How to Deal with Difficult Stakeholders
As a project manager or stakeholder consultant, dealing with difficult stakeholders is almost a rite of passage. So, whether it’s the first time, or you’ve already managed more challenging stakeholders than you can count, wear your badge with pride.
When stakeholder relationships are important to your organization’s goals, managing these stakeholders is challenging and meaningful work where you can often make the biggest difference for your project and organization. It’s also an opportunity to develop skills that will make you a valuable asset in any role, project, and workplace.
In this blog, we share how to deal with difficult stakeholders, some strategies that will help you build positive stakeholder relationships from the start, and our top tips to restore stakeholder relationships when they break down.
Common Causes of Stakeholder Challenges
It’s important to realize that stakeholder challenges always happen for a reason — and getting to the heart of the issue is generally the first step towards resolving them. Common causes to watch out for include:
- Communication Breakdowns: Failing to communicate in an accurate or timely manner can fuel existing tensions, increase conflict, and leave stakeholders feeling undervalued or ignored
- High Expectations: If stakeholder expectations aren’t met (either because they were unrealistic or you failed to properly communicate your project’s objectives and limitations), they may lose confidence in your project or organization
- Lack of Engagement: When stakeholders don’t participate in your consultation, you’re going to see less buy-in, misaligned visions for the project, and difficulty making decisions (because you’ll be missing important stakeholder knowledge and perspectives)
- Competing Priorities: It’s normal for collaborators to have different goals and agendas, but this can become a source of conflict if they prioritize personal goals over the project’s stated objectives
- Distrust: Many of the above issues (miscommunication, mismatched priorities, etc.) will erode trust over time, making it even harder to work with your stakeholders
Strategies to Build Positive Stakeholder Relationships
Strong, positive relationships with your stakeholders mean that difficult situations are less likely to lead to difficult stakeholders. Proactively apply the following strategies to improve your stakeholder relationships and get ahead of any potential issues before they happen.
Proactive Engagement
It’s important to engage stakeholders and build relationships proactively — before crises or challenges occur. It’s always better to engage stakeholders early on so that you can understand their goals, concerns, and motivations. This will ensure you have more time to build strong stakeholder relationships (and insights to help you be strategic). Plus, early engagement will give you the chance to identify and manage risks (reputational, financial, legal, and others) that might lead to bigger problems down the track.
As part of your stakeholder engagement process, you can ask your stakeholders targeted questions that will reveal their underlying priorities, such as:
- If you had to choose one part of the project to get right, what would it be?
- What trade-offs would you consider acceptable in order to get the project done?
- What past experiences (good or bad) have you had with similar projects?
Clear, Consistent Communication
Your stakeholder relationships will thrive when you get your communications right. Stakeholder communication methods will be different for every project, but the principles remain the same:
- Be Clear: Remember that your stakeholders may have cultural or knowledge barriers (such as project terminology) that make it harder to communicate, so you’ll need to accommodate their needs
- Be Transparent: Transparent communications involves consistency (share regular project updates), timeliness (notify stakeholders promptly about decisions), and honesty (be upfront about any challenges)
- Be Open: Embrace two-way communication and provide plenty of opportunities for your stakeholders to share their feedback with you
- Track Everything: If you don’t yet have stakeholder software, you could use a simple stakeholder register to track your communications and a stakeholder engagement matrix to evaluate your stakeholders’ response
Set Realistic Expectations
Since unmet expectations are a common cause for stakeholder challenges, it’s worth applying some specific strategies to help set realistic expectations with your stakeholders. These tips should help guide your approach to stakeholder communications and relationships:
- Be Upfront: Engage early on to ensure stakeholder perspectives are used to establish timelines, deliverables, and outcomes
- Don’t Assume: Ask your stakeholders what they expect from your organization and project (via surveys, focus groups, and interviews)
- State What You’ll Need: If you need something from stakeholders, be clear about what you need, when you need it, and why it matters (even if it seems obvious)
- Say What You’ll Do: Get clear on your organization/team’s role in the project and what you’ll deliver (and if there’s anything you can’t/won’t do)
- Stay Positive: Let stakeholders know if it’s not possible to meet an expectation, and redirect their focus towards issues they can influence or control
- Build Alignment: Where possible, find ways to align your interests with stakeholder interests, even if this requires some negotiation and compromise
Techniques for Resolving Stakeholder Challenges
Even your strongest stakeholder relationships may be rocked by an unavoidable or unexpected challenge. Resolving these challenges quickly and effectively will help you retain or rebuild those relationships and minimize any negative impacts on your project. The following techniques will give you the best chance of a quick (and mutually agreeable) resolution.
