One of the challenges many of you shared with me, was about onboarding and involving stakeholders. Some of you even expressed some tiredness about it. Due to high turnover at senior level, they feel as if they are doing nothing else.
Involving and informing stakeholders is an essential part of the alliance manager’s role. With transformation as a strong theme for 2020, involving stakeholders becomes even more important.
Here are a few considerations that will help you to deal more effectively with your stakeholders.
Know what your stakeholders need.
Often we spend a lot of time giving our stakeholders information they don’t really need. Investing time in knowing who your stakeholders are and what they need, will help you to point the information provided better to their needs.
Proactively communicate with your stakeholders.
Back in my days as an alliance manager, we used to send out quarterly newsletters to all involved stakeholders. It was highly appreciated and led to an increased personal involvement from the stakeholders. Additionally, I maintained a briefing deck that I used to get every new stakeholder onboard.
Nowadays, there are specialised alliance management tools like allianceboard. These tools can help you to streamline your alliance communication and lower the administrative burden. This will make your alliance management life much easier! I would still include some proactive communication in it. This way you will trigger your stakeholders to check the information.
The benefits are clear: you will know what your stakeholders need, they are up to speed and your alliance partner will only meet with committed stakeholders. As a personal bonus: it will enable you to spend more time with the partner!
PS: Stakeholder management will extensively be discussed in the upcoming Alliance Masterclass series.