Info Sheet
Stakeholder Engagement: Opportunities, Types, and Vehicles
Creating an effective stakeholder engagement strategy is an extremely important aspect of your overall change strategy. The more engagement you have, the more commitment and positive contribution you will have, and, as engagement goes up, resistance goes down.
However, stakeholder engagement is not easy. It takes time and resources to coordinate involvement, and takes people away from their normal operational jobs. This Info Sheet will help you think through the key aspects of stakeholder engagement in preparation for designing your engagement strategy.
Engage in What?
The first question to answer is, “In what change tasks do you want your stakeholders to engage?” Often, change leaders put off much engagement until the change effort is in its implementation phases. Generally, this is a mistake. By then many stakeholders, especially employees, will have already formulated their positions regarding supporting or resisting the change.
You should begin thinking about engagement the moment you conceive your need to change. Stakeholder engagement can and should begin very early in the change process, as early as assisting the leaders in the task of assessing the drivers of the change to the task of building the case for change. Certainly, employees (including executives and managers) should be engaged in understanding the case for change, if not helping to create it. They should learn about (even help create) the vision of the change, as well as the desired outcomes for it. They can also be involved in assessing customer requirements, doing benchmarking, even designing the future state. All of this occurs long before implementation.
Early stakeholder engagement will cause your initial phases of change to be more complex, but you will have to deal with far fewer people problems during implementation if you engage people early.
The following table lists the change tasks in The Change Leader’s Roadmap with the most obvious opportunities for stakeholder engagement. You may engage stakeholder groups in other tasks, but these warrant serious consideration in any large change effort.
| change tasks with Significant
stakeholder engagement Opportunities |
| | Task I.B.2 | Assess the Drivers of Change |
| | Task I.B.5 | Perform an Initial Impact Analysis |
| | Task I.C.1 | Assess Your Organization’s Readiness and Capacity to Succeed in the Change |
| | Task I.D.2 | Initiate Your Strategy for Addressing Leadership Mindset, Style, and Behavior |
| | Task I.D.3 | Build Leader Commitment and Alignment |
| | Task I.D.4 | Educate Your Leaders about Change Knowledge and Skills and the Use of a Common Change Methodology |
| | Task I.D.6 | Initiate Development Plans to Help Individual Executives and Change Leaders Walk the Talk of the Change |
| | Task I.E.8 | Clarify Your Engagement Strategy for How to Gain a Critical Mass of Commitment |
| | Task I.F.4 | Design Your Information Generation and Management Strategies |
| | Task I.F.5 | Design and Initiate Your Course Correction Strategy and System |
| | Task I.F.6 | Design and Initiate Strategies for Helping People through Their Emotional Reactions and Resistance |
| | Task I.F.7 | Select and Initiate Temporary Support Structures, Management Systems, Policies, and Technology |
| | Task I.F.9 | Develop, Communicate, and Initiate Temporary Rewards to Support Your Change Process and Outcomes |
| | Task II.A.1 | Communicate the Case for Change and Your Change Strategy |
| | Task II.B.1 | Roll Out Your Visioning Process to Create Shared Vision and Commitment |
| | Task II.C.1 | Increase Your Organization’s Level of Readiness to Change |
| | Task II.C.2 | Initiate Your Plan to Build the Organization’s Change Knowledge and Skills |
| | Task II.C.3 | Initiate Your Plan to Promote the Mindset and Behavioral Changes Required to Support the Transformation |
| | Task II.D.1 | Demonstrate that the Old Way of Operating is Gone |
| | Task III.A.1 | Assess the Current Reality within the Organization against Your Vision for the Change |
| | Task III.A.2 | Benchmark Other Organizations for Best Practices |
| | Task III.A.3 | Clarify Customer Requirements |
| | Task IV.A.3 | Pilot Test |
| | Task V.A.2 | Conduct Your Impact Analysis of the Desired State |
| | Task V.A.3 | Assess the Magnitude of Impact to Discover System-Wide Implications of Your Design |
| | Task V.A.5 | Communicate the Summary Results of Your Impact Analysis and Newly Defined Desired State |
| | Task VI.A.2 | Create Plans to Resolve the Individual Impacts of Your Desired State |
| | Task VI.A.3 | Integrate Individual Impact Plans to Identify Actions for Your Detailed Implementation Master Plan |
| | Task VI.A.4 | Design Strategies to Sustain the Energy for Change throughout Implementation |
| | Task VI.B.2 | Initiate Strategies for Supporting People to Embrace the Desired State and Manage Their Reactions to the Change |
| | Task VI.B.3 | Communicate Your Implementation Master Plan |
| | Task VII.A.1 | Roll Out Your Implementation Master Plan |
| | Task VIII.A.1 | Declare, Celebrate, and Reward the Achievement of Your Desired State |
| | Task VIII.B.1 | Support Individuals and Intact Work Units to Optimize Their Performance by Increasing Their Integration and Mastery of the New State |
| | Task VIII.B.2 | Support the Whole System to Optimize its Performance by Increasing its Integration and Mastery of the New State |
| | Task IX.A.1 | Build a System to Refine and Continuously Improve Your New State |
| | Task IX.B.1 | Learn from Your Change Process and Establish Best Practices for Change |
Who to Engage?
Once you have identified the change tasks in which you want significant engagement, you then must answer the questions, “Which stakeholders to engage?” Clearly, employees or sub-sets of them (supervisors, managers, plant workers, etc.) will be the most often engaged stakeholders. However, you should scan your entire project community map to ascertain the best stakeholder to engage in each task. See the Tool:
Identifying Your Project Community.Engage in What Ways?
Once you have identified the change tasks and stakeholders, you must clarify what you want them to do in their engagement. The diagram, Types of Engagement, lists the various ways you might engage stakeholders in any change task. Do you want specific stakeholder groups to perform some rote actions, offer original thinking such as providing input or advice, make decisions, or create results they own? As you move down the types of engagement continuum toward creating results, the engagement provides greater influence, and therefore, generates more commitment. People are more committed to processes when they own the results and the actions to achieve them.
The diagram below breaks down the four classifications of engagement into eight different types of engagement. In any given change task, you might use different types of engagement for each stakeholder group you engage in any change task.
Types of Engagement
Engage How?
The following table, Vehicles for Employee Engagement, specifies the various methods of engagement, both technological and face-to-face, for engaging individuals, small groups, and large groups. Face-to-face engagement usually has more impact than do technological vehicles.
Often, you might decide it best to use multiple vehicles for any given change task and stakeholder group. For example, you might begin your engagement regarding communicating your case for change and vision with supervisors using a large group, face-to-face vehicle. Then a week later, you might plan a work product to be produced in the supervisor’s work team, followed a week later with a response form to be filled out on your change effort’s intranet site by individual supervisors.
Be sure to use the vehicles for engagement that will deliver the results you need from each engagement. Do not expect technological engagements to deliver the same quality of human impact as face-to-face.
Many new vehicles for engaging large groups are being developed. These are often touted as change methodologies, but this is a misnomer; they are actually meeting methodologies. A great reference book that explains many of these methodologies is, The Change Handbook, Holman, P., Devane, T., and Cody, S., Berrett-Keohler, San Francisco, CA, 2007.
