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Author: George Pitagorsky

Mindfully Managing Senior Stakeholder Relationships

Managing relationships with all stakeholders are critical to project success.

Particularly important, and often challenging, is managing the relationship with senior stakeholders – sponsors and clients.

Managing Relationships

Relationships are dynamic. They involve communication on multiple levels – explicit and implied, oral, in writing and implied. Relationships are based on expectations and responses. They are influenced by culture, perceptions, emotional and social intelligence, intentions and hierarchies.

Recognizing your individual power to influence your relationships is the starting point for effective relationship management. Everything you do or say is taken in by those around you. They interpret it based on their perspective and respond. The response may be overtly or subtly observable or not. It is often the non-observable responses that are most important to the long-term health of the relationship.

Senior stakeholders are sponsors and clients in executive or senior management positions. What makes managing relationships with them challenging is a combination of hierarchies and the fear and power issues related to them, limited attention span and limited access, as well as your individual ability to manage these factors.

The Situation

Imagine a situation in which a very senior executive mandates a significant change in the way your organization interacts with its customers and vendors. He expresses a strong desire to get it done within a year. The work required to make it happen involves procurement of facilities, goods and services, software development to change existing systems and/or acquire and integrate new ones, development and implementation of new procedures, hiring and training several hundred people and communicating with all of the stakeholders. You are pretty sure that the procurement process alone could take several months or more.

You are faced with what you may perceive as a command from your project sponsor or senior client, often delivered to you by an intermediary who may be your direct boss or the senior stakeholder’s representative.

If you meekly accept it while exhibiting a subtle doubt that you can fulfill expectations, you may be seen as fearful and untrustworthy. You could be setting yourself up for failure by not saying what you think and giving the senior stakeholder a false confidence in getting the result he or she wants.

At the same time, if you push back by bringing up the risks and uncertainties that would keep you from delivering, you could be seen as a ‘naysayer,’ someone that is not committed to plowing through barriers to make things happen.

The way you read your sponsor and craft your responses makes all the difference.

Managing Senior Stakeholders and Emotional Intelligence

Emotional intelligence – the ability to discern and manage one’s own emotions and to discern and manage the emotional responses of others – is a critical factor. When hierarchies are encountered and the person in the superior position is emotionally intelligent, he or she can make it easier for subordinates to present their case with objectivity by explicitly promoting candid feedback.

As project managers, you are subordinate to senior stakeholders. It is important to identify your feelings when in direct contact with your boss or boss’ boss. As fear arises, you can accept it and find the right way to behave – responding as opposed to reacting. To find the right way it is necessary to read your senior stakeholder’s feelings and style.

As you get a sense of the stakeholder’s openness to hearing what you have to say, you may choose to be completely candid or more diplomatic. You might even choose to say nothing, reconciling yourself to yet another forced march to a dismal end. Of course, avoiding confrontation by not pushing back is a last resort. It is only an option when you have tried over and over again to be rational, objective and candid only to be faced with command and threats like “Get it done or we’ll get someone else who can.”

Cut Through the Hierarchy by Treating the Superior as a Peer

As you become more comfortable with accepting any discomfort that comes with pushing back in the face of power you can begin to play with the idea of leveling the playing field from your side. In other words, treating your senior stakeholder as a peer.

This shift in your perception frees you from unnecessary self-imposed constraints. It does not mean that you should go in and slap him or her on the back or get overly familiar. It means recognizing that the senior stakeholder is just another one of us, who, like everyone else, has strengths, desires, needs, stresses, weakness, biases, mental models and preconceived beliefs that influence what they say and do.

Since you are treating them as peers, you can interpret their commands as questions. For example, “We need the full organizational change to be done by September 2018.” becomes “Do you think it is possible to have the full change done by September 2018?”

With that perspective, you can mindfully and objectively come up with the optimal way to communicate, convince and generally relate.

Attention and Access

In addition to hierarchy and its impact in obstructing effective relationships, the ability to get the time and attention required to build and sustain a healthy relationship gets in the way. You need to be able to state your position and manage the relationship. In our example, setting reasonable expectations requires that you explain the risk and realities that might keep you from delivering a satisfactory outcome. You might find that as you are explaining your position your senior stakeholder abruptly cuts you off to answer a call or text, impatiently dismisses you, or just zones out.

