There are different ways to management stakeholder engagement. Generally, you could do a basic WWWHW: Who, What, Why, How and finally a “What’s In It For Me” messaging.
1. WHO: Know who your stakeholders are. Who will be impacted by the change? Who needs to be engaged for the scope of the change, and at each step of the change process? Who are the end-users or beneficiaries of the change? Who are the change sponsors at different levels of the organization? Or put simply who are the “recipients” of change vs. the mobilizers of change?
2. WHAT: Assess your stakeholders. What is their level of awareness, desire, knowledge, ability and (needs for) reinforcement in regards to change? (This by the way is called the goal-oriented ADKAR method of change by ProSci). Assess the impact the change is going to have on the stakeholders (e.g. high, medium, low). Same time, assess the level of influence, the stakeholders have. Ultimately, you should be able to come up with a “stakeholder map” of who influences who. This is critical for the next step. Also assess the communication channels that are mostly used by various groups of stakeholders, e.g. meetings — who gets invited to what; e-mail groups, etc.
3. WHY and WWIIFM. “What’s in it for me?”. Understand the drivers for change. Understand what will motivate your stakeholders. Make sure the vision, the outcomes, intentions and outputs for change are very clear. From there, you then craft the message to address the needs of your stakeholders. I recommend doing a VOC or Voice of Customer (stakeholders) prior to starting any change intervention or stakeholder engagement. This involves something as basic as interviewing key stakeholders, asking them what they think is working, what they would like to have happen, or see better of. (Those questions are positively framed by the way, which is an important step to break the ice with your stakeholders in a positive way. Make sure you establish rapport so you obtain quality responses).
4. HOW. Create a stakeholder engagement plan. This includes what key messages (WIIFMs) need to be delivered to who, from whom (remember from your assessment who influences who?), by when and with what channel.
Note that throughout a change journey, the stakeholders shift. It is important to keep re-iterating and validating the above. These are fairly generic and basic steps to begin with, and there are multitudes of techniques, frameworks, toolkit for each step of the process. But more or less, the key principles are there…
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