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Viewing Posts by Lynda Bourne
What's the Story? Stakeholders Want to Know
Categories:
Stakeholder Management
Categories: Stakeholder Management
| There is nothing like a good story to connect with project stakeholders and team members. Storytelling has been used to communicate sophisticated ideas for millennia, ranging from the parables in the Bible to the morals found in fairy tales. Done right, storytelling is a captivating way to explain why your project (or a decision within the project) was initiated, what it will become and the benefits that will follow. Creating a good story requires skill, and while you may never become the next J.K. Rowling, applying some effective development techniques can help you hone your own storytelling style. The "story spine," a tool created by U.S. playwright Kenn Adams, helps project professionals craft well-structured stories. The outline is a series of sentence fragments that prompt the narrative elements of your story. You can even use it in a group setting -- perhaps during an exercise in which you ask team members to craft a story to explain the technical decisions made by team. The template is as follows, with a project management example in italics on securing buy-in to solve an emerging risk issue: The Platform introduces the issue or topic.
The Catalyst explains why this is important today.
The Consequences explains the journey and the "problem."
The Climax is the turning point that leads to the proposed solution.
The Resolution is the final -- and positive -- solution to problem.
So next time you need to sell an idea to management or to your project team, why not try a good story? Have you ever tried telling a story to gain buy-in from stakeholders? What technique did you find helpful? |
How to Build Ethics into Your Team Culture
Categories:
Leadership
Categories: Leadership
| Ethical behavior is just as crucial as effective leadership in persuading stakeholders to cooperate and support the work of the project manager — and therefore contributes to successful project outcomes. Ethical behavior has been a hallmark of PMI's drive to establish the profession of project management, supported by the PMI Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct. What is less well understood is the crucial role leaders play in establishing the ethical culture of their organizations. One key direction ethical leadership takes is indirectly — across the hierarchy, to peers of the leader. There is also a cascading effect, with the ethics of a senior leader influencing a subordinate leader's behaviors. In turn, ethical conduct trickles down to the subordinate leader's team culture, and so on down the hierarchy. As with any cascade, figuratively speaking, the flow is always downhill. An October 2012 study among more than 2,500 serving military personnel published in the Academy of Management journal supports two key findings from various business studies, including one published in the Harvard Business Review and one by Boston University professor Tamar Frankel:
In short, the ethical framework of an organization is set at the top and standards can be expected to be similar or deteriorate as you move down the hierarchy and out into the teams. Note that these studies were not looking at extreme ethical behaviors, such as dishonesty or discrimination — breaching these standards would offend most people. The research above focused on subtle but important aspects of ethics, similar to those found in the "aspirational" sections of PMI's Code of Ethics. These types of behaviors encourage individuals to develop as professionals, create a great place to work and urge external stakeholders to support the team. The practical implications of these findings are that leaders need to "walk the talk" by engaging in ethical behavior. They need to create a strong ethical culture in their teams by providing the tools needed to help team members behave ethically, on a reinforced basis. Some tools to inject ethics into the team culture include:
Once created, an ethical culture in your team can be expected to have a strong effect sideways and downward within the organization — and outward to the wider stakeholder community. How do you encourage ethical behavior among your peers and teams? |
Tailoring Communication for Top Stakeholders
| Given the amount of work involved, most of your project communication efforts should focus on the stakeholders crucial to the success of your project. And this requires answering two key questions: Who are the most important stakeholders, and why are they important? Determining who's important is usually straightforward, based on an assessment of the stakeholder's power and involvement in the project. Understanding why each "important stakeholder" is important helps you define the type of relationship you need to develop for effective communication. Enter the mutuality matrix, a useful project communications tool that starts with two dimensions:
These assumptions create four quadrants for categorizing each of the important stakeholders:
