Stakeholder Stress Causes Tears: What would you do?

Thanks for your comments Sergio.

The SPIN model does work very well in many situations, whether you are familiar with the subject material or not. In this case, SPIN's full underlying "hurt and rescue" approach was not needed. The pain was already established before the meeting, and the only rescue was to commiserate with the stakeholder, promising future efforts toward relief.

I think I've been in similar situations. The human being is emphatically emotional and we can not be rational at all times, in situations like this one has to accept what people are feeling and take advantage of the emotions positively to rediscover the path to the goal that we are looking for as a team. At times we will have interested with disjoint interests we must let the emotions be expressed to understand them and give the time to return to the rational scheme for the decision making. I think you did the right thing and gave it a right approach.

Cris:
Great to see you are asking questions around the topic of emotional intelligence and empathy. As PMs we must always put ourselves in our stakeholders "shoes" and consider how our projects bring about change and the impacts. Everyone may act in different ways about the change so it's good to see how you handled it well and how others viewed how you handled yourself in this situation.

Yes, first when 'Pink Slips' were given, second when nearshore unit was shutdown. There is very little I can do.

Though the situation was different, I can understand stakeholder dilemma.