How to Improve Stakeholder Management Skills for Better Collaboration and Outcomes
Stakeholder management skills are useful in most professional roles, but they’re especially critical for leaders and project managers that need to navigate complex projects and collaborate with diverse groups.
Skilled stakeholder managers build trust, strengthen relationships, and find ways for stakeholders to align, work together, and achieve project objectives — even when stakeholders hold conflicting goals and interests. And when you combine these soft skills with modern tools and a best practice stakeholder management process, you have a strong foundation for effective stakeholder management.
Ready to build your stakeholder management skills? Let’s dive into some definitions, success stories, practical tips, and tools that will help you manage stakeholders like a pro.
What Are Stakeholder Management Skills?
Stakeholder management skills are the combination of soft skills and technical abilities needed to successfully identify, engage, and build relationships with your project or organization’s stakeholders. Stakeholders include any people, groups, and organizations that are impacted by, have an influence on, or an interest in your work.
Important soft skills and techniques for managing stakeholders include:
- Communication: Communicate with clarity and adjust your approach to different audiences so that you can manage expectations, build alignment, improve collaboration, and build relationships.
- Emotional Intelligence: Approach situations and people with empathy and understanding, while managing your own emotional response.
- Relationship Management: Use relationship tracking tools and consistently show up so you can build trust, develop strong relationships, facilitate collaboration between groups, and help move your projects forward.
- Negotiation & Conflict Management: Know how to anticipate conflicts, and be prepared to negotiate with different parties so you can find a solution that works for everyone.
- Strategy: Think strategically so you can see the big picture impacts of your actions, spot opportunities, anticipate needs, and adapt to change.
- Leadership: Be the face of your organization to stakeholders, confidently facilitate meetings, communicate your project’s vision, and unite people under a common goal.
- Problem-Solving & Deliberation: Know how to facilitate a deliberative approach to complex problems by giving people adequate information to consider all aspects of an issue so they can deliberate on suitable outcomes.
- Risk Management: Take a stakeholder approach to managing risk so you can identify more risks and the stakeholders that care about them.
Useful technical abilities for stakeholder management include:
- Recordkeeping: Use a system to keep accurate records and manage the data generated from stakeholder engagement so you can get more insights into your stakeholders, evaluate your engagement processes, demonstrate good engagement practices, and meet any compliance requirements.
- Data Analysis: Get data and tech savvy so you can use advanced stakeholder analysis methods to get more insights and make data-driven decisions.
- Reporting: Confidently create and share engagement reports, visually representing data for practical insights that support better decision making.
- Agility: Apply agile methods of working to your engagement process so you can quickly adapt your stakeholder engagement strategy based on feedback, new circumstances, and other changes.
Why Stakeholder Management Skills Matter
How often is poor stakeholder management behind the “uh ohs” and “oops” moments you’ve experienced in your career, projects, and workplaces?
When stakeholder management goes wrong, you’re more exposed to risk and more likely to deal with difficult stakeholders — often due to misaligned goals, unmet expectations, unresolved conflicts, ineffective communication, and missed opportunities.
For example, Australia’s National Broadband Network (NBN) implementation failed to adequately consult and manage their stakeholders, including industry experts, residential and business users, local communities, internet service providers, contractors, and subcontractors. This resulted in significant and ongoing problems, including significant cost overruns, missed deadlines, unmet service expectations, strained relationships, quality issues, and a dissatisfied public.
Whether you’re implementing a multi-billion dollar, nationwide project or something much smaller in scale, honing your stakeholder management skills and practices can make a real difference to the success of your projects (and the satisfaction of your stakeholders).
How to Improve Your Stakeholder Management Skills
Fortunately, there’s plenty you can do to build your stakeholder management skills. With the right strategies and tools, you’ll quickly become known for your ability to get to the heart of stakeholder issues — and can implement new approaches that transform your projects for the better.
1. Conduct a Stakeholder Analysis
Coming up with a list of stakeholders is easy — the hard part is analyzing them. Stakeholder analysis involves looking at the available data (such as interests, level of impact, and level of interest) to understand who your stakeholders are. Some methods of stakeholder analysis are objectively better than others, but you’ll need to work with the methods that fit your available data, such as:
- Multi-Dimensional Stakeholder Mapping: Assigning a level (low, medium, high) across up to six attributes (e.g. impact, influence, interest, criticality, position, effort) to prioritize, plan, and track your engagement
- Sentiment & Issues Analysis: Qualitatively analyzing stakeholder interactions and communications to determine what issues they care about and whether they feel positive, negative, or neutral towards them
- The Salience Model: Prioritizing based on a level of power, legitimacy, and urgency
- The Stakeholder Knowledge Base Chart: Positioning stakeholders based on their level of awareness and degree of support
- The Power/Interest Grid: Positioning stakeholders based on their level of power and interest
- The Power-Predictability Matrix: Positioning stakeholders based on their level of power and predictability
Mastering stakeholder analysis is worth doing as it’s often the first step to unlocking other valuable stakeholder management skills, including relationship building, stakeholder prioritization, and tailoring communications to stakeholders interests.