Senior stakeholders are busy. They have many things going on simultaneously and may feel that the issue they have with you is low on their priority list. Their time is limited, as is, in most cases, their interest in details. To manage a healthy relationship with senior stakeholders, you must make sure that your message is delivered succinctly (brief, to the point and clear). if you are trying to get across the message that there is uncertainty about your ability to deliver the desired results in the desired time frame, start with an engaging statement like “I’d love to be able to say that we can absolutely commit to delivering, but in good conscience I can’t.”

Let him ask “Why?” Then he’s hooked. To reel him in, you need to avoid long detailed explanations. Identify from one to five high-level reasons and state them as if they were bullet points in a presentation. Pause and ask whether he wants to go into further detail and carry on from there.

The point is to engage and give your stakeholder choices. Respect her time and need and interest in detail.

When you show someone that you care about them and their needs, are candid and can express yourself clearly and succinctly it is likely that they will be open to an effective professional relationship.

 

Managing Conflict and Managing Emotions

A recent incident reminded me of how important it is to stick to the content of conflicts and how difficult it is to deal with emotions disruptive behavior.

As I point out in my recent book, Managing Conflict in Projects, there are two major categories of conflict – content based and emotionally based conflict.  It is best to avoid emotionally based conflict and focus on the content.  This is easier said than done for a number of reasons.  For one, emotionally based conflict is often disguised as content based conflict.  For another, emotions are extremely powerful and often hidden behind a wall of rationality, particularly in organizations. 

 Many people are so identified with their positions and with the need to win that anger comes up whenever anyone confronts them with opposition. Others are frightened into submission or lack the self confidence to engage in a content centered conflict.  Often the individual is so habituated to emotional reactivity that they do not consciously recognize what is driving their behavior.  They just act without reflecting on the impact of their actions.

To effectively manage conflict one must address the content through a communication and decision making process.  The process is affected by emotionality and, often unconscious, conflict styles.

The content can be anything from decisions about vendor selection to estimates, to the cause and cost of a change in requirements.  Content centered conflict is a good thing. It is an opportunity to find optimum resolutions that improve project results.   For example conflict over a design or over a tactic in selecting a vendor can lead to an optimal resolution that would not have been found had one party’s position prevailed without opposition.

But, when the communication process is disrupted the ability to come to an effective resolution that is in the best interest of a project and organization is diminished.  Anger leads people to turn to rhetoric, personal attack, even violence and lose track of the content and the mutual desire for a win-win resolution.  Fear leads to people withholding their information and avoiding a healthy exchange of ideas and facts.  People get lost in their emotional reactions.  Satisfying personal agendas becomes the focus.

When faced with a conflict that moves into the realm of emotionality and disruptive behavior the healthy flow of dialogue, debate and decision making is disrupted.  It is necessary to take action to avoid this and if it is occurring to address it and return to a healthy process. 

Most organizations and many individuals do not do well in addressing their communication process, particularly when it comes to interpersonal exchanges and emotions.  It is necessary to reflect on the cost of allowing emotionality to impact effective conflict management and to address the issue on a personal and organizational level.

On a personal level an individual can make it his or her responsibility to monitor emotions and manage them so as not to disrupt the communications process and distort the decision making.  This means stepping back and being self reflective and disciplined enough to recognize the rising of emotional charge and taking control of one’s words and behavior to avoid displaying emotions in a way that would change the focus of the conflict from the content and work against the goals of a win-win resolution and healthy relationships.  This is hard work that requires the cultivation of sufficient mindfulness and concentration to manage oneself and one’s situation.  The individual must increase his or her level of emotional intelligence.

On a team or organizational level, the group must be made aware of the nature of dysfunctional conflict management and its cost.  The organization that ignores this dysfunction is bound to perform less effectively than one that sets as a value for rational and effective decision making and then supports that value by teaching it’s members how to manage conflict so as to obtain optimal resolutions for individual conflicts or disputes while building and maintaining healthy relationships.

Emotions are a fact of life.  They are to be acknowledged and not suppressed.  At the same time reactive, emotionally driven behavior is to be avoided to achieve personal health and optimal performance.

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