The Single Best Way To Manage Your Stakeholders

Relationships are absolutely critical for effective leadership. There are no leaders without followers, and achieving your goals depends as much on working with others as having great ideas. No relationships means no results!

That said, many of us are so focused on the technical, financial, or operational aspects of our business—what I like to call the “complexity” parts of our jobs—that we forget how important relationships are to our success. For a lucky few of us, building deep relationships with the right people comes naturally; but most of us will be better served by taking a more structured and deliberate approach.

A Stakeholder Map is a powerful and pragmatic tool to help you better manage your key relationships. Most of us just think of a Stakeholder Map as a tool we learned years ago in a project management class, but sophisticated leaders know it can be much more powerful than that.

Let’s start with a standard definition of stakeholder: “any party that has an interest or concern in a project or enterprise.” To be more pragmatic, your stakeholders are all of the people with and through whom you and your organization will (or will not!) accomplish your most important objectives.  

What might this collection of people look like? Your first task is to create a list of your stakeholders. Take your time and think about the entire landscape or ecosystem you operate in.  Try to visualize all of the people you should be interacting with, including the ones you may not enjoy interacting with.

Once you have your list, the best way to develop a clear understanding of your stakeholders is to create a graphic. Take a blank sheet of 11x17” paper and draw a picture of that universe of people with and through whom you must work in order to achieve success. That graphic is your Stakeholder Map. 

There’s no “standard template” for a Stakeholder Map: thinking through how you would visualize or depict your stakeholders is an important part of the exercise, and one that will lead to real insights. Your Stakeholder Map might look like a flow chart, a spider graph, a 2x2 matrix, a series of concentric circles, or something else altogether. 

There are only two rules you must follow in drawing your Map:

1. Your Map may not be a standard organization chart. “Org charts lie”: research shows that patterns of collaboration and relationships in any organization are actually quite different from what is depicted by the org chart.  Power doesn’t always translate into knowledge or influence.
2. You must list individual people, not just categories like “sales” or “customers.” The point of this exercise is to identify the specific stakeholders who are critical for your success, and then decide how to manage those relationships.

As you draw your Map, you will likely identify individuals (or even categories of people) that you forgot to include when you made your initial list. You’ll realize how many people are integral to accomplishing your results (the numbers can be daunting), and you may begin to appreciate that you should be thinking more about these relationships and how you are proactively managing them.

Now you have your Map, but the Map is not an end in of itself, it’s a means to an end.  (You’re not a cartographer!)  Let’s put the Map to use.  Start assessing each of the relationships you identified. For example, give each individual name a letter grade (A, B, C) to indicate the quality of the relationship. Or mark those relationships that are strong and productive with a +; those that are neutral with a 0; and those that need work (whether it’s a poor/troubled relationship, or just an insufficient one) with a —.

At this point in your stakeholder assessment, you may start to gain insights such as:

• “There are important relationships at my peer level that need work—I’m not spending enough time with Alain or Kathleen.”
• “Three or four influential senior leaders or board members probably don’t have a good enough idea of how I see the future of our business.”
• “My network of relationships is smaller and more internally focused that I would have expected—I need to do something about that.”
• “I have really good relationships with Djata and Joel—am I actually spending too much time with them?”

As you reflect your Stakeholder Map in this way, identify 4-5 pivotal relationships that you want to focus on: individuals with whom you see a need to deepen or improve your relationship. Here are some questions you can consider to create a Relationship Action Plan or (as a COO client of mine likes to call it) a “Touch Agenda”:

• What connects us? Do we have a mutual “purpose” or shared objectives?  
• What do I NEED from this person to be successful in my role?
• What do THEY NEED from me to be successful in their roles? (And how do I know that?)
• How can we deepen our COMMITMENT to each other’s success? 
• What issues or topics should we spend more time EXPLORING together
• Would I benefit from this person’s INPUT in making any key decisions?
• What GETS IN THE WAY of us collaborating effectively?
• What can I do to build a STRONGER relationship for the future?

Once you’ve built your Stakeholder Map you should convert it into a living document: with changes in the business, your role, or the organization structure, your landscape of stakeholders will change, and your Map should reflect those changes.

Creating your Map doesn’t have to happen in one day. Take a first pass, then build on it. Review it with your boss, your peers, your team—and get their input and perspectives. (In fact, consider conducting a mapping exercise with your team: “What do our team’s collective stakeholders look like—and how are we managing those relationships?”)

Revisit your Map regularly. Every time you do so, you will discover new insights for managing the relationships that are most important to your success and outcomes. And with your Map as a tool for your work as a leader, you will ensure you’re making the best use of your most finite resource: time.

A Stakeholder Map is a powerful way to identify which relationships will have the biggest positive impact—as well as a tool to hold yourself more accountable to investing in those relationships. Time to draw your map.

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