Gautrey Unleashed

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

Planning Stakeholder Meetings

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For each category on the stakeholder map, there is a suggested approach for engaging with them in order to either maximise the leverage in the relationship or to minimise the potential for damage. The overall goal of all activity is to work at moving all relationships into, or at least as close to, the top right hand box – Allies. However, we only have so much time and energy at our disposal, so we need to ensure that we spend it wisely. We suggest the following hierarchy of Read More

Exercise: Developing Stakeholder Influence

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When considering the action you need to take with a certain stakeholder, one of the most difficult challenges is to overcome your preconceived ideas about why they are resisting, or why they may be difficult to handle. It is vital to be able to move away from your assumptions so that you can try new approaches. The exercise that follows is another one which works best when someone else is asking the questions. Focus on a particular individual whom you have Read More

Exercise: Challenging Your Stakeholder Strategy

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This is one of those exercises where it really helps to have someone else to ask the questions. The reason for this is that they can stay alert to what you are saying, help you focus on blind spots and ask the naïve questions which would never occur to you. So the questions below are really coaching questions for someone else to ask you; but if you are working on your own, they will still help greatly.

Working with a friend...

If you are working with someone who knows your role well, it will be vital that they work with you as a coach, not as a consultant. The best learning comes from them helping you to Read More

How to Assess Your Stakeholders

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Having a list of stakeholders is a good start; but to get a sense of the priorities, you need to understand their position relative to your Influencing Goal and to each other. That way you can begin to see the bigger picture and develop a clear strategy to accelerate towards your goal. Using the Stakeholder Influence Map (below), the general idea is that you plot the name of each (impactful) stakeholder based on where you think they are in terms of Read More

How to Identify Your Stakeholders

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In this guide, I will focus on helping you to increase your ability to quickly identify the stakeholders who are critical to your success. It is all too easy to focus time and effort on the wrong ones and lose ground in your influence. This aspect should never be taken for granted and the result of this part of the Stakeholder Influence Process frequently yields huge progress towards your goal. As with other guides, this page will introduce you to content within the library which will help you in the identification process. Read More

Group Stakeholder Management

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If you have a very big goal on your hands which could affect a very large number of people, you should probably start off identifying the stakeholders by groups rather than individuals. The reason for this is that you will find it very difficult to find the best people to be influencing. When focusing at a group level, you can use Steps 3 (Analyse) and 4 (Plan) of this process to work out which group (or groups) are most critical to your success. Once you’ve done that, you can settle on a smaller Influencing Goal relating to each specific group. Then start Read More

Prioritising Stakeholders to Analyse

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The final part of this step is to consider how much impact each person could have — how much could they help or hinder your progress? In many ways, this is a combination of the benefit (or loss) that they are aware of which could be heading their way and the amount of power/influence they have within the organisation — or more importantly, among your stakeholder group. The more they are likely Read More

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