Our team has an upcoming "offsite" meeting for 2 days and I've been asked to prepare a 2.5 hr session on stakeholder management. As this can be a bit intense I'm looking for any suggestions are activities I can use to help me. There will be three areas of discussion: "What" - intro to session covering what are stakeholders, "Who" - determine who are stakeholders are and categorise them, "How" - the big part looking at how we manage expectations, relationship (now and future), review relationships, etc.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

Kind regards,
Jan Patterson
Perpetual Ltd
Sydney, Australia

Hi Jan -- could you please provide the desired outcome(s) for this session? (In other words - please provide that which any instructional designer would need prior to designing and developing the learning activities)

Given your company's long history I suspect you already have a pretty good handle on the stakeholder management process. I'm wondering if your underlying challenge today is moving folks to the next level in understanding and appreciating the role of stakeholders.

My own experience tells me that it is easy to define and discuss the topic of stakeholders (your first discussion area). The hard part is when it comes time to actually sort out who is a stakeholder, why, and how to maximize their appropriate involvement in planning, problem solving, product development...et al.

For the first discussion, be sure to reinforce the notion that stakeholder analysis is an involvement strategy. Including those who do not support a particular course of action. While it may be convenient to exclude them...you will get to meet them at implementation (which is the worst possible time).

A stakeholder being any person or group who will be affected by, or can have an effect on, a decision or action.

For the remainder of your time think about teeing up a few examples...maybe one from outside the business and then a few inside the business. Push people hard to expand the stakeholder population...who else has knowledge, information and experience with this....where are the alligators?

Once people have identified stakeholders you will also want them to describe what they believe a "win" would look like for each respective voice. It is from that conversation that you discover where to seek common ground.

Stakeholder identification and analysis is critical to any collaborative planning and problem solving initiative. My frist question is always..."Who else needs to be involved?"

I've often found it helpful to meet with a few of the leader participants to discuss their issues and to turn that into a survey for the participants.

Do the survey prior to the retreat and discuss what they mean at the retreat.

For example and issue that might arise is how to balance the needs of different stakeholders while maintainig their support. You could ask turn that into a survey item have participants rate before the session, compile the results and use the resutls to either develop your content,fuel a discussion, or both,