Assessing Your Stakeholders

Often overlooked when considering a management role are those people you impact besides your boss or your team. Stakeholders are individuals or groups who have an interest or stake in an organization's activities and outcomes. They can include employees, customers, shareholders, suppliers, and the community, all of whom are affected by the organization's decisions and performance. Each group has unique expectations and needs, making it crucial for the organization to engage and communicate effectively with them. By understanding and addressing stakeholder concerns, you can build trust, enhance your reputation, and ensure long-term success. Here’s how various stakeholders breakdown:

Those you may collaborate with on projects, problems, and mutual support:

• Peer departments.

• Partners.

• Suppliers.

Those who pay for services that your work effort has an impact on.

• Internal, i.e., groups, departments, and business units within your company.

• External, i.e., customers.

• Note that Internal organizations that pay for your services are also customers.

Those who may be impacted by your results, even if you don't interact with them directly.

• Stockholders

• Community

You must understand the needs of these stakeholders, specifically the ones you’ll work directly with. You need to know their current perception of your team, and what they expect from you. To identify the key groups and individuals to connect with, ask your potential boss or the HR department. For internal stakeholders and external partners or suppliers, it should be simple to set up meetings with the people you’ll work with.  

• Peer departments should be the easiest to meet with, as you’ll be working with those managers on a regular basis.

• Partners and vendors will be the next easiest, they should be more than willing to meet, as they have a revenue stake in your success.

• You should be able to speak to a management representative of internal customers, you may need help from your boss to navigate this.

For external customers, there may be roadblocks to direct communication depending on:

• Your organization's customer-facing policies.

• Whether your role is insulated from customer contact.

• The best place to start would be with the customer service department:

  • They can facilitate meetings with customers if appropriate.

  • If not, they should be able to speak on behalf of customers.

When engaging with stakeholders, your primary goal is to discover their expectations for your team and evaluate whether these expectations are currently being met. To navigate these conversations effectively:

• Be Non-Defensive: Approach feedback with an open mind. Remember, the aim is to improve team performance, not to justify past actions.

• Listen Actively: Pay close attention to what stakeholders are saying. Acknowledge their concerns and ask clarifying questions to fully understand their perspective.

• Remain Objective: Focus on the facts presented without letting emotions cloud your judgment. Objectivity allows for constructive analysis of the feedback received.

These meetings can often be the source of the most challenging feedback. Keep in mind that stakeholders—especially paying customers—may not have a complete understanding of your team's responsibilities, so their feedback may seem unfair.

• People see things through their own expectations.

• Stakeholders may have developed expectations based on things like

  • Experience with similar services elsewhere.

  • Personal bias having performed in similar roles themselves.

  • Miscommunication or poor understanding of a contract.

  • Overpromise of services through the sales cycle.

  • Knowledge of competitive offerings promising more for similar services.

• This isn't the time to correct the situation, simply take note. You can't promise to fix anything, you’re just there to learn.

Before engaging with stakeholders, it's important not to appear naive or uninformed. Ensure that your inquiries are grounded in a solid understanding of:

• Your Team's Responsibilities: Know what your team does and how it operates.

• Stakeholders' Roles: Understand what your stakeholders do and their objectives.

• Service Utilization: Be aware of how stakeholders use your team's services.

• Interaction Dynamics: Familiarize yourself with how interactions currently take place between your team and the stakeholders.

Before posing your questions, inform the stakeholder that:

• Management Transition: You are considering taking on a management role with a team that interacts with theirs.

• Customer Representation: If the stakeholder is an external customer, you might be speaking with a customer service representative acting on their behalf.

Express that you are seeking feedback on your team's performance from their perspective, focusing on what's going well and what areas need improvement. Common aspects where stakeholders might suggest improvements include:

• Responsiveness: How quickly your team addresses inquiries or issues.

• Communication: The clarity and effectiveness of information exchange.

• Personality: The demeanor and attitude of team members during interactions.

• Timeliness: Adherence to deadlines and punctuality in delivering services.

Quality: The standard and reliability of the work or services provided.

By approaching the conversation with this knowledge and transparency, you position yourself to receive valuable feedback that can help you evaluate your team's current performance.

Assessing stakeholders can present certain challenges. It's possible that your boss or HR representative has never been asked about conducting interviews with peer groups and customers. Here are some important considerations:

• Even if they cannot accommodate your request, your initiative and thoroughness will likely make a positive impression.

• Be aware that interactions with customers may be contractually defined, which could limit direct communication.

If you're unable to speak directly with customers, aim to connect with customer representatives within the company. If you’re looking at a role within your current company, keep in mind that reaching out to certain stakeholders might reveal your interest in switching roles to the broader organization. By this point, you should have already discussed your intentions with both your current manager and your prospective new boss. If they are uncomfortable with making your potential job change public, there may be little you can do. However, in an employee-centric organization, this transparency should not be an issue, as growth and advancement are typically part of the company culture.

You'll need to use your best judgment on how to proceed with obtaining stakeholder feedback. Remember, this knowledge is critical to your success as a manager. While you can gather the details after accepting the position, it's better to have clarity about what you're stepping into beforehand.

In this lesson, you sought to understand the views of your stakeholders. Were you successful?

Possible concerns:

• You were unable to speak to one or more of your potential stakeholders.

• You uncovered problems that are significant, difficult to resolve, or outside your ability to resolve.

• You discovered expectations that you are not prepared to accept.

If you attempted to gain access to stakeholders and were denied, try to find out why.

• As already discussed, there may be reasons you were unable to meet with some of your stakeholders.

• If the reasons why you were denied don't make sense, you should contemplate how this organization views employee success and growth, as well as open communication and information sharing.

• You are taking a critical role, and it's in the organization's best interest that you be as well prepared as possible.

If you met with stakeholders, you might have discovered expectations or conflicts that were not previously known.

• These may be issues you view as opportunities, or they may be problems you are reluctant to accept.

• Only you can determine your willingness to accept such challenges.

• Discuss any such issues with your current manager and new boss to obtain clarity.

In the following downloadable survey you’ll summarize what you discovered during the assessment by placing a weight on each concern that was raised.

This exercise is to help you visualize the concerns, it can’t recommend a direction, one way or the other.