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Stakeholder Management - Get Ready To Get Creative!

Guest post by: Martin Haworth

Article Overview: Stakeholders are one of the most important elements of any project. By getting relationships with everyone affected right, any manager will have a big positive to work with...

Stakeholder Management - Get Ready To Get Creative!

Stakeholder management is a pretty important component of any manager's role. In the main the key stakeholders will often be simply employees, the bigger organization and, of course, the customers and clients that are on the receiving end of the goods and services they purchase. In many circumstances, stakeholders will be a considerably broader range - especially with larger projects - and it's vital to really understand just who will be affected by what you are doing and potentially how they will react as well.

Now, none of this is easy. It becomes less easy where a manager decides that he or she is the only person who is up to the task, thereby leaving a significant chunk of their resources in the team back in the locker room.

When this is a time to max out all the resources you have, losing possibly 95% of your people assets is likely as not an idea worth reconsidering.

By utilizing more of your team, as you come up with a plan of action for your stakeholder management, you are more likely to come up with new ideas and concepts, some of which might seem to be a bit off-the-wall to you.

Here's where the best manager's are worth their weight in gold. They listen carefully to their people and stop themselves from 'editing' too hard when the wacky ideas come.

You see, out there in the real world, where stakeholders come in all shapes and sizes (often literally!), some creative ideas about how to firstly find and then manage them effectively, are much needed.

Taking a risk or two with the ideas your people come up with not only risks huge success, but it also risks building a dynamic team who will be energized by the way they are trusted to come home with the goodies.

Of course there are always going to be some ideas that get rejected, that's inevitable. What is vital is that the ideas are heard through and respected by careful questioning, that will enable the individual with the ideas to make their own decisions about feasibility and relevance too.

Remember, although something might not resonate with you in your ways of seeing things, there is everything to say that a different approach could make a valuable impact in the stakeholder activities that you need it for.

Sometimes, managers really do have to get out of their own way a little and go with the flow, because so often, there is much to gain and actually very little to lose!

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  Stakeholder Management - Using The Team To Share The Load

Article Tags: creativity, empowerment, management development, managing stakeholders, stakeholder management



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