How to manage demanding stakeholders

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Each week in my email newsletter I answer a question from a reader.

I do this because I know it’s going to resonate with lots of you too. Everyone working in internal communication tends to shares the same challenges, experience the same problems and work on the same issues.

So if you ever feel alone in your role or frustrated that no one in your organisation understands you or ‘gets it’, then don’t worry! You are NOT alone. I’m here and there’s a whole community of internal communicators just like you who truly ‘get it’ and understand your reality.

This is one of the reasons I built The Curious Tribe – it’s a membership for internal communicators who understand each other, share the same challenges and who want to work together and directly with me to make more impact at work. It's development and learning - it's also fun and friendship. Because life's too short to be boring quite frankly.

This week's question

This week, I tackle a question from an Internal Communications Manager in the UK. He asks:

“My biggest challenge right now is to do with people telling me what to do. I don’t mean my boss – but other people in the company who regularly give me last-minute work to do and they tell me it’s my job because it’s related to communications. Do you have any advice on what to do about this or how I should be handling these stakeholders?”

Oooof. I’ve been there.

Stakeholders often treat the comms team as the company “arts and crafts department” don’t they? My good friend Jason Anthoine used this phrase on a call once and it absolutely hits the nail on the head.

You can relate to this if you’ve ever been subject to these kind of demands:

• Make me a poster
• I need a blog on the intranet immediately
• Come to my event last-minute and film it for me

As internal communicators, we are often expected to juggle multiple tasks and wear multiple hats – but you can’t do everything for everybody. That’s not possible, it’s not sustainable and it’s not even useful.

You don’t want to be the arts and crafts department because you won’t make any impact, you’ll spend a lot of time frustrated and your workload will also be loaded with busywork and vanity projects.

If you get a lot of requests (or demands) from colleagues who assume that anything involving “communication” falls on your shoulders, then you know that these requests are often unclear, unimportant and not linked to the broader goals of the business.

But what do you do? Do you just say “Nah I’m not doing that?”

Probably not. Let’s get practical here to see how to handle this.

Curiosity is your new best friend

Hey guess what, I’m going to recommend you sharpen your curiosity skills to help with this issue. Because when a stakeholder comes to you with a new request, it genuinely might seem urgent or super important. You might feel you NEED to stop everything and do their work straight away.

But hang on. Slow down, wait a minute. Try approaching the situation with curiosity instead BEFORE you commit to working on this or adding it to your to-do list.

Your first step is a mindset shift. You’re going to try to shift your mindset from:

❌ “I have to do this because it’s been dumped on my desk”

to

✅ “Let me understand this request better so I can determine if and how I can help.”

Indulging your curiosity and asking lots of questions allows you to dig deeper and understand the true intent behind the request, which is often not fully communicated when this work is simply dropped on you. Working in this way shows that you are a thoughtful partner who wants to deliver impactful work to benefit the organisation, rather than the arts and crafts department.

How do I do this?

Like most of the advice I give out, it’s quite simple really – ask questions.

Ask lots of questions until you understand what the request is really all about, if it’s important or not and whether you’re the right person to tackle it.

Here’s a few of my favourite questions that I use with clients all the time, and when I was in-house I used these with stakeholders and colleagues on a daily basis.

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What problem are you trying to solve?

Stakeholders who come to you with busywork, unimportant work and whims will HATE this question. Because they probably aren’t trying to solve any problem in the business, they’re just ticking boxes off a list and creating ‘stuff’.

Nah, we don’t do that in strategic comms. We deliver value, and that means working on things that solve problems in the business.

So try this question. Next time someone says “I need a poster” or “You need to send out this all-employee email for me” ask them what problem they’re trying to solve. Encourage them to articulate the problem so that you can understand what their communications objective is and you can help guide them on the best way to meet that objective.

(Spoiler alert: a poster is rarely the answer. To anything.)

What would success look like for you?

Try this question too. This forces the stakeholder to think about the future state they’re trying to create and consider what outcome they want. Again, some stakeholders will really dislike this question because they don’t really have a desired outcome – they just want you to SEND OUT THE STUFF.

Nope nope nope, thank you but nope.

If a stakeholder is struggling to answer this, you can follow up with probing questions like “If we went ahead and did this project/ campaign/ tactic and it was successful, how would you know? Would people be doing things differently or would people feel differently about something?” This can help them to think through what they’re really trying to achieve. Together you can develop a clear communications objective that is both thoughtful and measurable.

And if the stakeholder isn’t clear on what success would look at AT ALL, then they’re not ready to come to you. They need to go back to their team and think about what they’re doing and why before they want to communicate anything.

Why is this important to the business?

And the third question that strategic communicators love but your whim-based stakeholders will hate is this: “why is this important to the business?”

This is one of the most critical questions you can ask. Because everything you work on should be important to the business. If you’re spending 3 hours producing posters for an event that doesn’t matter and doesn’t help the business achieve anything, then that’s 3 hours of wasted time. And wasted time costs the business money.

So try to have a conversation with your stakeholder to understand how their request connects to the organisation’s larger goals. If it’s not important, then you shouldn’t be doing it (and probably they shouldn’t either tbh). If it is important, then you can develop a good understanding of how to prioritise this and how to approach it.

When you ask this question, it does more than encourage a conversation. It sends a very clear signal that you’re thinking strategically and you’re not the arts and crafts department. It forces the stakeholder to think about how their request fits into the company’s mission or strategy, and helps you evaluate whether the request deserves immediate attention.

Yeah yeah yeah but this all makes me nervous

If this resonates with you but you feel a bit hesitant or nervous about using these questions with stakeholders (esp senior stakeholders) then send this newsletter to your boss and have a chat with them about it. Why not also collect some data about how you're spending your time too and bring it to your next 1:1 with your boss and have a conversation like this:

“Hey boss, I got curious about how I’m spending my time and it looks like around 60% of my time right now is working on reactive, urgent requests from stakeholders. I would love to have a conversation with you about how I can handle these stakeholder requests and spend more of my time on planned, strategic work to deliver more value to you and the business.”

I mean – what boss wouldn’t be open to a conversation like that??

I've got more useful questions you can use, alongwith templates and checklists and guides in my Internal Comms Cheat Sheets.

Alright, over to you – what do you want me to tackle next in this newsletter? Message me anytime and let me know.

Thanks for reading and stay curious,

Joanna

PS Find me on YouTube, TikTok and check out my book