This is an excerpt from the new book Stakeholder Whispering: Uncover What People Need Before Doing What They Ask by Bill Shander. Shander, a data storytelling expert, LinkedIn Learning instructor, and speaker at our upcoming Impact 2025 conference, shares a hard-earned lesson about stakeholder misalignment, failed assumptions, and how even the best-designed solution can fall flat without the right people on board.
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There is no end to the hierarchy of power. Everyone answers to someone, in some capacity.
Your boss’s boss’s boss’s boss may be the CEO. But guess what? The CEO may answer to a board of directors. And the board answers to shareholders. And institutional shareholders answer to their investors, who answer to their spouses, and so on.
Softbank Corp. has famously developed a 300-year plan. Founder Masayoshi Son includes his successors and distant future employees and customers as key stakeholders to consider when making decisions.
You might ask, “Do I need to really worry about what the spouses of the investors in my public company think about the HR compensation report I’m putting together?” Probably not! The hierarchy may be never-ending, but that doesn’t mean everyone is a stakeholder you need to fully understand and address.
Carl Sandburg quipped, “Life is like an onion. You peel it off one layer at a time, and sometimes you weep.” You need to peel that onion and discover all the relevant stakeholders, but you don’t need to peel your organization’s hierarchy all the way to the center, crying every step along the way!
Failure to Peel
That being said, one of the greatest failures in my career was due to not peeling deeply enough.
I was hired to develop a web-based tool to explore a fascinating dataset from one of the most famous and influential academics in the world. This was a high-profile project that would be seen by policymakers, economists, academics, economic development professionals, the media, and so many more. The list of stakeholders was enormous. We had long discussions about these stakeholders, what they needed (and why), and this drove our decisions throughout the design and planning process.
And yet, I completely failed at Stakeholder Whispering in the most fundamental way.
First, my most direct client (we’ll call him Dave), acting as the project manager, was the right-hand person to this famous professor. There was another professor who was a junior colleague of the professor (we’ll call him Joe). I started the project mostly working with Dave. Occasionally Joe would show up and comment on things, but Dave was running the show. As time went on, we saw more and more of Joe, but Dave was doing most of the speaking on behalf of the client. We only had about three meetings with the famous professor during this planning and design phase of the project. Oof. Big mistake.
I believe we did a great job designing a solution for the ultimate users of the tool. We talked to and very carefully considered the primary end users: policymakers and economic development folks.
And our suggested approach was well received by them. But guess who was not on board? Mr. Famous Professor. He completely disagreed with our approach. And I had failed to consider him a key stakeholder in the process. Why? Because I assumed that Dave (and Joe) were speaking for him. I trusted that their insights and perspectives represented Mr. Famous Professor’s insights and perspectives. They told me so, and I believed them. This was a total rookie mistake.
We should never have agreed to do the project without confirming that Mr. Famous Professor would be involved every step of the way. And even if not, I should have known which of my suggestions might be sticking points and insisted they get run up the flagpole to him earlier in the process.
And here’s the rub. The project could still have succeeded if I had either (a) reoriented the plans to match Mr. Famous Professor’s needs or (b) convinced Mr. Famous Professor that his idea may not have been in line with his users’ needs. Either might have saved the project, but we got fired before we had a chance to really explore it.
In retrospect, while (a) might have “saved the project” (avoided us getting fired), (b) was the only real choice. Mr. Famous Professor was wrong. His users (the real stakeholders for this project) liked what we had proposed. I failed to convince him during my brief opportunity to try, and that was my fault. I failed not only because of his biases (because he is so famous, so sure of his expertise, so set in his ways) but because I didn’t do a good enough job convincing him to identify and empathize with his stakeholders. In other words, he thought he was the ultimate decision-maker, which technically he was. But if he had been willing to cater more to his users’ needs, he might have more openly considered the approach I was suggesting.
Stakeholder Whispering requires identifying your stakeholders. But it is also about making sure your stakeholders identify and recognize (and prioritize) their stakeholders. It’s a subtle distinction, but it’s critical.
Stakeholder Whispering requires identifying your stakeholders. But it is also about making sure your stakeholders identify and recognize (and prioritize) their stakeholders. It’s a subtle distinction, but it’s critical. They need to understand who they’re working for, and why. And your job is to help make sure that’s crystal clear. If they perceive that the stakeholders are your thing to “worry about,” then they’ll see themselves as the most important stakeholder and others’ opinions as simply less relevant. If they understand that they’re in the same boat as you, and they are serving those same stakeholders that you are, there’s a solidarity there with you and there’s some solidarity with the stakeholder that they might realize they really want to please.
An abbreviated and prioritized (and categorized) stakeholder list for that project was as follows:
The Users:
- Economic development professionals
- Policy-makers
- Media
The Decision-makers:
- Mr. Famous Professor
- US Department of Commerce
- President Barack Obama
Yeah, President Obama was supposedly weighing in on this project.
Even though those Decision-makers’ opinions mattered (and I needed their approvals), none of them were the end users. My most important responsibility, which I failed to do, was to Whisper with the decision-makers to help them understand that we were trying to serve the users, not them. Their opinions mattered, of course, but they didn’t really know what the users needed.
