#25 The Good, Bad & Ugly of Managing Resistance & Stakeholders At Work

THAT MOMENT WHEN YOU HEAR

• “X keeps bugging me for updates….do I really have to update X all the time? It’s super annoying….”

• “I have weekly face to face meetings with Y. But my co-lead keeps saying we really don’t have to and an email is fine.”

• “Why are we leaving out Z from the meetings? Am I the only one who sees that they are important to have at the table for a decision to be made?”

• “Why can’t X just get on board with the plan? Why does X always have to raise issues just before we push things out?”

…you’re in the Good, Bad & Ugly of Managing Stakeholders At Work

THINK // 3 insights from the field

😇 THE GOOD THING  about doing stakeholder management is that it can really help you with your priority, time and energy management issues.

If you want to change anything, you have to consider what resistance may crop up along the way that can cost you more time and energy than you imagined.

Some resistance is not bad. Resistance can be good and necessary friction from people who see something in your decision-making or the changes you are proposing that you don’t see.

They may see it because they will be impacted by the changes or they have other forms of power to push their own preferred version of changes.

It’s worthwhile spending time and energy to engage with the resistance or doing some preliminary pre-emptive planning of where resistance might come from.

Otherwise, people’s resistance will manifest itself in all sorts of inconvenient and costly ways: they can block a project, present awkward arguments to stall discussions, voice out public support but go against things in private etc.

Stakeholder management is simply “the process of maintaining good relationships with the people who have most impact on your work.” And it begins with discerning which are the priority relationships for you to manage.

• A stakeholder is anyone who holds a stake in a problematic situation that you are dealing with. You can also call stakes interests - or as people might more simply put it “my desires and concerns”. As long as your work involves dealing with problematic situations, your work will always have stakeholders to prioritise and manage.

If you are trying to solve a complex problem with multiple stakeholders, you can consider using this Stakeholder Overview Map below that we at Common Ground adapted from Thinkplace’s 4 Voice of Design framework):

1. Who are the Voices of Intent? The ones who want to do something about the problem, with either motivation to take action or mandate to drive change

2. Who are the Voices of Experience? The ones who keep you grounded in real-world needs and ground-level context, who will be the users most affected by the changes?

3. Who are the Voices of Capability? The ones who can help everyone who wants to do something about the problem, who bring resources, knowledge, skills, access to the table?

4. Who are the Voices of Process/Design? The ones who can create connective tissue between people & processes, who can broker, facilitate and coordinate the changes between diverse communities? The ones who can represent and document progress in an accessible way?

🤬 THE BAD THING is we tend to see and treat stakeholders according to our biases or simply our blindspots.

We prioritise those we feel friendly towards and deprioritise those we feel uncomfortable or unfriendly towards. We may even ignore those we weren’t aware existed.

This is why it’s handy to do a bit of quick stakeholder mapping to give us a better perspective of who we should be prioritising more or less.

Imagine this simple sounding situation:

Annie, a stay-at-home mom, is doing the hard work of managing her household. She wants to get Ben, her toddler to try eating her home-made mushy peas instead of the bottled baby food her mother-in-law, Cathy keeps pushing as the ‘wiser’ choice. Annie is losing her patience and spending a lot of time and energy ranting to her husband David about Cathy’s stubbornness (and his slowness to intervene). Ed, her father-in-law, hides behind a newspaper whenever the situation flares up.

If Annie wants to change her mood and get back her time and energy, she has to do some basic stakeholder management.

FIRST,
Annie must see that she herself IS a primary stakeholder in her own problematic situation.

She can do a first cut of framing what she thinks is the problematic situation she is dealing with. She could use a “How might….?” question:

• “How might (stakeholder)(concern) so that (desire)?”

Annie’s initial framing of the problematic situation can look like:

• “How might I (get my mother-in-law off my back) so that (I can just feed my kid home-made food)?”

