Life+Work

Creating a Communication Plan for Influence Management

Just got off the phone with a coaching client who has goals that rely completely on her ability to influence others to do the work. We looked at how she could create a focused, intentional communication strategy to guide what she says to whom and how best to do it.

Influence Management Communication Strategy

Identify your difference audience segments. Individuals or organizations who:

• Share the same perspective, needs or connection to your goals (e.g., all chiefs of staff or dept heads, all practitioners or staff in a particular area)
• You would meet or communicate with at the same time (e.g., everyone on a particular committee or in the same dept). For an individual essential for you to influence. plan for at least some 1:1 meetings.
  

My client is a senior leader responsible for influencing the actions of several other senior leaders and key members of their organizations. It's not possible to meet with everyone at the same time, nor would the message be the same for everyone. I'm helping her figure out how to "bucket" or categorize the different segments of her audience so that we can tailor the communication message and mode appropriately.

Identify how and why each person or group is important to you.

• How important is their work to your goals?
• What specifically do you need from them to support achieving your goals?

Not every stakeholder is equal. For my client, influencing one particular Chief of Staff was more important to achieving her goal than anyone else. She needs him to be a strong, visibly supportive champion of her goals in order for her to get the physicians, nurses and other staff in his organization to take action. She'll dedicate far more focused time and energy meeting with this Chief of Staff than anyone else, and know it's time well spent.

How often and by what means should you communicate?

Although keeping everyone's focus on her initiatives is crucial to her success, she has many other job responsibilities and only so much time in the week to dedicate to communication and influence. We confirmed that she has the right level of communication for each segment of her audience, based on how important it was to influence them. For the two Chiefs most important to influence, she has weekly 1:1 meetings. She meets with the remaining Chiefs in weekly team meetings. For nursing and other support staff supervisors, monthly team meetings and/or email communication is sufficient for successful influence. For all other medical center employees, general communication modes like newsletters and posters are enough additional communication to support pass-downs they receive from informed Chiefs and supervisors.

How can you best support this audience of stakeholders?

Often what you want from a stakeholder requires them to make a change, commit time or supply other resources. Find out how you can make it easy for them. One client I work with had been at an impasse in a key project for months because he couldn't get a critical stakeholder on board with his initiative. He finally got a breakthrough commitment from them by taking the time to sit down and help them solve the problem his proposal was creating for them.

Identify what to communicate. For each segment of your audience, ask:

• What messages do you need them to hear?
• What actions do you need them to take?
• How can you deliver your requests and message in a way that motivates and influences them to take action?

Part of being influential is you being a clear, passionate communicator. The other part of influence is knowing how to get your audience inspired and motivated to take clear and specific action. My client has different, specific things she needs from Chiefs, nurses and general medical center staff. We are listing out the specific requests she has for each audience and tailoring her message to include the kinds of information that inspire each audience. For example, for Chiefs she is now going to include regular updates on two key metrics they are already highly motivated to manage. For nurses, who are motivated by participation of doctors in key initiatives, she is emphasizing stories and data that show how doctors are participating in the initiative.

Stakeholder Management: Key to Success for Projects and Decision Making

I just got Tweetdeck and am reveling in being able to locate people having Twitter conversations on topics I'm passionate about. One of those topics is stakeholder management. Recently I noticed several people retweeting Rob Llewellyn's blog post on CIO.com. I thought Llewllyn's comments were spot on: "Stakeholder management is a critical element of IT transformation and indeed any business transformation and is easier said than done, but it can often mean the difference between the success and failure of transformation programmes." Over the 15 years I've been doing business coaching and meeting facilitation work, stakeholder management is one of the top factors I've seen lead to success or failure.

One particular experience stands out in my mind. I was asked to help facilitate a final agreement-building session on changes to a process that would impact multiple departments. A cross-functional team had worked hard for months putting together a redesigned process. They were excited to share the final proposal with key stakeholders and get their commitment to dedicate staff hours to help implement the plan.

At the end of their presentation, they were shocked to discover that their most important stakeholder was not on board with the proposal and not willing to commit resources for implementation. Moreover, this senior leader disagreed with the whole premise of their proposal. Her support was so critical that the proposal had to be scrapped and the team had to go back to square one. Everyone wondered what happened. Where did they go wrong?

When we followed up with the senior leader, it turned out that the representative from her dept on the cross-functional team didn't think it was his job to broker communication between his leader and the team. He had never spoken with the leader about the process and never gotten her input. Somehow this broken communication link never emerged in the team meetings--a sign that the whole team was not tracking well enough on the interests and concerns of their critical stakeholders.

Any leader or team who wants to accomplish something that impacts others or relies on resources outside of their control must do a good job of stakeholder management to be successful. If you don't communicate effectively with key stakeholders or overlook some, your project or decision-making process can drag on miserably or fail completely with missed deadlines, escalating costs and resistance or outright rebellion at implementation time.

Here's some basics I've found really make a difference in creating good trust and communication with key stakeholders:

Ask your stakeholders two questions before you craft your proposal or make key decisions:

• What would be a win for you [in how we create this/do this]?
• What would really concern you/not work for you?

Make time on your agenda to report out stakeholder input and discuss how to take all the input into consideration.

• The key to paving full-buy-in at the end is discovering and incorporating what works best for your key stakeholders as you develop your idea.
• Often wins and concerns for one stakeholder are at odds with another. Find out what the underlying interest is for each. There is always a point where they have something in common; working from this point can give you a win for all parties.

Want to really build trust and relationship with your stakeholders? Loop back with them:

• Explain how their input was taken into consideration, especially if the end result is different than they requested.
• If you're building an application or process, show your work in stages to make sure it's really matching what the stakeholder expected. It's common and entirely human to misunderstand each other--baking check points into the process is key to final success.

I'd like to keep exploring and expanding on the topic of stakeholder management. Do you know of a good book, article or blog on stakeholder management? What have you found is most important in successfully managing stakeholders?