Colin Gautrey

How to Develop Your Stakeholder Strategy

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This part of the Stakeholder Influence Process usually begins to happen quite naturally as you are analysing each individuals position. Yet what usually happen is that the initial ideas for action are unlikely to be the more appropriate or effective. Here you will find a collection of resources to really challenge your thinking, test thought devilish assumptions of yours and help you to turn a conversation into a coherent strategy and plan for action. Oh, and your strategy does not need to be Read More

Benefits of Using the Stakeholder Influence Process

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If you give it a half decent go, you will quickly start to notch up the benefits. Over the years, I have seen people achieve remarkable advances in a very short space of time in so many different areas. For example, clients have been able to…
  • Focus their time on what will make the biggest difference to their success.
  • Reduce the risks of failure and be more prepared if those risks start to materialise.
  • Dramatically increase buy-in, getting more people to actively support their work.
  • Deliver their projects in record time, with fewer problems and enhanced benefit realisation.
  • Pull out of the detail so they could take a more strategic view.
  • Achieve much more with much less.
  • Become more confident, assured and less stressed.
  • Attract the attention of the talent spotters at the top of their organisation.
  • Move forward their career, sometimes several steps at a time.
The Stakeholder Influence Process is also useful in a very wide range of pursuits. Over the last Read More

Stakeholder Influence Process Introduction

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The Stakeholder Influence Process is a sequence of steps which will help you work out what you need to do to achieve your goals when they are reliant on the agreement of other powerful people. It provides a simple framework to think through the situation you wish to influence, your goal, or the project you are managing. It will help you to figure out who is onside and who may be out to get you. From that you can start to develop your strategy to accomplish your goal. This will probably involve engaging with people you may have overlooked before. Before starting the process, you may have considered them to be minor players or not even interested. Some of them may not be interested in what you are doing, but the Stakeholder Influence Process may uncover opportunities Read More

Considering Your Stakeholder Strategy

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Assuming you have been diligent in your application of the preceding steps in the Stakeholder Influence Process, now is the time to pull it all together and make quick decisions about what you need to do in order to maximise your progress towards the goal. The word “strategy” seems to be used everywhere in business today. Put simply, what I mean when I use this word is the general direction or steps you are going to take over a period of time in order to achieve your Influencing Goal. It might be helpful to think of this in terms of the stepping-stones that you need to move safely across from where you are today to where you want to be tomorrow. Many of the stepping-stones will require Read More

Exercise: Deciding Your Stakeholder Strategy

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Bearing these principles explored in Considering Your Stakeholder Strategy, let’s start to get you thinking about what your strategy needs to be – at least initially. Remember to stay focused on your chosen Influencing Goal.

See if you can answer all of the questions below. If you can get a friend to challenge you with these questions, it will help you greatly – even if they know nothing about Read More

Planning Stakeholder Meetings

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For each category on the stakeholder map, there is a suggested approach for engaging with them in order to either maximise the leverage in the relationship or to minimise the potential for damage. The overall goal of all activity is to work at moving all relationships into, or at least as close to, the top right hand box – Allies. However, we only have so much time and energy at our disposal, so we need to ensure that we spend it wisely. We suggest the following hierarchy of Read More

Exercise: Challenging Your Stakeholder Strategy

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This is one of those exercises where it really helps to have someone else to ask the questions. The reason for this is that they can stay alert to what you are saying, help you focus on blind spots and ask the naïve questions which would never occur to you. So the questions below are really coaching questions for someone else to ask you; but if you are working on your own, they will still help greatly.

Working with a friend...

If you are working with someone who knows your role well, it will be vital that they work with you as a coach, not as a consultant. The best learning comes from them helping you to Read More

How to Assess Your Stakeholders

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Having a list of stakeholders is a good start; but to get a sense of the priorities, you need to understand their position relative to your Influencing Goal and to each other. That way you can begin to see the bigger picture and develop a clear strategy to accelerate towards your goal. Using the Stakeholder Influence Map (below), the general idea is that you plot the name of each (impactful) stakeholder based on where you think they are in terms of Read More

How to Identify Your Stakeholders

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In this guide, I will focus on helping you to increase your ability to quickly identify the stakeholders who are critical to your success. It is all too easy to focus time and effort on the wrong ones and lose ground in your influence. This aspect should never be taken for granted and the result of this part of the Stakeholder Influence Process frequently yields huge progress towards your goal. As with other guides, this page will introduce you to content within the library which will help you in the identification process. Read More

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