Stakeholder management strategies: What you need to know

Knowing how to manage the relevant stakeholders and their unique peculiarities contributes to building a positive relationship with them. Communications professionals must understand the strategies required to manage relationships with stakeholders to retain their trust and confidence in the organization, business or entity.

A stakeholder is anyone with interest or influence in an organization or over an issue, event, activity, operation, initiative or business.

Anyone who is able to influence the outcome or impact or is directly or indirectly interested is a stakeholder.

It is the level of interest and influence on any specific matter or development that determines the priority given to the stakeholder.

~ Sola Abulu.

The following are strategies for effective stakeholder management.

• Involve stakeholders in goals and target settings. Understand their needs and prioritize them.
• Assess your performance with the feedback of stakeholders, both internal and external. Many organizations make a costly mistake by paying attention to only the feedback from external stakeholders forgetting that employees are internal stakeholders who can shape he brand voice.
• According to Sola Abulu, our principal consultant, reputation is made up of your performance, behaviour and communication (how you show up daily). Show up consistently and with clear messaging.
• Work with a communication plan that ensures you are apt with your messaging and channels for each stakeholder group. The different channels to reach different stakeholder groups depending on other factors like demography include; one-on-one meetings, emails, social media, and traditional media. This strategic communications framework is a helpful resource for you.
• Be timely in communication and transparent. Because stakeholders (especially external stakeholders) are interested in the word on the street concerning an organization, it becomes more important that you are on time to update your stakeholders on things that could be a concern. Transparency builds trust. Be honest about setbacks and state clearly the measures taken to resolve them.
• Avoid spinning: Spinning often does the exact opposite of why it was adopted as a strategy for stakeholder management especially in a crisis. It is more appropriate to address the sentiment than outrightly lie to cushion the effect of a damaged reputation.
• Regularly engage. It is smarter to engage stakeholders regularly and not wait till there are major updates or an issue. This will help them build confidence in the operations of the organization and can give room for them to contribute to decision-making alongside sharing their feedback.
• Manage expectations by being very realistic about goals and plans. This will prevent disappointment and can allow for over-performance as opposed to underperformance.
• Be ready to evaluate strategies and adjust them as often as possible based on feedbacks and its overall effectiveness.

Click the link below to learn from Sola Abulu on “Operational Excellence: The Role of Communications”

Stakeholder management is very critical in organizational communications. An instance is regular communication with a host community (where a business, organization or entity is physically established) whether there is an issue or not. Utilizing the outlined stakeholder management strategies above, there will be an assurance of business growth and stakeholder trust for better productivity.

Our last blog post is on Strategic Communication: Its impact on an organization’s reputation “. You can catch up here.

We have also announced our Public Relations, Media and Stakeholder Management Course.

You should enroll especially if you are new to the media management space.

Registration for the course is ongoing and closes at 11:59PM on May 28, 2024.

Sign Up Here

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Sola Abulu & Associates is a strategy and communications consulting and training firm committed to enabling businesses, brands and organizations to achieve their objectives through strategic communications, organizational effectiveness and reputation risk management.