Practice Active Listening
The default mode of listening involves hearing the other person’s message and paying just enough attention to provide a socially acceptable response. But active listening requires more skill, more attention, and more effort. It involves:
- Focus: Paying close attention to what they’re really saying (including thoughts and feelings that aren’t being stated) without distraction
- Proof: Demonstrating your attention through eye contact and facial expressions (if face-to-face)
- Feedback: Asking clarifying questions and rephrasing what they’ve said to make sure you understood
- Empathy: Acknowledging any concerns, emotions, and perspectives (whether or not you agree)
Even if active listening doesn’t resolve the issue, your stakeholders will feel more understood and are more likely to be satisfied with the interaction.
Tip: It’s a good idea to keep a record of stakeholder feedback (ideally, in your stakeholder system) so that you can track any recurring themes and issues. Keeping a history of past interactions will also help you (and your team) continue the conversation with stakeholders — without missing a beat.
Collaborate to Solve Problems
Stakeholder participation can lead to more creative ideas, increased buy-in, and the opportunity to find a solution that works for everyone. A good process for this can involve:
- Discussion: Discussing project objectives and stakeholder goals to find common ground
- Brainstorming: Working together to brainstorm potential solutions
- Evaluation: Objectively evaluating the pros and cons of each solution (and their impact on the project and stakeholders)
- Selection: Selecting the most fair and realistic solution
Analyze and Prioritize Issues
It’s not always possible to tackle every stakeholder issue or concern at the same time, especially if different stakeholders care about different things. You must prioritize which concerns to focus on first based on an objective analysis of each issue. Criteria for analysis might include:
- Impact: How many people and processes are affected?
- Feasibility: Do we have available resources to tackle the issue?
- Urgency: How will the issue impact deadlines? Will it get worse over time?
- Alignment: How closely does the issue align with organizational goals and values?
- Risk: What are the potential negative consequences if we don’t address it?
- Complexity: How complex is the issue? Could it be a quick win?
- Compliance: If we don’t resolve this issue, will there be regulatory/legal repercussions?
You could use a scoring system or matrix to quantitatively analyze your issues. But the key here is to stick to the facts and follow the same set of criteria for each issue so your decision remains objective.
Set Boundaries When Needed
Part of knowing how to deal with difficult stakeholders is knowing when enough is enough. Active listening, collaboration, and prioritization won’t always be enough to resolve your stakeholder difficulties. Some stakeholders may continue to make unreasonable demands or even share misinformation about your project. When this happens, you’ll need to set clear boundaries so that your project can move forward. Setting boundaries with stakeholders will require:
- Calm: Keep it professional and respectful, even if the other person becomes emotional
- Gratitude: Demonstrate the ways you’re already using stakeholder input to shape your project
- Clarity: Communicate the facts (publicly, if needed) to avoid further misinformation
- Assertiveness: Be clear that some solutions aren’t feasible without a magic wand and/or unlimited resources
- Acceptance: Accept that you won’t be able to make everyone happy
By setting boundaries, you send a clear message to stakeholders that their efforts aren’t going to get the result they want. And taking a strong stance will show your other stakeholders how you handle yourself in challenging situations.