Once you understand the mutuality matrix, the way you communicate with each of the important stakeholders can be adjusted to ensure both parties achieve a satisfactory outcome. For example, the time and effort saved by minimizing communication with intractable objectors can be invested in building relationships with your key suppliers. Keep in mind that each stakeholder will also be either supportive of or opposed to the project. Important stakeholders against the project — typically competitors and objectors — usually need nothing from the project and your communication should be focused on minimizing the objections. Similarly, important stakeholders who need something from the project are usually either passive or supportive, and your communication should be focused on building robust relationships. How do you identify and communicate with important stakeholders? |
5 Communication Tips for Better Stakeholder Management
Categories:
Stakeholder Management
Categories: Stakeholder Management
| Over the past few years, I have written numerous posts looking at different aspects of stakeholder management. But what really matters and what is just useful to know? Here are my top five things to know to achieve effective stakeholder management: 1. Know who really matters. Make sure that the majority of your limited resources are being used to communicate with the stakeholders who really matter. They might not always be the bosses, either. The most important stakeholders will almost certainly change from month to month, so you need to regularly re-assess who is a top influencer at any given time. 2. Know why those stakeholders matter and what they need or want. Mutuality is important. If you need something from the stakeholder, you need to be able to link your needs with their requirements. Trading is far more effective and realistic than relying on charity or altruism. 3. One size fits no one. If you want your communication to be effective and deliver the outcome you need, you must understand the stakeholder with whom you're communicating. If you want your communication to have its intended effect, you need to have the right information for the receiver, in the proper format and delivered through the channel he or she prefers. 4. Attitudes change constantly. People change their minds all of the time. What you knew about your stakeholder's attitude toward your project last month is probably out of date. To compensate for a shift in focus, constantly re-assess the important stakeholder's attitudes and adjust your communication plan to deal with the current situation. 5. Everyone is biased (including you). When managing stakeholders, rational objectivity is nearly impossible to achieve. You are using your perception of your stakeholder's perception of your project to plan and manage your stakeholder communication effort. But perceptions are not real -- they are simply a person's understanding of what they believe to be real, filtered through their innate and acquired biases. To be successful, you need to be pragmatic, design the best communication plan you can with the resources available to you, and then see what happens. Knowing these five basic concepts and adapting as the situation changes won't guarantee success, but it will at last give you a fighting chance. Your project will always be better off if you spend time thinking about the best way to manage your stakeholder's needs and expectations. |
Motivate Stakeholders on the Project Team
| When it comes to stakeholder management, many project managers forget to consider the project team members. Every project manager and team leader wants to direct a team of motivated people. And many team leaders probably know that the most powerful forms of motivation -- autonomy, mastery and purpose -- center around self-actualization. So as a project manager or team leader, it's up to you to facilitate these circumstances for each member of your project team. To do this, you need effective communication in three key areas: 1. Comprehension. Make sure the person assigned to a task understands the work and measures of success, and agrees he or she can achieve the desired outcome. Asking the team member questions and listening to his or her suggestions on how to best accomplish the work helps develop the team member's sense of ownership associated with autonomy. 2. Acknowledgement. Everyone likes to feel they have accomplished something in their workday. Facilitating this feeling is part management -- minimizing interruptions and diversions -- and part communication. Make sure a team member's progress is acknowledged on a regular basis and "accidentally" catch the person doing something right. You have to notice and rectify errors in performance. Balance this negativity by acknowledging positives. This is a daily process to keep the team motivated and focused. 3. Purpose. Change is inevitable in project management, and it's up to you to maintain a sense of purpose throughout a project's lifecycle. The challenge usually comes when you have to move a project team member to another role or change his or her objectives. This can be especially frustrating if the team member has developed a sense of purpose around his or her overall project objectives and work. If you simply instruct people to change, you risk damaging or destroying motivation. Instead, communicate these four points:
Above all, communicating to motivate has to be authentic to be effective, and it need not require too much time and effort. Plus, the extra time spent motivating will be more than repaid in better team performance. How do you keep stakeholders happy on your project team? |