2. Use Stakeholder Management Tools
What are stakeholder management skills on their own without the right tools to help you implement best practices and get more done?
A Stakeholder Relationship Management (SRM) system like Simply Stakeholders can help manage more stakeholders more efficiently via built-in tools for recordkeeping, stakeholder analysis, stakeholder mapping, reporting, and more.
Stakeholder mapping is a powerful tool in itself. The right mapping models can help you strategically build relationships, identify stakeholder interests to avoid conflict, segment your stakeholders for engagement, and track your results over time to improve your outcomes. So, even if you don’t have access to a SRM with built-in stakeholder mapping, it’s still worth trying some of the top mapping methods to see what works best for you, such as Multi-Dimensional Stakeholder Mapping, Relationship Network Mapping, the Salience Model, and the Power/Interest Grid.
3. Engage Stakeholders Early
For better project outcomes, you need to start planning your engagement (and engaging your stakeholders) as early as possible. This brings a number of advantages, such as:
- Mutual Understanding: Get a headstart on communicating project information, while learning about your stakeholders’ concerns
- Relationship Building: Give yourself more time to build strong, mutually beneficial stakeholder relationships
- Risk Management: Apply stakeholder knowledge to identify more risks and take action to minimize them
- More Flexibility: Fewer decisions are set in stone, so you’re more able to adapt to stakeholder concerns
- More Alignment: Make adjustments to align project objectives with stakeholder goals
- Less Friction: Give yourself time to address major conflicts and issues before the project officially begins
4. Boost Your Emotional Intelligence
Emotional intelligence is the ability to understand (and influence) your own emotions, and the emotions of the people you’re interacting with. With high levels of emotional intelligence, you’re more likely to stay calm under pressure, respond appropriately to other people, and resolve conflict effectively.
You can work on increasing your emotional intelligence by practicing greater:
- Self-awareness: Learn how to identify emotions in yourself based on your physical feelings, embrace your strengths, and work on your areas of weakness
- Self-control: Notice when your emotions are triggered, slow down your reaction, and think before you act
- Awareness of others: Try to be more conscious of other people’s emotions based on non-verbal communications and observable behaviors
- Empathy: Acknowledge when conflicts or decisions may impact someone’s feelings and take the time to build genuine understanding
5. Become More Culturally Aware
Cultural awareness is a critical skill for stakeholder managers. When you engage meaningfully with local communities and indigenous groups you can uncover issues that may impact your project, such as heritage sites, rights, traditions, and territorial claims. Cultural differences can also have an impact on how you communicate and build relationships with stakeholders, so be prepared to develop your awareness through:
- Listening: Pay attention to stakeholder perspectives and preferences
- Immersion: Proactively seek out diverse communities and spend time learning about them
- Curiosity: Leave your assumptions behind and ask questions (with respect!) so you can learn
6. Invest in Professional Development
One thing that sets skilled stakeholders apart from the rest is that they’re always learning. The practice of stakeholder management has evolved significantly over the past few decades and will continue to shift along with societal expectations and technological advancements.
So, invest in ongoing professional development by enrolling in stakeholder management courses (like this one), attending relevant workshops, joining a community, or watching webinars like the one below.
7. Seek Continuous Feedback
Evaluation is so important because it can help you identify ways to improve your stakeholder engagement during a project — and how you can improve on future engagements. Surveys and focus groups are popular methods of feedback because you can ask stakeholders directly about their experiences and ideas for improvement.
However, other valuable sources of feedback can include:
- Communications: Record and analyze notes from phone calls, meetings, and online comments
- Data: Review the analytics in your stakeholder system to see what actions led to greater stakeholder engagement, stronger relationships, and more positive sentiment
- Communities: If you’re not already a member of Simply Stakeholders’ online community for stakeholder professionals, join today and use our space to ask for ideas and feedback from peers
- Mentorship: Find a trusted mentor who you can chat to about what went well and what you could improve on next time
Real-World Success Story: Australian Wind Farm
In this case study, a large wind farm developer in Australia had five new projects that required careful stakeholder management so they could establish landholder agreements with all the affected landholders before the projects could go ahead.
To ensure the success of the project, the development team applied a range of stakeholder management skills, including stakeholder identification, data management, feedback management, and property tracking. Their skills in relationship management helped them track and maintain relationships with contractors, local community members, and environmental groups. And they were able to use stakeholder analysis tools to rate interactions based on stakeholder sentiment, identify specific issues within those interactions, and to decide on which stakeholders to engage next.
With Simply Stakeholders’ SRM system enhancing their capabilities, the development team were able to confidently manage their stakeholders and keep their projects moving forward.
Create Stronger Connections with Stakeholder Management
If there’s one thing that could make all the difference for your career, it’s strong stakeholder management skills. These skills can pave your way to better communication, better risk management, stronger relationships, improved collaboration, greater stakeholder satisfaction, and more success in your projects.
Start by applying some of the strategies we’ve covered here, then continue to build on your knowledge with more in-depth resources (like our eBook on Stakeholder Management Planning!).
And don’t forget to join our professional community for more opportunities to learn, share resources, and grow with your peers.
