Stepping into Their Shoes: Why it’s Difficult (but Vital) to Connect with Your Stakeholders

A company invests considerable resources in developing a new product line that its core customers don’t need or want.

A business develops an expansion plan that ignores the potential impact on a local community.

An organization embarks on a major strategy pivot without securing employee buy-in.     

You might read the above statements and wonder, “How could that happen?” Yet, a more realistic question would be, “Why don’t problems like these happen more often?”

In each scenario, the common element was a failure to connect effectively with a key stakeholder. It happens more often than you might think, and the consequences can be significant and far-reaching.

Connecting: A Discipline That Demands Work

High Value-Creating Teams will tell you they’re committed to co-creating value for all the stakeholders their organizations touch. And most times, they truly mean it. So, they do the foundational work required: Identifying the team’s true purpose; clarifying their vision and their mandate by developing a team charter; and defining how they’ll work together to co-create greater value.  

But unless the team forms strong connections with its stakeholders, and prioritizes where and how to engage them, even the best-laid plans won’t come to fruition. Or worse, the team will make decisions that unintentionally ignore stakeholder needs.

Connecting is one of the Five Disciplines of High Value-Creating Teams, and as with any discipline, it requires intentional focus and hard work. That’s especially true in our volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) world—a world where there are more influences impacting your organization than ever, often far from home or far afield from your core business.

Think about all the PESTLE (Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Legal, and Environmental) factors that influence the organization, along with the speed and scope of the change we’re seeing across every one of those areas. In this environment, it would be relatively easy to unintentionally overlook or underestimate any given influence or stakeholder, often with dire consequences.

Most organizations have many stakeholders with varying degrees of importance and influence but only limited resources to allocate across all of them. To connect with them effectively, it’s essential to prioritize each stakeholder based on two criteria: How critical is this stakeholder to the organization’s success? And what is the quality of the team’s relationship with this stakeholder currently?

After assessing each stakeholder along each criterion, you can map them on a matrix with four quadrants that help to define where to prioritize.

• Stakeholders in the quadrant of High Criticality and Low Quality require improvement to avoid the risk of an adversarial relationship. They should be your highest priority for establishing a stronger connection.
• Those in the quadrant of High Criticality and High Quality have the potential to become ambassadors for the organization. They should be your next highest priority.
• Those deemed Low in Criticality and High in Quality are your comfortable alliances, which likely need little effort from the team to maintain a good relationship.
• Those that are both Low in Criticality and Low in Quality can become a great source of distraction if you allow them. The team should find ways to appease them without losing sight of higher priorities.

Stepping Into Their Shoes: Where Connections Start

Once a High Value-Creating Team prioritizes its stakeholders, they can begin the work of connecting with them in a way that enables them to create more value together than they can achieve on their own. That work is most effective when it starts by stepping into your stakeholders’ shoes—a concerted effort to understand what they need and expect from you and whether they perceive that you are (or are not) meeting those requirements.

As Systemic Team Coaches, we often guide teams through a “stepping into their shoes” role play exercise that allows them to explore the relationship with a high-priority stakeholder, played by a team member. The coach observes the interaction as the stakeholder expresses their needs and wants, while the remaining team members respond. This can be an eye-opening experience, revealing a team’s perceptions of this stakeholder and their ability (or inability) to empathize with them. It also shines a light on how the team tends to view and react to this stakeholder, both emotionally and cognitively, which is a great awareness builder.

While role-playing and initial dialogues are just the start, they’re highly effective ways to begin the difficult but vital work of connecting with priority stakeholders—ensuring that High Value-Creating Teams form the relationships it takes to co-create value for all the stakeholders the organization impacts.

The Leadership Advisory Practice at Odgers Berndtson helps organizations discover and develop leaders, strengthen value-creating teams, and prepare for what’s next. Learn how our highly experienced team of assessors and coaches uses a holistic approach to help your organization achieve more.