March 28, 2024

The Art of Herding Cats

biz & tech icon

By Kim Mozingo

biz & tech logoWho are all these people you’re talking to?

Have you ever had a long conversation with someone about a critical topic where the goal was to reach consensus and gain their support? Tons of preparation and plenty of passion and discussion later, they finally see their way clear to agreeing to support your goal. Work gets underway. But then they back off or begin to move in the opposite direction. Why?

Kim Mozingo The Conway Group

Kim Mozingo
The Conway Group

Communicating strategically means thinking through a process and being proactive and intentional. Hitting the target – getting people engaged and motivated to support your objective – requires truly understanding who they are. The people you are communicating with are your stakeholders.

A stakeholder analysis is the means by which stakeholders and their wants, needs, and concerns regarding a goal or objective are identified. My last article’s football analogy is useful here. For a quarterback, stakeholders include both his team as well as his opponents. But really ‘knowing’ stakeholders requires a good deal of preparation such as watching hours of film to understand the other team: how they operate, how they tend to respond in different situations, how they change tactics mid-play, etc. A quarterback is also required to understand who shows up on the field. For example, there may be second or third string players with whom he and his team may not be as familiar. That requires changing strategy.

Who are an organization’s stakeholders? Stakeholders are the people and organizations with a ‘stake’ in reaching a goal or objective. They could be specific groups of employees, a leadership team, or all employees. Stakeholders could also include current and potential customers, partners, competitors, investors, advisors, the community, or the world at large.

But simply ‘naming’ groups of stakeholders isn’t enough. To really reach people, to get them engaged, means understanding their perceptions, considering how they best consume information, where they can typically be reached (an active Facebook community, popular conferences and seminars, blog posts, journals, etc.), understanding their environment, and more. Reaching your goal is about understanding your needs. Getting others engaged is about understanding theirs.

For example, a goal to become more innovative may mean asking suppliers to change delivery timing or tactics. How will suppliers respond? Can they be expected to turn down such a request?  Will they need to develop new processes? What information do they need? Stakeholders can be grouped by assessing the impact they have on outcomes (high or low) and their attitude toward the goal (positive or negative).

Keep an open mind while assessing stakeholder’s attitudes. Avoid the temptation to guess how they might respond. Suspend judgment and use research to understand their perspective.

A thorough analysis will provide information necessary to begin developing communication themes and messages. Without understanding to whom you are communicating, all your hard – and potentially expensive – work of message development and delivery could fall flat.

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