SECOND,
she can list all the stakeholders in her situation to help her sense what is her engagement strategy to move her situation forward:

She could use a basic Power x Interests stakeholder map:

• Level of interests: level of desires and concerns in the situation; level of how impacted they are by the situation

• Level of power: level of influence and impact they are capable of asserting over the situation

It is important to place the stakeholders where they actually are and not where they (or you) would like them to be. Once they have been placed within the grid, you can see how best to manage them accordingly.

The key stakeholders you will always need to “get on board” with what you have in mind are:

• the Key Collaborators (High Power, High Interest)

• the Key Deal-makers/Deal-breakers (High Power, Lower Interest)

• the Key Advocates (High Interest, Lower Power)

As Annie assesses her situation, she realises

• Annie and David are both high interests, high power (Key Collaborators):

  • As parents, they both have many interests in their child’s well-being as well as the well-being of their marriage dynamics. As the primary guardians, they are ultimately the most responsible decision-makers over their own child and household.

  • Annie must Regularly Engage her own interests as well as her husband’s interests. They are of the highest priority.

• Ben, her toddler, is high interests, lower power (Key Advocates):

  • he is highly impacted by people’s decisions in terms of what he gets to eat and the mood of the adults around him. But Ben is helpless to do anything about it for now.

  • Ben must be empathised with and Annie must Maintain Ben’s Interest in what’s happening to him and around him.

• Cathy, her mother-in-law, is medium interests, high-ish power (Key Deal-makers and Breakers):

  • While, Cathy has loud opinions about the situation, she is realistically not that impacted by what the kid eats. She is however impacted by how David chooses to pick her side or his wife’s side. But with her domineering style and high influence over David, much as Annie hates to admit it, Cathy has pretty high power here. However, she ultimately is not Ben’s parent.

  • Much as it irritates her, Annie must Actively Consult Cathy but she realises her #1 priority stakeholder to engage is still David.

• Ed, her dad-in-law, is lower interests, lower power:

  • Ed is checked out in general and not that impacted by the domestic squabble. He has also given up on how much impact he has over Cathy’s decisions.

  • Annie must Keep Ed Informed with minimum effort since he is part of the family but he is of lowest priority for her limited time and energy for now.

THIRD,
she can then reconsider how to reframe her problematic situation so that it connects better with (what she imagines as) her stakeholders’ interests:

Annie’s original framing of the problematic situation was:

• “How might (I)(get my mother-in-law off my back) so that (I can just feed my kid home-made food)?”

She could try reframing to get a fresh new perspective that lands better than her original framing that focused mainly on her interests and views:

“How might (other stakeholder)(their concern) so that (their desire)?”

• To David, she could Regularly Engage with a question like:

  • “How might (we as a couple) (speak respectfully to your mom) so that (we can get the space we need to raise our child our way and you can assure her she’s still an important part of your life)?”

• To Cathy, she could Actively Consult with a question like:

  • “How might (you) (share your best ideas about raising Ben with me and David) so that (we can hear them out)?”

  • “How might (you) (say No kindly to Grandma) so that (you can eat what you want without arguing with her)?”

There is not right or wrong way of filling up the stakeholder concerns and desires here.

What’s important is to test your hypothesis, listen to the feedback and reflect back what you are hearing from your stakeholders.

A simple question you can always ask:

“Am I hearing/reflecting back your concerns and desires accurately?”

If they tell you that you got it wrong, prepare to listen humbly and reframe your questions if you’re seeking a way to connect with what moves them.

😈 THE UGLY THING about stakeholder management is that problems can get quite complex and trying to seek interests first can feel laborious.

All good negotiators know if you want a decent level of co-ownership of decisionmaking, you start with interests first and try along the way to operate from shared interests.

You don’t have to agree with their interests, but you have to listen for the interests that are significant to them. Doing so will help you connect with where they are coming from and find an angle that works sufficiently for you and them.

People often impatiently and pre-emptively try to use Power or Rights/Rules to push through stakeholders’ resistance because they believe it is a quicker, more efficient way to get change done.

