Your Stakeholders Will Make Or Break You!

I often hear leaders talk about their stakeholders, but I don’t always get the sense that they have clarity around who their stakeholders are and, more importantly, what each of them expects.

This is why it’s critical to map your stakeholders… you need to know who they are, and what drives each of them.

For a start, anyone who has a touchpoint or interaction with your team is a stakeholder, so make sure you identify all of them first. 

Employees, suppliers, customers, and supporting functions are some of the more common ones.

You may have other stakeholders who are harder to identify, because they don’t interact with you directly very often.

For example, when I was running CS Energy, the communities we operated in were key stakeholders in our success. 

We didn’t see them very often, but that didn’t detract from their importance.

Some of the most difficult issues I had to deal with as CEO, related to disgruntled land owners who claimed that our power station or mine assets were adversely impacting their lifestyle and prosperity.

This is one reason why you need to create an exhaustive list of stakeholders, and make sure you know what their potential impact on your team is. 

You might consider the following attributes:

• What do they expect from you?
• How important are they to your success?
• How frequent are your touch points?
• What are the typical issues you face?
• What risk does this stakeholder present to the success of your team?
• What motivates them?
• How active are they with your other critical stakeholders?
• How often should you (and your team) maintain contact?
• What level should your team engage at? 
• How do you synchronize your communications?
• If you had a stalemate that you needed to escalate, how would you do that?

Not all stakeholders are equal. But there’s often a mismatch between the stakeholder’s importance, and the amount of attention we give them.

For example, you’ll hear a lot of pundits talking about the “people before profits” principle, which seeks to deprioritize shareholders, in favor of employees… 

This feels right to many leaders, because employees are the stakeholder group you deal with most frequently.

But, how about your shareholders? They’re also a critical stakeholder in your business. Arguably, the most critical.

Without the capital your shareholders provide, there’s no money to invest in innovation… there’s no opportunity to expand your customer offerings… there’s no money for payrises, promotions, and new hires… and, ultimately, there’s no business.

Your employees prosper when the business is strong, and pursuing profitable growth.

This is why it’s so important to know who your most critical stakeholders are, and to devise a strategy for work with each of them.

Not paying attention to key stakeholder groups can be incredibly dangerous.

A stakeholder risk that blindsides you because you didn’t anticipate it, will almost always have greater consequences than a risk you identified in advance and consciously managed.