Business Management ABCs

Stakeholder Management Tactics – Learning to Lobby Key Influencers Effectively

In every project and activity, there are stakeholders. For a manager running a team is sales, there will be a list ranging from employees and their families, to the end-users of the product via any middle-man too. These are the headline stakeholders and there are often many levels of other interested parties who can be called stakeholders too, that need a little investigating.

So it’s vital to fully understand just who you are working with. Once you have a clear understanding, you will then need to appreciate and assign the appropriate levels of resources to ensure that you influence the right people at the right levels to get the outcomes you need.

Many times this will be down to using the best communication skills, together with relevant marketing, PR and even involving negotiating expertise too. Interestingly, many people will see through obvious efforts to influence them. Whilst this is not necessarily disastrous, there are better ways to create valuable relationships with people and often it’s quite simple.

In Dale Carnegie’s famous book, ‘How To Win Friends And Influence People’, he makes the vital point that it within the arena of relationship building that the greatest successes so often come.

Whilst this is not likely to shift those stakeholders who are very fixed in their position, great rapport with those you are trying to get the best of deals with, are the foundation to success.

When you are able to ‘get on well’ with those who could appear across a negotiating table with you, it’s an opportunity too good to be missed. Even if making the most of the one-to-one relationships that you have might seem minimal in the potential to change minds, in fact it’s been found many times that such relationships can so often be the missing piece in the jigsaw that can sway a decision.

Need a starter?

Well, one of the ways of communication that Carnegie strongly recommends is that capacity to listen rather than talk too much.

Whilst you are bursting to tell your influential one-on-one all about the project that is so vital to you, good advice is to take a time out. Find out what interests them; listen hard to what they say, paying full attention as you go; be interested in them as people.

By investing your time in listening rather than talking so much, you will find that there are valuable rewards to be won – simple as that! You see, taking time to make friends with the very people you need to, can be extremely rewarding and save a lot of financial sense too.

Those with the best Stakeholder Management skills work on those who can make a difference. Through being interested in them as people, a whole raft of negotiations and hard bargaining can be rendered unnecessary.

(c) 2010 Martin Haworth, Business and Management Coach and trainer, is the author of Super Successful Manager!, an easy to use, step-by-step weekly development program for managers of EVERY skill level. Find out more at http://www.SuperSuccessfulManager.com.