7 Steps for Effective Stakeholder Alignment

Many big stakeholder concepts can be illustrated on a much smaller scale, and stakeholder alignment is no exception. 

If you’re a parent raising children at home, you’ll know that there are timelines to be aware of, decisions to make, and each member of the household likely has different goals and ideas for how things should go. And as cheesy as it sounds, learning some stakeholder management and project management skills can actually be quite helpful in getting things to run more smoothly at home. 

The better you can keep your stakeholders in alignment (even if those stakeholders are you, your spouse, and your kids), the more likely you’ll achieve everything you need to — while maintaining some kind of harmony.

This is true of stakeholder alignment in the corporate world, too. And whether you work in project management, stakeholder engagement, or business management, it’s important to understand what stakeholder alignment is, why it matters, and how you can do it more effectively. 

In this guide, we’ll unpack practical definitions and tips for better stakeholder alignment.

What is Stakeholder Alignment?

Stakeholder alignment generally involves uniting the goals, interests, and expectations of stakeholders — so that they work in harmony together and with the mission and objectives of the organization.

On the other hand, stakeholder misalignment refers to a situation where stakeholders are out of step with one another, or with the organization’s mission and objectives.

Going back to basics, a stakeholder includes the people, groups, and organizations that may be affected by, have an impact on, or an interest in your project or work. Some common stakeholders include:

• Customers
• Employees
• Managers
• Shareholders
• Local communities
• Neighboring businesses
• Suppliers
• Contractors
• Non-profits
• Government agencies

Each organization or project will have a slightly different stakeholder list, although you may not need to build alignment for every stakeholder on your list. But before we get into how you can identify stakeholders for alignment, let’s take a closer look at why stakeholder alignment is worth doing.

The Importance of Aligning Stakeholders

There are a number of reasons why stakeholder alignment matters for most organizations and projects:

• Build understanding – Aligning your stakeholders on goals, priorities, or methods can help you avoid misunderstandings (and the associated frustrations, costs, and delays).
• Get commitment – When your stakeholders are aligned, it’s much easier to get them to commit to your project goals. 
• Gain buy-in – The process of building alignment can help stakeholders buy into your project.
• Be productive – Stakeholder alignment can help you run more successful and productive group meetings, especially when there’s trust and open communication between participants.
• Be strategic – Stakeholder strategies like building alignment are often key components of your overall business strategy.
• Make better decisions – Aligned stakeholders are more likely to work well together, share information, and make decisions that lead to good outcomes.

Fortunately, there’s a lot you can do to support stakeholder alignment. For example, actively engaging your stakeholders early on has been shown to increase project success by helping to identify misalignments and other potential problems early on, while increasing opportunities for innovation.

But it’s a continuous process — and as you’ll see in the next section, it’s one that can require regular evaluation and updates as you gather feedback and review the results.

7 Steps to Align Key Stakeholders

We’ve found there are seven steps in the process of aligning stakeholders. Be sure to kick off steps 1-5 as early as possible in the project so that you can increase your chances of successful stakeholder alignment.

Identify Your Stakeholders

Before you can align your stakeholders, you first have to know who your stakeholders are. Stakeholder identification requires you to consider all the people, groups, and organizations that may be impacted by your work, have an influence on it, or an interest in it. This includes both internal stakeholders (like employees and shareholders) and external stakeholders (like customers, regulators, and suppliers).

It’s a good idea to create a comprehensive stakeholder register that covers all your potential stakeholders, their interests, and their impact on the project. This will be an important tool for stakeholder tracking, monitoring, and reporting.

But as we’ve already mentioned, you likely won’t need to build alignment with every stakeholder in your register. It’ll be more important to build alignment with your key stakeholders, and to identify who they are, you’ll need to do stakeholder analysis and mapping.

Map and Prioritize Stakeholders

Stakeholder mapping is a useful process for prioritizing stakeholders so that you can determine which stakeholders are most critical to align with. It involves visualizing your stakeholders on charts based on their characteristics or relationships, allowing you to see (at a glance) how you could logically group similar stakeholders. There are many different methods to map your stakeholders, but our top two approaches include:

• Relationship Mapping – Visualizing the connections between stakeholders and your organization (and other stakeholders).
• Multi-Dimensional Mapping – Assigning a rating or level (from very low to very high) based on multiple dimensions or characteristics (like impact, influence, interest, criticality, effort, and position) that are relevant to your project or engagement.

Relationship mapping can reveal well-connected, influential stakeholders that must be in alignment in order for your project to run smoothly — but it can also show stakeholders that may require extra effort and communication in order to strengthen the relationships and build alignment. Multi-dimensional stakeholder maps work similarly, as you’ll likely need to focus your efforts on stakeholders with a higher overall rating. Though you may also want to look specifically at ratings for criticality, effort, and position to understand the amount of work it might take to build alignment with certain stakeholders.

