Gautrey Unleashed

How to Engage with Your Stakeholders

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The thinking you have done so far in the process is likely to be useless unless you get active. Careful preparation before you engage your stakeholders will increase the probability that you’ll achieve your goal. And this stage is all about preparation. It explores a wide range of different topics related to engaging with stakeholders. Each of these topics could justify a book in its own right, so what I have tried to do is keep it simple and brief. Where I think it useful, I have also referenced other books which can be found in the library. One of the temptations with the Stakeholder Influence Process is to fly into action as soon as you get the first big flash of inspiration. That may well yield the result you want, but please consider pausing just a moment longer to make a clear decision about how you wish to tackle each Read More

Tailoring Your Stakeholder Pitch

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It is one of the most natural things in the world to be preoccupied with your own ideas and plans. If this spreads into the way you engage with stakeholders, it isn’t going to get you very far. It is essential to translate your own ideas and goals into words and phrases that your stakeholder might naturally use, or that will speak to their agenda. I’m a firm believer in the notion that you should have a consistent vision as the base for all communication with stakeholders. If you don’t have this, there is a very real danger that when your stakeholders get together they may start talking about your goal and realise Read More

Understanding Conflicting Agendas

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Unless you understand someone else’s position, ambitions and problems, your influence attempts could be much more difficult. When others don’t want to cooperate or are working against you, “conflicting agendas” are often cited as the cause. This seems to signal a barrier to success, an explanation of why you can’t get the things done – or is it just an excuse? A more helpful attitude is that it is simply a question of different priorities. This opens up the possibility that the difference could be negotiated to achieve a win-win situation, while also removing Read More

How to Develop Your Stakeholder Strategy

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This part of the Stakeholder Influence Process usually begins to happen quite naturally as you are analysing each individuals position. Yet what usually happen is that the initial ideas for action are unlikely to be the more appropriate or effective. Here you will find a collection of resources to really challenge your thinking, test thought devilish assumptions of yours and help you to turn a conversation into a coherent strategy and plan for action. Oh, and your strategy does not need to be Read More

Benefits of Using the Stakeholder Influence Process

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If you give it a half decent go, you will quickly start to notch up the benefits. Over the years, I have seen people achieve remarkable advances in a very short space of time in so many different areas. For example, clients have been able to…
  • Focus their time on what will make the biggest difference to their success.
  • Reduce the risks of failure and be more prepared if those risks start to materialise.
  • Dramatically increase buy-in, getting more people to actively support their work.
  • Deliver their projects in record time, with fewer problems and enhanced benefit realisation.
  • Pull out of the detail so they could take a more strategic view.
  • Achieve much more with much less.
  • Become more confident, assured and less stressed.
  • Attract the attention of the talent spotters at the top of their organisation.
  • Move forward their career, sometimes several steps at a time.
The Stakeholder Influence Process is also useful in a very wide range of pursuits. Over the last Read More

Stakeholder Influence Process Introduction

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The Stakeholder Influence Process is a sequence of steps which will help you work out what you need to do to achieve your goals when they are reliant on the agreement of other powerful people. It provides a simple framework to think through the situation you wish to influence, your goal, or the project you are managing. It will help you to figure out who is onside and who may be out to get you. From that you can start to develop your strategy to accomplish your goal. This will probably involve engaging with people you may have overlooked before. Before starting the process, you may have considered them to be minor players or not even interested. Some of them may not be interested in what you are doing, but the Stakeholder Influence Process may uncover opportunities Read More

Exercise: Becoming More Influential

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Research is consistent the world over that in just about every walk of life it really helps if you are influential, and this is particularly true of people who work in leadership roles. Some people have gone so far as to say that Leadership = Influence and while it is tempting to think that, there are some differences; however, we’d suggest that 90% of leadership work entails influencing people in some way. Since you’re using this library, it’s likely that you’re working on developing your influence. This is a big subject and there are many different aspects to it, but nobody has time to learn it all — even if that were possible. So we recommend that you complete the exercise below to Read More

Considering Your Stakeholder Strategy

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Assuming you have been diligent in your application of the preceding steps in the Stakeholder Influence Process, now is the time to pull it all together and make quick decisions about what you need to do in order to maximise your progress towards the goal. The word “strategy” seems to be used everywhere in business today. Put simply, what I mean when I use this word is the general direction or steps you are going to take over a period of time in order to achieve your Influencing Goal. It might be helpful to think of this in terms of the stepping-stones that you need to move safely across from where you are today to where you want to be tomorrow. Many of the stepping-stones will require Read More

Exercise: Deciding Your Stakeholder Strategy

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Bearing these principles explored in Considering Your Stakeholder Strategy, let’s start to get you thinking about what your strategy needs to be – at least initially. Remember to stay focused on your chosen Influencing Goal.

See if you can answer all of the questions below. If you can get a friend to challenge you with these questions, it will help you greatly – even if they know nothing about Read More

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