Speaker 1: There's no doubt in my mind that it's your stakeholders who will determine the success or the failure of your project, and I call it my first rule of stakeholder engagement. For me, communication, and in particular communication with your stakeholders, is perhaps the largest single part of project management. So in this video, I want to share with you my five tips for good stakeholder engagement. My first tip is very simple. Allocate the time to it. It's very easy as a project manager to get caught up in the do, and the oversee, and the paperwork, to get your head down behind your desk and get to work. But that's not where your stakeholders are. Allocate plenty of time to get out and meet your stakeholders, to speak with them, and to listen to them. If your stakeholders are going to contribute primarily to the success or the failure of your project, then they are the primary lever by which you succeed. Listening to their opinions, making sure you understand their concerns, is vital. Communication is 80% of project management. It's really only three places to communicate, with your team, with your governance, and with your stakeholders. And numerically, your stakeholders are by far the largest group. So most of your project time needs to be spent in some way or another, engaging with or actively serving your stakeholders. My second tip is to not think of stakeholder management anymore, but to think of stakeholder engagement. The best way to communicate with anyone is to communicate with them in the way they prefer to be communicated with. Nobody wants to be managed. We all want people to engage with us. And therefore, your whole stakeholder engagement process has to be keyed around one fundamental concept, the concept of respect. Build a stakeholder engagement process around respecting your stakeholders. And the stakeholder engagement process is very simple. It's five steps. Step one is to identify your stakeholders, to figure out who they are. And the more widely you draw the net, then the more stakeholders you will engage, and the more successful you'll be. The second step is to analyse who your stakeholders are, what they want, what their needs are, how they like to be communicated with, and yes, which ones are going to be more important to you and to your project. Step three is to plan. Put together a plan for how you are going to engage each of your stakeholders. What information they need, how you're going to deliver it, when you're going to deliver it, who's going to deliver it, and how you're going to evaluate how well that information goes down and the feedback that you get. Step four is to act. This is the part where you manage your stakeholder engagement process. And therefore, you could refer to this as stakeholder engagement management. This is where you get out and you speak to your stakeholders, you listen to them, you reflect on what you learn from them, and you incorporate it into your project. But of course, no process is going to be complete without reviewing what you're learning. And therefore, you need to take that review and feed it back into, have we identified new stakeholders? Have we got new understanding of the stakeholders we already have identified, and therefore we need to reanalyse it, or were we not getting the results we hoped for when we took action, and therefore do we need to make a new and better plan? My third tip is that you can please all of your stakeholders some of the time. And you can please some of your stakeholders all of the time, but you will never be able to please all of your stakeholders all of the time. And that's just the reality of things. Therefore, what's really important is that you listen to your stakeholders carefully and make informed judgments as to which stakeholders you're going to have to let down at times, and when is the right time to let them down, and what is the correct way to communicate that to them. Letting your stakeholders down is only going to be disastrous if you don't tell them and they find out the wrong way. And the toughest part of all project management is scope negotiation because this is all about making judgments as to who to please and who not to please about their preferences and desires for what's going into your project and what's going to be left out. My fourth tip is don't argue with idiots. Yeah, they'll just drag you down to their level and then they'll beat you with their experience of being an idiot. And I know that that's kind of a humorous aside, and it's only partly serious, but it's only partly intended as a joke because there is some truth in it. The fact is there are some people who don't want to be persuaded or who won't be persuaded or can't be persuaded, they don't want to engage, they can't engage, they don't understand what you're saying. And the fact is that nobody is ever persuaded of anything by the facts, not least those people who have an entrenched view. And therefore, you have to find out what their opinions are, what their needs are, and therefore how to build the right emotions so that they can use the facts, use the reasons, use the evidence to justify a change of opinion. And I have three tips to help move someone's opinion. The first is to ask questions, let them find the answer for themselves. This is always going to be stronger and more effective than giving your opinions and your answers. By asking the right questions, you can often move someone's mind. The second is if they've answered and it isn't quite the right answer, you know they've either inadvertently or willfully misinterpreted something, repeating the last few words they say and then waiting is often a way of getting them to shift their opinion. And finally, silence. If necessary, give them some silence. Nobody has more power in a conversation than the person who is comfortable with silence. Oh, and there's one last thing. If you want someone to change their mind, and you know they really have changed their mind, they're just too proud to admit it, give them a last reason. Oh, here's another reason why you should change your mind. Should have told you this sometime before, but I forgot. And you give them another reason. Hopefully you can find something that you didn't tell them, a minor detail, maybe just pretend you forgot to tell them something and that way they can say, oh, if you told me that, well, now you've told me that, now I can see that I do need to change my mind. You're giving them an excuse. They're not changing their mind. They're adjusting their opinion to the new evidence. So there we have my five tips for good stakeholder engagement. These tips are inspired by our Kindle exclusive ebook on stakeholder engagement. And I think if you've enjoyed this video, it'd be well worth seeking it out and taking a look. It's priced very economically. In that ebook, there are six chapters, which I think will give you a good broad understanding of stakeholder engagement. These chapters include, don't try to manage your stakeholders when you can engage them instead. Do you know the top 20 techniques for stakeholder analysis? This set of stakeholder engagement strategies will power you up. How to plan your stakeholder engagement campaign, persuasion and influence, a thorough introduction and the all important project and politics, how to win the game of projects. If you've enjoyed this video, I hope you'll give us a thumbs up to show you like it and subscribe to our channel. And to find out about more videos as soon as they're available, hit the notification bell. I'll see you in the next one.