who want to push learning culture into the 21st century. But also between individuals who are laser focused on different areas of the business.?

At the beginning of any project it’s worth carrying out a stakeholder mapping exercise where key individuals are highlighted, along with their key drivers and communication preferences. As a result of this activity you will then be able to prioritise stakeholders against the aims and outcomes you’re looking to achieve.

If we return to the empathy piece here, you’ll soon realise that L&D might not be a priority for key individuals, and so if you lean into what is and show how learning can be leveraged to make an impact in the space they’re concerned with, you’ll soon be able to shift their focus onto what you’re doing because ultimately it helps them.

It’s not all rosy…

Recognising that sometimes people will clash heads is key. It’s how you navigate these situations that arise that will set you apart. Part of the process in any project is identifying the potential risks, and if that means flagging certain stakeholders as risky, the sooner you do that and create a plan of action about how to deal with it, the better. Mitigation strategies can be your best friend here. Effectively managing conflicts among stakeholders, or between stakeholders and your wider project team, involves diplomatic negotiation and compromise to ensure that the project remains on track and relationships stay intact.

If you’re looking for another skill to work on throughout 2024, negotiation could well be it.

To wrap it all up

Managing stakeholders is tricky, but the more you prep’ for how to approach this, the better. Successful stakeholder management in L&D means starting with empathy, whilst understanding how different people communicate and prefer to be communicated to. The easiest way to bring people along on a journey with you is to tell stories with data that mean something to the people you’re talking to, and being able to do this effectively is an art. Balancing the multiple demands of any stakeholder group is not an easy task, and you have to be prepared for clashes and expert negotiation.

How do you approach stakeholder management in your business? I’d love to hear from you…