The Handy-Dandy Stakeholder Filter

 

As the month of insightful rants on involving stakeholders in your projects comes to a close, I wanted to leave the subject with some usable guidelines for knowing when to follow the conventional wisdom on stakeholder involvement, and when to treat it like Sean Penn weighing in on foreign policy. In order to get there, though, we need to do some categorization.

There are two kinds of people: those who divide people into two categories, and those that don’t. So goes the saying, but, in our analysis of who our stakeholders are and whether or not they should be “engaged,” a bit of analysis of where they’re coming from and their relative capabilities is in order. Let’s start simple: of the people impacted by the successful (or unsuccessful) completion of your project (i.e., “stakeholders”), some of them will desire a successful outcome, and others won’t (see my previous piece on “engaging” the latter). Fair enough, but the people in these categories won’t be wearing signs announcing their loyalties. Assuming you are in a position to evaluate your stakeholders’ true alliances, proffered intentions, and competencies (depending on how good you are at reading people, this could be a rather large assumption), we can assemble a basic grid at this point to help evaluate our stakeholders:

·         There are those who want you to fail, and present as such.

·         And there are those who want you to fail, but pretend to want you to succeed.

·         Those who want you to succeed, and present as such.

·         And then there are those who want you to succeed, but present as if they want you to fail.

This last category is rather rare, and something odd must be going on in the background, like a union boss who’s thrilled at getting the work, but has to pretend to be mad at the compensation rate. This category also includes those who are nominally opposed to your project, but have a larger conflict with your major opponents – the old “enemy of my enemy” category. While Sir Winston Churchill believed these to be analogous to friends, I believe there’s a little more nuance involved with them. Since I have evaluated the extremely dangerous second category in previous posts, I won’t go back over that, but I will suggest a third category: the competent, and the inept. Now we have a three-dimensional analysis, as indicated in the following table:

Of course, we all hope that our project teams are entirely composed of Category As; alas, they never are. At the very least there’s always a sprinkling of Bs, with the chilling addition of the Category Gs (the so-called Jungle Fighters, from Michael Maccoby’s archetypes). As we move beyond the actual project team and into the realm of stakeholders who do not belong to our organization, we encounter more and more Category Es and Fs. How to handle these? Well, once you’ve categorized all of your stakeholders, here are my suggestions for dealing with them:

While much of the literature I’ve seen on the topic of stakeholder engagement asserts that all identified stakeholders should have input into your project’s management decisions, note that I have suggested that only Category A people should have such unfiltered access. I guess that means that, in my view, at least some of the conventional wisdom on this topic was written by Category B people – and now you know how to deal with them.