Stakeholder Management

Overview:

Introduction:

This program is dedicated to enhancing participants' understanding and mastery of managing stakeholders effectively within organizational contexts. Through comprehensive curriculum and practical exercises, participants learn to identify, engage, and influence stakeholders to achieve strategic objectives and foster positive relationships.

Program Objectives:

At the end of this program, the participants will be able to:

• Explain the process flow, the processes, and key documents involved in managing stakeholders.

• Describe how to analyze the stakeholder environment, identify/prioritize stakeholders, and recognize their expectations.

• Create and promulgate communications that assist in engaging stakeholders.

• Demonstrate an ability to recognize how personality and behaviors give an insight into how to best manage stakeholder aspirations and expectations

• Give examples of different types of culture and the impact it has on your stakeholders’ worldview.

• Show how to undertake successful negotiations, using principled negotiation techniques.

Targeted Audience:

• Executives and managers.

• Junior managers and supervisors.

• Professional managers and staff, including HR and finance.

• People involved in transformation initiatives.

• Program, project and PMO personnel.

Program Outlines:

Unit 1:

First Principles, Identifying and Defining Stakeholder Audiences: 

• Overview of stakeholder engagement and management.

• The stakeholder engagement process and key documents.

• Identifying stakeholders, Creating and analyzing stakeholder profiles.

• Producing the stakeholder register.

• Assessing interests, positive and negative.

• Analyzing the gap between current stakeholders and required perceptions.

• Selecting a suitable stakeholder management strategy.

Unit 2:

Planning Stakeholder Communications and Measuring Effectiveness: 

• Planning stakeholder engagement communications.

• Identifying and delivering the key messages.

• Creating stakeholder communications.

• Planning and managing stakeholder meetings.

• Dealing with stakeholder objections.

• Escalating stakeholder issues for resolution by senior management.

Unit 3:

Interpersonal Skills in Stakeholder Management:

• Empathy and how it can assist in managing stakeholder relationships.

• Trust – the foundation on which relationships are built.

• Influencing, persuading, and manipulating – why they are different and the impact they have

• Personality factors affecting stakeholder management.

• Behaviors, their relationship to personality, and how to read them.

• Influencing without authority – how to do it.

• Emotional intelligence, what it involves, and its benefit.

Unit 4: 

Negotiating for Success:  

• The negotiating environment and backdrop.

• Reservation points, zones of potential agreement and best alternatives to a negotiated agreement.

• Differences between ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ negotiation techniques and why they are important.

• Principled negotiation, hardball tactics and important choices.

• Negotiation protocols, processes, tools and techniques.

• Managing a negotiation.

Unit 5:

 How Culture Affects Stakeholder Engagement and Management:

• What do we mean by culture?

• National culture, Regional culture and Organizational culture.

• Business unit or division culture.

• Communicating to different cultures.

• Negotiating with different cultures.