Jesse Jacoby
A stakeholder is anyone who shares (or might share) one or more of your objectives or goals. In other words, anyone who has some stake in the work you do or its outcome. Stakeholders can sit inside or outside your organization, and increasingly they sit in different time zones, different business units, or different companies altogether.
The last three decades reshaped how work gets done. Organizations have been downsized, flattened, restructured, outsourced, distributed across continents, and now augmented by AI. There are few organizations where a command-and-control style of management still works. In today’s organizations, things get done through relationships.
That has always been true to some degree, but understanding, building, and managing relationships is a bigger part of a leader’s job today than it has ever been. Hybrid work, cross-functional product teams, vendor ecosystems, and AI-enabled workflows have multiplied the number of people whose cooperation you depend on, while reducing the hours you actually spend in the same room with them.
We interact with a wide circle of others over the course of our working life, giving and getting feedback through the connections that surround us. The language and images that describe our work relationships have grown more circular, dynamic, and interconnected. We need new ways of mapping our network of stakeholders and figuring out how to work with them so everyone wins.
For each stakeholder, focus on two levels of relationship:
- Your individual relationship with that stakeholder
- The relationship between your business unit and your stakeholder’s business unit
To be successful in your role, you need to identify your key stakeholders and earn their support.
Caution: Do not fall into the trap of only building coalitions with your boss, senior leadership, and your immediate team. No leader can afford to neglect the importance of solid relationships across and down the organization.
It is natural for others in your network to protect their territory, and their interests may collide with yours. Think carefully about the conflicts you may face in your role, and about the broader web of relationships that will let you get things done. Because some of those relationships may not yet exist, you need to decide which ones are likely to be critical to the work ahead. A review of your Key Few Objectives will suggest the relationships you need to create, strengthen, or in some cases repair. Think strategically. There will likely be people who are not currently viewed as stakeholders (or who do not see themselves that way) whom you will need to bring into the fold.
Viewing Stakeholders Objectively
You need to build relationships based on sound observation and judgment, not assumptions. We all tend to bundle personality traits together based on past experience. If we meet someone friendly and outgoing, we may quietly assume they are also honest, which may or may not be true. Psychologists call these automatic assumptions “implicit personality theories,” and they often lead to faulty judgments. Few leaders can afford that kind of miscalculation when the stakeholder in question controls a budget, a team, or a critical decision.
Building Stakeholder Relationships: What to Do
Once you have completed your stakeholder analysis, you are ready to begin shaping your Stakeholder Plan. This involves three steps:
- Identify the key stakeholder relationships that should be addressed in your Stakeholder Plan. These are relationships with stakeholders who have some interest or stake in at least one of your Key Few Objectives.
- Prepare a list of questions to guide you, and interview at least some of these stakeholders to gain a better perspective on the nature and challenges of the relationship.
- Outline stakeholder-related action items that can be added to your Stakeholder Plan.
Good Stakeholder Relationships: Following Up
- Take notes after each stakeholder meeting. Specifically record your stakeholder’s priorities and key expectations of your function.
- Check with your manager to validate your read on each stakeholder.
- Engage your team in finding ways to build effective stakeholder relationships.
- Continue to proactively monitor the state of your stakeholder relationships and assess the need to enhance or repair them.
- Draft a formal plan to continue the stakeholder relationship-building process.
Drafting Your Stakeholder Plan
At this point, you should have the information you need to build a stakeholder relationship plan. Lay out the actions you will take with respect to each stakeholder, with a timeline that fits your operating rhythm.
Then revisit it quarterly. Stakeholder maps go stale faster than they used to. People change roles more often, new business units stand up overnight, and AI is starting to reshape who actually makes which decisions inside organizations. A plan you built six months ago may already be missing a name or two that now matter quite a bit.
Strong stakeholder relationships rarely show up on a performance review as a line item, but they quietly determine how much of what you set out to do actually gets done. Treat them as work, not as a soft skill that happens on the side.
