How it can go wrong

If you want (and need) the total commitment of stakeholders to your project, it might also be helpful to understand what stands in the way of their engagement.

It is good practice to identify and address these barriers as part of your engagement strategy.

Stakeholder engagement fails to achieve its full potential when stakeholders:

• Are denied the opportunity to participate 
• Are presented with poorly defined issues or problems 
• Lack sufficient knowledge and information about the project 
• Are insufficiently empowered to be able to contribute effectively
• Are placed in emotionally upsetting situations
• Lack the skills to be able to contribute effectively
• Conflict with (or perceived bias towards) other stakeholders
• Have doubts about the capability, stability, or availability of the project team, or
• Feel their input is not valued or their time is being wasted.

DAD engagement method

DAD is the Decide-Announce-Defend approach to stakeholder engagement. 

It relies on the speedy analysis of an issue by an individual or group of experts whose decisions will be immediately actioned, even if not everyone agrees with them.

Although considered a good response in emergency situations due to its potential to rapidly resolve a crisis, it is actually a poor method of engagement in almost all other circumstances.

This is because the DAD approach is guaranteed to generate resistance to even the best ideas. 

Resistance eats up time and resources because it needs a response.

And the time spent overcoming resistance and defending the solutions against opponents often delays implementation and can lead to the plans being abandoned; hence the derivative acronym DADA (Decide-Announce-Defend-Abandon). 

Source: Science in Society

Are you engaging your stakeholders like a DAD?

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How to get it right

Stakeholders’ value comes from their unique ability to provide information and influence to your project.

In their Stakeholder Engagement Standard AA1000SES (modified here for project management), AccountAbility argue that quality stakeholder engagement must: 

• Clearly define its scope 
• Have a transparent decision-making process 
• Focus on issues material to the project and/or its stakeholders 
• Create opportunities for dialogue
• Be integral to project governance
• Have a process appropriate to the stakeholders engaged
• Be timely, flexible and responsive, and
• Add value to both the project and its stakeholders.

In practice, this means the project manager must:

Later in this Module, we will take a closer look at how to facilitate engagement and conduct a (stakeholder) meeting.

The related principles of management and leadership are also comprehensively explored in Module 3 on Project Delivery and Close.

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Successful engagement depends upon…

Keeping promises

Remember at the start of this topic when we mentioned the importance of keeping your promises?

This applies just as much to how you describe engagement to your stakeholders.

If you tell someone you are looking forward to collaborating with them but only end up consulting them on an issue, you risk upsetting them and provoking their power.

Similarly, if you tell a community you are going to consult but are really only keeping them informed, their anxiety and opposition to the project will rise.

Would you be surprised to learn that this is a common cause of stakeholder management failure?

Monitoring for change

It is also important to recognise that stakeholder attitudes and outlook are a fluid.

This means that issues, events, and the actions of the project team can change the classification dynamic.

For example, during the initiation phase, the project manager generally has quite low power; during delivery, they have a high degree of power over the project.

Similarly, a client might have low interest during the early stages of delivery; however, their interest will grow to eventually peak as it comes to the point of handover.

This is why the importance of continually monitoring stakeholder sentiment is the critical foundation of effective stakeholder management.

Keeping it real

It is finally reiterated that the thresholds and engagement methods proposed by the power interest matrix may not be suitable for every circumstance and every project.

You can use this model as a baseline for stakeholder engagement in your organization, but be sure to regularly revisit it as part of your continual improvement process.

We certainly will!