If you’ve recently moved into a leadership role, you may find yourself wondering why one of the key pieces of advice you will receive from experienced leaders is “Make sure you’re communicating effectively with your stakeholders.” This article answers two questions that you may have, who your stakeholders are and what to communicate and why.
Here goes.
Who are your stakeholders?
As a leader, everyone you have contact with should be considered a stakeholder. Your team and your boss are significant stakeholders for you and communicating effectively with them is covered in the following two articles: Communicating effectively with your team and Communicating effectively with your boss.
To identify your remaining stakeholders, think of your work and identify anyone you need to get the job done. The people, teams or groups you identify are your key stakeholders and they may also view you as one of theirs.
Typical stakeholders include:
- Your direct peers. These are the other people who report directly to your boss.
- Contractors you rely on for services and or products. Whether they are managed directly by you or others, their services or products directly impact your work outcomes and outputs.
- Other organisational teams you need to get the job done. These may be project teams working on improvements for the systems your team uses, finance teams who pay your contractor invoices, or specialist procurement or recruitment teams who manage the process for the engagement of contractors and staff.
- Your customers.
What to Communicate and Why
If you think of your stakeholders as part of your broader team you will find it easier to identify what you should be communicating with them about.
Roles and Responsibilities – Be clear about what each of your role and responsibilities are and what you need from each other.
For example, you may be managing a project and have support from a finance team to process invoices. You and the finance team have different needs from the other as follows:
- You need this team to process invoices, without unnecessary hold-up or another review of the costs.
- The finance team needs you to ensure the invoices contain the correct information, along with your sign-off that the services have been received, to enable them to meet corporate requirements for payment of invoices.
- The finance team needs to know what costs you expect to incur and when you expect to incur them to manage the organisation’s cashflow.
In this instance, being clear about each other’s roles and responsibilities and knowing what you need from each other will ensure invoices are paid. This will benefit another of your stakeholders, the contractor.
There may be times when you be unable to fulfil an expected role and/or responsibility effectively unless something changes somewhere else. Being able to step up, communicate the issue and lead its resolution directly with your stakeholders is one way that you can demonstrate your effectiveness as a leader, communicator, stakeholder manager and problem solver.
Expectations – If you need inputs from others for your team to do their work then those others are your stakeholders. Ensure the leader of each team providing your team with inputs is very clear on what you need, the quality of the inputs and the timing of when you receive them.
For example, your team may need specific information from another team relating to products or services a customer has applied for. For your team to process customer applications in a timeframe that meets performance metrics you need to receive the inputs in a specific timeframe. By working through what your needs are with the other team leader and reaching agreement on whether your needs can be met or not allows you to manage each other’s expectations. Regular review and discussion between you both on how the agreement is working allows you both to address any issues as they arise. An effective working arrangement is mutually beneficial because you will both look good when things run smoothly between your teams.
Improvement opportunities – Much like feedback, communicating openly and inviting suggestions from your stakeholders for how things can be done better presents you with opportunities for improvement in efficiency, quality and overall performance. A strong stakeholder network is the ideal ideas incubator, as everyone has a stake in the outcome and will have a different view and perspective from which improvements can be driven.
Hopefully by now you can see that being able to openly communicate with your stakeholders is as essential as being able to effectively communicate with your team and your boss.
The key is having a willingness to work outside your own direct remit and look more broadly to identify who you need and who needs you. Once you know this and set up opportunities for an exchange of information, ideas and feedback you will add another essential skill to being a successful leader.
It is never too late to do a stocktake on who your stakeholders are and to think about whether you can improve communications with them for mutually beneficial outcomes. Take the lead and initiate a conversation in that direction. You might be surprised at the positive results that come from the engagement.
