PM SKILLS

Stakeholder Alignment

Navigating the maze of stakeholders to land a decision

Photo by Ben Mathis Seibel on Unsplash

Introduction

Admit it. We’ve all been in a situation where we thought we had an agreement, but it quickly fell apart. A new, hidden agenda appeared, or a new critical risk emerged, and you were back to the drawing board.

What happened?

I’ve collected lessons on alignment over the years, and there are ten consistent things you have to get right, whether you’re on a project board or convincing your family to go somewhere new on holiday. Before jumping into the ten rules, we’ll discuss stakeholders and what alignment means.

What is a stakeholder?

Simply put, a stakeholder is anyone with a legitimate interest in your actions. In a project context, stakeholders might be people that will use what you create. They may pay for it, be impacted by it or be concerned about reputational damage if it all goes wrong. Irrespective of why they have an interest, they are stakeholders.

Not all stakeholders are equal. If you read a book on stakeholder management, you’ll find a discussion on “power vs. interest”, but this is rarely a helpful way to look at stakeholders. Instead, view your stakeholders in terms of what they need to know, what they need to feel or what they need to do for you to succeed. Then, you can view stakeholders by their power level to make things happen. If they have the power to tell, that’s more important to you than the power to influence. There is a third category of stakeholders, who have the power to shape. Another time, we’ll discuss this in more detail, but they are the hidden gems that most PMs don’t realize exist.

What is alignment?

Alignment happens when the decision you need is made by all the people that directly make the decision’s success a reality.

I remember my marketing director making a decision that our legal counsel profoundly disagreed with. Whilst he wanted to force the decision through, the counsel merely needed to say, “You are acting against legal advice”, for the director to realize that we weren’t going live.