You can conduct stakeholder mapping inside Simply Stakeholders, making it easy to update your maps while automatically integrating them with your overall stakeholder analysis, tracking, and reporting processes. Or you could manually recreate the charts or diagrams to map your stakeholders.

Uncover Stakeholder Needs and Expectations

In order to build alignment, you need to first understand what your stakeholders need and expect from your organization, your project, and one another. Making assumptions here is risky. Instead, collect real data from your stakeholders via:

• Surveys and questionnaires to gather stakeholder input and feedback (early on, and as the project evolves)
• Focus groups to deepen your understanding of stakeholder needs and work towards consensus
• Personalized, one-on-one conversations with key stakeholders to uncover and address specific concerns

By the way, you can use Simply Stakeholders’ form builder tool to create online surveys, gather stakeholder feedback, and qualitatively analyze the data to understand sentiments and issues. Plus, each response is automatically linked to the relevant stakeholder contact record in your system.

Align Stakeholder and Company Goals

You need to consider more than just your company’s goals for the project and engagement. You also need to be able to clearly articulate what your stakeholders hope to achieve from:

• The project
• Their relationship with your organization
• Their interactions with other stakeholders
• Their involvement in the consultation or engagement

From here, you should be able to identify shared goals and interests — or areas where each party can accommodate the other party’s goals or interests without derailing their primary concerns or objectives. Finding areas of overlap will be key to building alignment, minimizing conflict, and working together towards common goals.

Develop a Communication Plan

Effective communication is key to building stakeholder alignment, and it all starts with a communication plan to keep your stakeholders informed and engaged from start to finish. In your plan, outline any considerations for stakeholder communication and any actions you’ll need to take, such as:

• The audience you’ll be targeting (likely your key stakeholders as identified in step 2)
• What channels you’ll use to communicate, based on audience attributes and preferences
• What key messages you’ll need to share (these can be helpful to create alignment)
• Updates you’ll share about the project’s progress (open and transparent updates are essential to trust and alignment)
• How and when you’ll ask for stakeholder feedback and participation
• A timeline of events and communications activities
• How you’ll monitor and measure your communications (and any stakeholder responses)

Get Stakeholders Involved 

Bring stakeholders into your planning and (where it makes sense) other parts of your project process in order to increase their buy-in and sense of ownership, while helping to improve your project and decisions. Involvement can look like all sorts of different things, depending on your stakeholders’ skills, expectations, roles, interests, and their willingness to participate. But you could get stakeholders involved in:

• Planning – Attending project meetings, helping to set goals, sharing perspectives, and helping to define the project requirements or scope.
• Decision-making – Being involved in advisory boards or committees, and providing their input at key decision points.
• Sharing Expertise – Consulting on the project, applying their specialized knowledge/skills, and acting as subject matter experts.
• Sharing Resources – Contributing financially towards the project, sharing equipment, facilitating access, and contributing volunteers/workers.
• Evaluation – Helping to define KPIs, sharing feedback on the project, and reporting on lessons learned.
• Implementation – Helping to rollout project deliverables, providing training, and updating processes.

Revisit, Realign, and Evaluate 

Lastly, it’s important to realize that stakeholder alignment is a job that’s never finished. It can take time to build stakeholder relationships, and even the strongest relationships will require you to revisit them regularly. On top of this, business goals, project goals, and especially stakeholder goals and priorities will change over time. 

You’ll also need to continually evaluate your engagement to determine if you’ve been successful in aligning your stakeholders and how you could improve your approach in future. Some markers to look for include:

• Stakeholder sentiments
• Their level of engagement
• Their self-reported satisfaction
• Whether they participate consistently from start to finish

By qualitatively analyzing stakeholder responses, gathering feedback, monitoring relationship health, and seeing how active your stakeholders are in the consultation, you can get a good idea of alignment, what’s working, and what’s not working.

Get Aligned With Simply Stakeholders

Hopefully by now it’s clear just how important stakeholder alignment is. By keeping key stakeholders informed, engaged, and committed throughout your project, you can benefit from greater levels of commitment and buy-in, improved productivity, more support, greater shared understanding, and better decision-making. All of this will increase the likelihood of a smooth project process and successful outcomes.

Looking for a system to help you enable alignment within your organization, as well as with external stakeholders? Simply Stakeholders offers powerful tools for alignment, like stakeholder and relationship mapping, stakeholder analysis, relationship scoring, issues analysis, surveys, communications, and much more.

If you’d like to learn more about what you can do with Simply Stakeholders, reach out to the team to book a demo!