3 ways to handle tricky stakeholder requests.
Stakeholder management can make or break a career. Depending on the organisation and role you work in, this could take up a large proportion of your time.
Stakeholders can on occasion, be rather demanding, and make what might seem like unreasonable requests. If this happens, there are three things that can help manage these effectively:
- Communicate clearly
- Be collaborative
- Show humility
Let's look at why each can help in a bit more detail.
Step 1 — Communicate clearly
It would be naive of you to think that Stakeholders don’t have their own Stakeholders, and quite often their demanding requests trickle down from above. If this is the culture where you work, you can quickly win favour by reaching out to discuss this with them directly.
Get some time face-to-face and find out more information. This will both help you understand the ask, and support in working through the right next step by asking:
- What’s driving this request?
- Is this something that someone has suggested, or is this coming directly from them?
- Would they be willing to run through and help prioritise where this sits alongside the other demands on the team(s)?
Once you have a little bit more background, and understanding, you might be able to help them complete one of the many impact assessment templates that exist, and get to a conclusion about how this could slot into existing work, or (and this happens a lot) allow them to save face by coming to their own conclusion that, having had a deeper look, it wasn’t such a great idea after all.
Foster those relationships and bring them into the process. This might lead to them coming to you to help work through other ideas before they get thrown at you as a demand.
Step 2 — Be Collaborative
Always assume positive intent. Although sometimes it’s hard to believe it, most people don’t purposefully go out of their way to ruin your day. There’s likely a logical reason your Stakeholders feel compelled to come to you with a request, so you need to find out what that is, and then see how you might be able to help.
Speak to them, and find out why they are so keen, have they promised something to someone — if so, support them in the backtracking you need them to do, and make them look like a genius when they come back with an even better plan.
It’s a pain, but Stakeholders need to be fed. They’ve trampled on enough sensible initiatives, that if the only payment needed for yours to succeed is with a big slice of credit, and a two-handed ego massage, then in the long term it will work out better for you.
To do this, you need to talk their language. If they are a risk-orientated Stakeholder, then talking about risk-reduction, or demonstrate the risk associated with their idea. Frame it so they focus, and don’t distract them with elements that they either don’t understand or don’t care about. Talking to them about technical complexity, user-needs analysis or weighted cost-of-delay may all be valid, but it will not be as powerful as providing them with a reusable soundbite that they can deploy to their other like-minded Stakeholders.
Step 3 — Show humility
Humility is a powerful weapon, and can often help to disarm (and even charm) a Stakeholder. Or, if you’re not careful and take the opposite approach, it will come down on you like a pile of humble pie.
There’s a chance that the Stakeholder’s idea is actually quite a valid one, which shouldn’t be too surprising given that not everyone flukes their way to the top (although there is of course the Peter Principle to contend with). In this case, get them to champion the work, and if you want to try and tame, rather than train your Stakeholder, this is a great opportunity to get them to do the demo at the end!
Sometimes, however, their ideas aren’t great and despite your best efforts, this is a just-f#@king-do-it moment, where you have to swallow your pride, gently uncurl your rage and move into damage limitation mode. If you are a product person, this is about making the best of a bad situation, and you generally have two options:
- Tell the team exactly what’s what. You’ve got a demand, you either do or don’t have enough information about it, you’ve tried your hardest to appeal to reason, but it got to a point where it’s no longer possible to fight. Help.
- Spin it slightly. If the thing is more of an acceleration than a deviation from the current plan, then you don’t always need to air your dirty laundry and can save face by giving them the background, then providing the positive reason for moving forward with that option.
Whatever option you choose, buy your team as much time as you can to work through what would need to happen before you commit to moving forward with the work. Stakeholder requests tend to get a little bit more scrutiny than average, so providing a tiny bit of governance can help to minimise the disruption.
#TIP# If you’ve not already completed a stakeholder mapping exercise, now is the time to do that. You need to understand where your most influential Stakeholders live! Miro do a great job of walking through how to do that.
Please let me know below any other top tips for dealing with tricky stakeholders!
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