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Creating an effective stakeholder engagement strategy is an extremely important aspect of your overall change strategy. The more engagement you have, the more commitment and positive contribution you will have, and, as engagement goes up, resistance goes down.
However, stakeholder engagement is not easy. It takes time and resources to coordinate involvement, and takes people away from their normal operational jobs. This article will help you think through the key aspects of stakeholder engagement in preparation for designing your engagement strategy.
The first question to answer is, “In what change tasks do you want your stakeholders to engage?” Often, change leaders put off much engagement until the change effort is in its implementation phases. Generally, this is a mistake. By then many stakeholders, especially employees, will have already formulated their positions regarding supporting or resisting the change.
You should begin thinking about engagement the moment you conceive your need to change. Stakeholder engagement can and should begin very early in the change process, as early as assisting the leaders in the task of assessing the drivers of the change to the task of building the case for change. Certainly, employees (including executives and managers) should be engaged in understanding the case for change, if not helping to create it. They should learn about (even help create) the vision of the change, as well as the desired outcomes for it. They can also be involved in assessing customer requirements, doing benchmarking, even designing the future state. All of this occurs long before implementation.
Early stakeholder engagement will cause your initial phases of change to be more complex, but you will have to deal with far fewer people problems during implementation if you engage people early.
The following table lists the change tasks in The Change Leader’s Roadmap methodology with the most obvious opportunities for stakeholder engagement. You may engage stakeholder groups in other tasks, but these warrant serious consideration in any large change effort.
Once you have identified the change tasks in which you want significant engagement, you then must answer the questions, “Which stakeholders to engage?” Clearly, employees or sub-sets of them (supervisors, managers, plant workers, etc.) will be the most often engaged stakeholders. However, you should scan your entire project community map to ascertain the best stakeholder to engage in each task.
Once you have identified the change tasks and stakeholders, you must clarify what you want them to do in their engagement. The diagram, Types of Engagement, lists the various ways you might engage stakeholders in any change task. Do you want specific stakeholder groups to perform some rote action, offer original thinking such as providing input or advice, make decisions, or create results they own? As you move across the types of engagement continuum toward creating results, the engagement provides greater influence, and therefore, generates more commitment. People are more committed to processes when they own the results and the actions to achieve them.
The diagram below breaks down the four classifications of engagement into eight different types of engagement. In any given Rote Action change task, you might use different types of engagement for each stakeholder group you engage in that task.
The following table, Vehicles for Employee Engagement, specifies the various methods of engagement, both technological and faceto-face, for engaging individuals, small groups, and large groups. Face-to-face engagement usually has more impact than do technological vehicles.
Often, you might decide it best to use multiple vehicles for any given change task and stakeholder group. For example, you might begin your engagement regarding communicating your case for change and vision with supervisors using a large group, face-to-face vehicle. Then a week later, you might plan a work product to be produced in the supervisor’s work team, followed a week later with a response form to be filled out on your change effort’s intranet site by individual supervisors.
Be sure to use the vehicles for engagement that will deliver the results you need from each engagement. Do not expect technological engagements to deliver the same quality of human impact as face-toface.
Many new vehicles for engaging large groups are being developed. These are often touted as change methodologies, but this is a misnomer; they are actually meeting methodologies. A great reference book that explains many of these methodologies is The Change Handbook, Holman, P., Devane, T., and Cody, S., Berrett-Keohler, San Francisco, CA, 2007
VEHICLES FOR STAKEHOLDE ENGAGEMENT | |||
---|---|---|---|
Individual | Small Group | Large Group | |
Face-to-Face | • Meeting • Conversation |
• Advisory Councils • Project Teams • Task Forces • Focus Groups • Brown Bag Lunches • Learning Map Discussion Teams • World Cafe |
• System-Wide Networks (i.e.,ambassadors,representatives, advocates) • Conference Model • World Cafe • Open Space • Real-time Strategic Change• Future Search • Appreciative Inquiry • Learning Map Rollouts • All-Hands Meetings • Brainstorming |
Technological | • Video Conferencing • Telephone Call • Interactive Website • Website • Instant Messaging • Response Form • Newsletter; newspaper • Written Memo |
• Video Conferencing • Telephone Conferencing • Online, Real-time Workgroups • Webinars • Blogs |
• Video Conferencing • Telephone Conferencing • Webinars • Blogs |