Tools and Frameworks to Support Stakeholder Management
Stakeholder management tools refers to frameworks, methods, and software systems that support the stakeholder management process. With the right set of tools, you can more effectively manage your stakeholders, identify issues, build relationships, and work through conflicts. Essential tools include:
Stakeholder Mapping
Stakeholder mapping refers to the process of placing stakeholder attributes (e.g. influence, relationships, impact, knowledge) onto a chart to better understand those stakeholders. They can be used to track changes, segment stakeholders into groups, identify trends, and compare different stakeholders.
Our favorite stakeholder mapping methods (both available inside Simply Stakeholders) are useful tools to support stakeholder communications in different ways:
- Relationship Network Maps: Track the connections between different stakeholders and your organization so you can strategically build and strengthen stakeholder relationships
- Multi-Dimensional Stakeholder Maps: Generate charts based on six stakeholder attributes to identify stakeholder interests, anticipate potential conflicts, and prioritize your engagement efforts
Stakeholder Relationship Management (SRM)
A Stakeholder Relationship Management (SRM) system is a category of relationship management software that’s built to track and manage stakeholder relationships. Unlike CRMs like Hubspot that are built for the sales process and tracking customer relationships, SRMs like Simply Stakeholders can track all your relationships and are designed to support the stakeholder engagement process.
SRMs can help you engage stakeholders more efficiently, thanks to features like tracking, analysis, mapping, and task management. But the right SRM will also help you deliver a better stakeholder experience that leads to more satisfied stakeholders by:
- Tracking Preferences: Track how your stakeholders want to be contacted (including any accommodations needed)
- Analyzing Interactions: Read between the lines with automatic AI-driven sentiment and issues analysis
- Integrating Communications: Make it easier to communicate regularly with built-in tools for communications
- Encouraging Feedback: Easily collect feedback via survey tools, with each response attached to the right contact
- Tracking Grievances: Keep track of every grievance, task, and commitment so you don’t miss a thing
- Supporting Conversations: With a detailed history of past interactions, keep your conversations going with all the context you need
Tips for Building Trust Over Time
We’ve touched on the importance of building strong stakeholder relationships that can withstand potential challenges — and ways to resolve issues and repair relationships when things go wrong. But a lot of the techniques and strategies we’ve discussed come back to one thing: trust.
Trust strengthens stakeholder relationships. A lack of trust can down those relationships. And difficult stakeholders are often stakeholders that don’t trust you because you haven’t handled their concerns or problems effectively.
Trust is key, but often hard to come by (especially in the public arena). But you can make it as easier for stakeholders to trust you by:
- Meeting Your Commitments: Show up consistently, do what you say you’ll do, and don’t promise something you can’t deliver on
- Showing Capability: Put your expertise, skills, and resources on display
- Building Connections: Establish positive relationships with people that your stakeholders already know and trust
- Being Open: Provide meaningful opportunities for stakeholder input and inclusion, have honest conversations, and let stakeholders know if you face a setback
- Being Human: Appreciate your stakeholders, be generous and empathetic towards them, and make sure they know that they matter
- Doing the Right Thing: Courageously choose fairness, integrity, human rights, and values over what’s easy or comfortable
How Simply Stakeholders Helps You Deal with Difficult Stakeholders
There’s so much you can do to minimize the likelihood of stakeholder problems — and to be prepared so you know how to deal with difficult stakeholders when challenging situations arise. When you show up with positive strategies for relationship building, tools for stakeholder management, and skills in conflict resolution, you’ll be able to work through the challenges and get the best possible outcomes for all parties.
Looking for a stakeholder relationship management tool? You’ll love Simply Stakeholders’ built-in stakeholder mapping, analysis, issues tagging, sentiment analysis, relationship health monitoring, and grievance management. Plus, with a complete history of your stakeholder interactions, you can always go back to see where your relationship went wrong and how you can fix it.
Book a demo with the team to learn more!
