Speaker 1: At work, do you have the challenge of managing stakeholder relationships each with their different sets of opinions and values and different areas as well in industries? And you're just wondering, how do I manage those relationships effectively? Well, in this video, I'm going to share with you five very practical steps on how to manage these relationships, communicate with them, and produce great outcomes with your projects. So first of all, when we say stakeholder, a stakeholder is someone with a vested interest in something. And that something is usually a business, but it could also be a relationship. It could be a project. It could be some sort of products and services. It is somebody with a vested interest. And when it comes to stakeholders, their interest that they're vested in, their interest is usually around three arenas. They're interested in the decisions, they're interested in the activities and they're interested in the outcomes. So when you look at decisions, usually the decisions around moving forward, for example, in a business come beforehand, before the activities. So this is before and defining in the process where you're defining the relationship. The activities that they're interested in is usually during the transactions, during the movement, when the relationship has already been determined. And finally, the outcomes is after. What's going to happen afterwards, after we had this progress process of working together, right? So those are the three things, three key things that your stakeholders are going to be interested in and looking at in terms of assessing whether or not this is a worthwhile relationship moving forward and assessing whether or not things work well as well, while this progresses moving forward. So when it comes to understanding how to build stakeholder relationships, how to maintain great relationships with your stakeholders, the key is understanding there's one principle associated with it. And the principle is this. Any incongruencies between the highest values of your stakeholders and the missions or the vision of the project or the organization, those incongruencies are going to cause a lot of misunderstandings between the stakeholders and the persons involved on the teams, especially if you're the team leader. And it's going to undermine the whole team spirit and even the team spirit of all the management levels below. It's getting cold outside. All right, so let's continue with this. When stakeholder relationships are not managed effectively, what happens, what could happen is that there's perceived inequities among stakeholders and this can cause a reduction in the leadership integrity and also disrespect among management levels. So what I want to share with you are the five key strategies on managing stakeholder relationships. And the first strategy, step number one in the strategy is to map out their influences, map out their impact. So what do we mean by that? Every single stakeholder will have an impact on the thing that you are managing. It could be the business, a relationship, a project, and so on. So every stakeholder will have an impact. So this is where you're taking a step back and looking at each stakeholder that you are interacting with and understanding what is their impact on this moving forward, right? And usually what we focus on are, the purpose of this is to focus on which stakeholders are the most important in terms of the most impactful. And usually it's in terms of which ones can produce the most influence on the financial decisions or the company's bottom line or the most important metrics moving forward. Those are usually the ones that are the most impactful and therefore the relationships that you want to prioritize and put in importance. But outside of that, this is also looking at in each stakeholders, the context of the expertise they bring in, how do they influence the project? How do they influence the business? How do they influence the outcomes, the decisions and the activities, right? What do they bring in and how impactful are they in terms of the company's bottom line, in terms of the leadership, in terms of the motivation, in terms of access to resources and so on. So once you have mapped out the impact of each of your stakeholders and prioritize which ones are more important and less or important to focus on when it comes to maintaining relationships, this will give you more of a structure and guidance on moving forward in managing the stakeholder relationships. Step number two of the strategy is to identify what they value most, each stakeholder. Because the thing is every single stakeholder on your team that you will be managing relationships with, each and every one of them will decide and act in accordance to what they perceive is the most beneficial based on what they value. And the key is what you value in the relationship, what you value in the project, what you value in your teams or the business moving forward that you're interacting with, all of your systems of values. You cannot expect that they will have the exact same values as you and you cannot expect them to see things equally as important as you do. Even if you were to present the data, present the information, isn't it true? And you will realize this, that sometimes the stakeholders and other person's systems of values just don't see things exactly the way you do. So understanding that your values in the organization and the team and so on are unique to you and they may not share the exact prioritization of values as you. And if the stakeholders are going to decide and act in accordance to what they value and therefore that's going to affect their perception of what is the most beneficial decision and action to take, then wouldn't it make sense? Wouldn't it stand to reason that it is important to help them to understand how your proposal, your action steps, your plan is going to help them to fulfill what's most important to them? So once you've identified their most important values and what their highest priorities are and so on, this will help you to avoid miscommunications. This will help you also to better manage the relationship where they can see that you are on their side, that you can create the union, that they will be able to understand that what their decisions, their actions as well, that you are helping them to fulfill what's most important to them. By the way, this is very nuanced. For your particular situation, I understand when you have particular industries, particular stakeholders as well, there's a lot of nuances with respects to communicating, with respects to relationships and sometimes the nuances, I'm unable to cover all of them in this video. But if you are somebody who really wants to master this skill, who really wants to step up in leadership and there have been some conflicts with certain stakeholders