How to Peel
So, how do you help your stakeholders identify and manage their stakeholders?
You can start with a simple list or a visual map of stakeholders. And this should be as inclusive a list as you can possibly come up with. If you think that the opinions of the spouse of the investor of your public company might play a role in your HR compensation report, then add them to the list. You can always remove them later. You can always prioritize them to bottom of the list (labeled something like “Tier 12 people who we can’t possibly worry about catering to’’). But include them if they cross your mind. Better to over- than underconsider. And you need to do this in collaboration with those decision-making stakeholders because they’ll think of things you won’t (and vice versa).
When organizing this list, think about “the political rather than the organizational structure,” as the Project Management Institute (PMI) puts it in a white paper on stakeholder engagement. This will help you get out of the tunnel vision of corporate hierarchy and really understand who the key players are in the decision-making process. As my example showed, it’s not just about decision-makers, but also about the end users and audience for your content, which may not be the same people.
That PMI white paper recommends prioritizing your stakeholders by thinking of them on a matrix with “influence” on one axis and “commitment” on the other. Highly influential and highly committed (to your project) stakeholders will naturally be higher priority than those at the opposite end of this matrix.
I would also consider another matrix, below, with “influence” and “frequency” as the two axes. People who will be using whatever you’re creating frequently may be worthy of more consideration than those who only occasionally use it. (But be careful here; an occasional but influential user could actually still be highly important. For instance, President Obama would never have used the tool we were designing, but might have advocated its use across government. That’s a key stakeholder!)
For both of these matrixes, remember that influence isn’t only based on organizational hierarchy. A chatty well-liked and well-respected lower-tier employee can have an outsized impact compared to a boss who everyone thinks is clueless.
While you’re prioritizing the stakeholders, categorizing them is also very helpful. There are types of users (e.g., policymakers do things with the data, media talks about it) so you might categorize people this way (“doers” and “talkers,” in that case). You also might categorize the priorities in tiers: Tier 1, Tier 2, and so on. This could help you make decisions about the level of effort you put into Whispering and catering to those groups.
Another way to think about stakeholders is whether they’re supporters or detractors. Or, as Vilma Luoma-aho labels them,2 “faith-holders,” “hateholders,” and (a third category) “fakeholders.” Faith-holders are supporters; hateholders are detractors; and fakeholders aren’t real (bots, for instance), which you only need to worry about in public-facing projects. As Luoma-aho says, “Hateholders actually embody a valuable opportunity for the organization to detect neglected issues, problems, and shortcomings in need of improvement.”
Say you’re implementing a new customer relationship management system for an organization. (Good luck! Gartner Research has shown that 80% of major corporate systems investments are not used as intended — or not at all — six months after installation. I would argue this is almost always because of a lack of effective Stakeholder Whispering, by the way.) In this case, you would obviously want to engage the stakeholders who are supportive of launching a large complex system like this. But if you also engage the most skeptical, you’ll receive invaluable insight around potential pitfalls to avoid, and if you address their concerns (and even if they just feel heard), you can turn them into faith-holders in the process, according to Luoma-aho.
…Converting detractors into supporters can be very powerful — they can become your most ardent advocates!
Marketing research3 has shown that “maintenance of existing stakeholders and customers is more important than the acquisition of new ones, as the satisfied stakeholders will attract new stakeholders by themselves.” What’s true in marketing and customer acquisition is true in other contexts. Keeping your supporters happy is more important than attracting new supporters. They’ll do that for you. And converting detractors into supporters can be very powerful — they can become your most ardent advocates!
Again, understanding who your stakeholders are and having them in priority order is essential for good Whispering. But beyond that, you need them to understand who their stakeholders are. You might be working with all of the stakeholders yourself. Or your first degree stakeholders might be Whispering on your behalf to their stakeholders. You need to be sure they’re aware of who they’re dealing with. And you need to do your best to arm them with the information and skills to do that Whispering well.
In my project for Mr. Famous Professor, I didn’t do anything that well. Even if I had, though, that last point becomes critical. I would never have had the opportunity to sit down with President Obama and explain our work. But Mr. Famous Professor would have. Would he have effectively Whispered the president on our behalf? Would he have believed enough in my proposed approach to do it well? Had I Whispered him effectively, perhaps. If not, then no chance.
Bill Shander is an author, speaker, LinkedIn Learning Instructor, and data storytelling workshop leader.
Footnotes:
- Miller, D. and Oliver, M. (2015). Engaging stakeholders for project success [white paper]. Newton Square, PA: PMI.
- Luoma-aho, V. (2015). Understanding stakeholder engagement: Faith-holders, hateholders & fakeholders. Institute for Public Relations. Available at: https://instituteforpr.org/understanding-stake holder-engagement-faith-holders-hateholders-fakeholders/ (accessed 15 July 2024).
- Parasuraman, A., Zeithaml, V.A., and Berry, L.L. (1985). A conceptual model of service quality and its implications for future research. The Journal of Marketing, 49, pp. 41–50.
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