Don't Be Afraid of Commitment
How stakeholder analysis ensures success
You don’t have to wait until you’ve created a clear vision of your change to start mobilizing commitment for it, but it certainly helps. A shared vision for why the change is important and what it will accomplish (created with help from the tools we spoke about last week and the week before) will make it much easier to win friends and influence people.
However, if your business is like most businesses, you know that faster is better, and if you can accomplish things in parallel, so much the better. While you’re shaping a vision, there’s no reason not to pull your team together for a little stakeholder analysis.
If that phrase – stakeholder analysis – smacks of corporatespeak to you, feel free to ignore it. It’s really just a fancy term for figuring out where important or relevant people stand with respect to the change you’re leading, and it’s a good thing to do.
Sure, you can plow ahead with your initiative without paying attention to how other people feel about it, but it’ll probably bite you in the asparagus sooner or later. Every change involves and impacts people with titular or situational power in your organization, and if those folks aren’t as supportive as you need them to be, they’re likely to undermine the effort, either through active sabotage or through passive non-compliance. Either way, you’ll be stuck.
As a change leader, it’s your job to bring your key stakeholders along to where you need them to be, and in order to do that, you first have to know where they are. The table below is an example of a quick and dirty stakeholder analysis for a company rolling out a new product. Here’s how the project team used it.
First, the team got together with the blank matrix drawn on a flip chart. Only the column headings were filled in. The team then brainstormed all the key stakeholders, i.e. the people who were mostly directly impacted by or had the greatest ability to influence the success of the new product introduction, and tried to figure out how much support the effort needed from each of those stakeholders.
As you can see from the O’s on the chart, the new product intro doesn’t need the same level of support from everyone. While the team needs strong support from Martha and John in marketing and sales, it only needs moderate support from the CEO and CTO. Mere indifference is about all that is needed from the legal department. As long as Larry isn’t opposed, the project should succeed.
Once the team figured out where it needed folks to be, it had to figure out where those same folks stand today, in order to know whether they had work to do. This is the step where it’s tempting – but potentially fatal (project-wise) – to take shortcuts. Lots of project teams will simply give their best guesses here, but I wouldn’t recommend that. It might be OK as a first step, but to truly know your stakeholders opinions, you’re going to have to ask them. This is where it might be handy to have your vision shaped into an elevator pitch. Of course, our imaginary team did just that. They pitched the key elements of their change initiative (what it is, why it’s important now, how success will look and what’s needed from the stakeholder) and captured stakeholder responses.
After the stakeholder interviews were complete, the team reconvened and put X’s in the matrix to signify the stakeholders’ current positions. Where the team found the biggest gaps between current position and desired level of support, they documented the reasons why that person was resistant and then came up with influencing strategies to move each one along.
Next week, we’ll talk about three different influencing strategies, when to use them and how they work.
Eryc Eyl / Freelance Writer and Business Consultant
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