For instance, let’s imagine how this can play out in Annie’s situation:

• Interests-based (desires and concerns of stakeholders): At first, Annie tries to negotiate with her husband and her mother-in-law and takes time to hear out their underlying desires and concerns. But after a week, she gets fed up of working through David’s reluctance to engage his mother and getting her point across through Cathy’s self-righteous nagging…

• Rights/Rules-based (Externally legitimised set of rules): So Annie decides to Google the best practices she can find online about nutritional well-being for toddlers and she pastes the new rules of feeding baby Ben on the fridge. She informs Cathy “home-cooked baby food - that’s what the experts say” and refers Cathy to the fridge list everytime the bottled baby food option gets talked about…

• Power-based (“My rules, my way - or the highway”): Cathy gets increasingly passive-aggressive with this tactic and complains to David behind Annie’s back. Annie is so frustrated she puts down her foot with Cathy and declares, “This is my house, my kid, deal with it”. Cathy is shocked into temporary submission and Annie has won the day - for now.

It’s not that Annie is wrong in this scenario.

She may have legitimately decided she’d rather not pay the price of time and energy going back and forth collaborating with her husband (Key Collaborator) or negotiating with her mother-in-law (Key Deal-maker/breaker)

It’s that Annie must be aware of the high price in relationship she must be willing to pay for putting all bets on Rights and Power as her stakeholder engagement strategy.

Power, Rights and Interests are all legitimate strategies to try to resolve or navigate stakeholder disputes.

But if you look at the Dispute Resolution Stairway, you must just recognise the downside of using rights and power for a quick win: the further you go up the stairway, the costlier the 'victory’. You must be prepared to lose the relationship, the good feelings, the sense of trust, ownership etc.

The tougher you are with using Power as your winning move, they more likely you’ll lose whatever relational bonds you built with your stakeholder. Negotiators know you lay down power as a “winner takes all” trump card if maintaining cordial relationships is not important anymore to you/the situation.

Interests-based stakeholder negotation is about trying to reach a mutually acceptable outcome, something that is mutually beneficial to both parties.

Interest-based stakeholder negotiation can feel slower and less efficient.

But the benefit of doing this with the high powered key collaborators and potential deal-makers & breakers) is that because the interests of stakeholders are being addressed, when a problem does emerge, the stakeholders are likelier to focus on attacking the problem and not attacking the persons.

FEEL // 2 links to help you feel less alone

READ Bill Bannear of Thinkplace’s thoughtful essay referencing the 4 Voices framework.

DOWNLOAD + READ Common Ground’s grounded research into how to get stakeholder conversations unstuck: “How might we move ourselves and our community to take action together?”

DO // 1 strategy to try this week

The next time you are thinking through a stakeholder engagement strategy with a stakeholder.

DISCERN WHAT IS THE VOICE THEY BRING TO THE TABLE

• Listen to figure out which of the 4 Voices do they bring to the situation. Place them on this Stakeholder Overview Map

PLACE THEM ON THE POWER X INTERESTS MATRIX:

• Listen to figure out how high is their their level of power and interests. Are they a Key Collaborator to regularly engage, a Key Deal-Maker to actively consult or a Key Advocate to interest?

FRAME UP THE WAY YOU SEE PROBLEMATIC SITUATION + COMPARE TO HOW THEY SEE THEIR PROBLEMATIC SITUATION

• Write out your version: “How might (I)(my concern) so that (my desire)?”

• Write out their version: “How might (other stakeholder)(their concern) so that (their desire)?”

• Share your version of their problematic situation and listen to whether you read it rightly.

• For your Key Stakeholders (Deal-Makers, Collaborators, Advocates) Adjust accordingly so you find a version that lands well for both you and them.

CONSIDER WHETHER TO USE INTERESTS/RULES/POWER

• What is the common interests you share with your Key Stakeholders?

• If interests does not work, what could be a common set of rules that can support a more productive engagement with them?

• If interests and rules do not work, in what situation would power be appropriate to use? What are you prepared to lose?
  

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