Here is a truism, knowledge of an organisations stakeholders always exists. A key question is, how such knowledge can be used to best effect in the pursuit of strategy.
In ‘Strategic Management of Stakeholders: Theory and Practice. Long Range Planning’ Ackerman et al state:
“Every TMT (Top Management Team) holds knowledge about its organization’s stakeholders, and (intuitively) about how to manage them, but these resources were often woefully under-used”.
Stakeholder management is about getting disciplined and optimising the knowledge of stakeholders. In the opinion of the author stakeholder management is best defined thus:
“A professional, disciplined and rigorous approach to identifying, monitoring and optimising stakeholder interaction’.
Notably the Institute of Directors speak of ‘Stakeholder Engagement’ rather than ‘Management’. Engagement intuits the importance of managing the connection. In ‘A Stakeholder Mapping Approach’ Newcombe et al refer to some discomfort on what can be perceived as the ‘Machiavellian’ approach of stakeholder mapping.
The author would argue connections matter, and that disciplined stakeholder relationship management is a fundamental duty of senior management to ensure a robust approach to strategic goal execution. Stakeholder management done properly should not resemble any surreptitious activity.
A great exemplar of the importance of Stakeholder Management can be found in Dr Lynda Bourne’s article in the PM World Journal, following the Heathrow Terminal 5 journey from inception to launch and beyond.
Key SentinelReward Lesson: It is interesting to note that whilst good stakeholder management is desirable, poor stakeholder management has the potential to be catastrophic, the inference being, doing the job well is fundamental to sound strategic goal execution.