that you can leave a little bit more feedback on, then I invite you to work with me. Below this video in the description, there's a link to apply for coaching with me. And this is where I'm going to walk you through the steps to help you to come up with a plan on how do you navigate communication landscapes when others have different perspectives, different values to you. I'm also going to be training you on how do you communicate effectively? How do you advocate for yourself, share your ideas, express yourself in ways that you are still respecting and honoring what's important to you, but also creating a collaborative, a harmonious and a productive relationship in your workplace. So if you're serious to stepping up in your career as a leader in your industry, then I invite you to apply only if you're serious about stepping up in your leadership. And so submit your application and I look forward to working with you on the inside. Step number three is to link it to the dashboard, right? So when it comes to managing your stakeholder relationships, it's not only about what the stakeholders think. It's not only about their decisions. There is a bigger picture, an entity there. It could be your business, it could be a project that leads to greater outcomes for humankind. So there's a bigger picture at play. So your senior management, whether or not you're part of that senior management or you work closely with the senior management, but the entity, the entire entity of senior management in your organization already has a dashboard. In other words, that dashboard that they're looking at every single day, that they're tracking every single day, they're monitoring every single day. That dashboard has a lot of KPIs, key performance indicators where they know that things are going in positive directions. They can identify gaps right away and they can recourse or they can regroup in ways that are more productive. So that dashboard, whatever is on that dashboard, this is important to link to your stakeholders, the communications with your stakeholders, the conversations you're having with them, getting them on board, helping them to understand how it's going to meet their values as well. All these communications with your stakeholders, you want to link it back to the dashboard, show them and demonstrate with them how they can improve it, ways that they can give feedback, ways that they can improve upon it, ways that they can refine it as well on that dashboard. And when you link it to the dashboard, this is exactly what you can do to avoid doubling the work. Or you can also avoid these little side goals that sometimes creep up along the way that take up time and increase the output of your teams as well. So this is a really effective way to keep the entity in a coordinated fashion and keep it in unified fashion. So link it to the dashboard. Step number four is equanimity and equity. Those two are very different things. The principle behind this step is to realize that your relationship with your stakeholder is a personal relationship. Make no mistake about it. It is a personal relationship. So here's what I mean by that, right? Your stakeholders, yourself, and every member of your team as well, they all have their own personal goals. There is a stake in their career path, in their life purpose, in their chief aim. So the key in this step that I'm sharing is to reestablish, find some ways to implement and establish equanimity and equity in the teams, in each stakeholder relationships. Here's what that means. Equanimity is internal. It's your self-governance. It is the way that you handle yourself, the way that your mind frame is, your state of mind. And establishing equanimity means that you have a mindset of fairness. You have a mindset of wanting to serve. You have a mindset of wanting to create, of seeing people as your equals. So that is establishing a sense of equanimity. The other one is equity and that is external. This is collectively governed, which means that you are governing within the relationships, a state of equality where you are putting in systems and processes and a team spirit where there is equality among the stakeholders and your team members at play, right? So this step includes doing what it takes to increase the levels of equanimity internal and equity, which is external on your stakeholder teams. Step number five, contextual features. So contextual, the root word is context. This is where you are doing, being a little bit of a researcher as a scientist and understanding the context between each of your stakeholders. Because every single stakeholder that you are managing relationships with, they come with a context behind them. So I'll give you some ideas of what this means and how you can begin your research. For example, every single stakeholder comes with him or her, a relationship, a network behind it. So who do they have access to? Who is in their network that could be important to you, that could add some context to understanding their behaviors, their philosophies and their beliefs. So that's one aspect of it. Another aspect is understanding how each of the stakeholders share information. How do they share information and what information do they have access to? Are there any particular areas of expertise or experiences that they might have that might add some clues to how they can make decisions and what resources they could have available to you? Another example could be, what are some nuances in which data needs to be shared with each of the stakeholders in terms of their personal preferences, in terms of how they communicate, in terms of what data they use or that they find necessary that is important, that could influence the way that they decide. Right? So these are various contextual features and I'm just giving you examples, but the contextual features can run really deep or you might find repeated things, patterns common with each stakeholders. So this is important as you are managing relationships to understand and start to develop patterns on how you can manage each relationship effectively. And you might find that some stakeholders could have very close relationships with each other, commonalities and networks as well. And that will help guide the way that you manage. Was this topic relevant to you? If so, then give me a thumbs up and remember to subscribe to my channel. Every single week I release videos on this topic and so much more. And I have what's coming up next for you. If you are currently leading a team and this video was helpful for you in stakeholder management, but you also want to take your leadership to the next level, then click on this video. I keep forgetting which side it is. It's either going to be here or here and that's my next video on how to lead a team effectively. So go there coming up next and I'll see you there in that video.