I'd Like My Stakeholders Well Done...
How using a regular Stakeholder Meeting reduces chaos and increases trust
This is another entry in the Kanban Cadences series I want to share. This particular edition focuses on Stakeholders and the chaos they create which can be minimized with a regular touchpoint we call the Stakeholder Meeting. Despite the title of the article, no Stakeholders were grilled in the writing of this story.
I love running sound and video for churches. That’s right, in my free time I flip faders and help the rest of the team at church create an atmosphere for people to find hope. It’s a great gig, and I love the challenges. Part of the challenge of any good church ministry is the need to keep leadership in the loop of continuous improvements of the ministry with new technology, enhancements, or other various audio/visual work.
This reminded me of one of the Kanban cadences I teach Ramsey Solution’s teams to use called a Stakeholder Meeting. I thought it was worth sharing how to use one of these to align your stakeholders and leaders while creating transparency and excitement around the work you do. Buckle in for your Tuesday Tidbit.
So Many Conversations...
When you lead a team that is doing any kind of work, there is always a group of stakeholders that either want to know what’s happening or feel they need to be part of your decision making process. The term “Stakeholder” is defined, at least in our circles, as someone that is either requesting work of you and your team or has the ability to say no to work you want to do.
It’s true for volunteer teams and even more-so for teams that are paid for the service they provide. Think about it: if you were paying someone to build a house for you, you would check in from time to time and discuss decisions and progress. Whether out of curiosity or need for control, we like being in the loop when we have something at stake (thus the term stakeholder).
One thing to know about stakeholders is that they love two things: progress updates and speaking into prioritization. Take my team of audio engineers for a moment. If each of our five stakeholders came and asked each of the five audio engineers for a progress update or, worse, for some work or new pet project, we would have chaos. That’s five different meetings and, potentially, five different projects.
Enter the Stakeholder meeting.
What if, instead, we had a way to point those five stakeholders to a regularly recurring meeting where we could have the right conversation with the right People, Information, and Time. I like to call this the PIT Maneuver. It’s an easy way to remember to focus on having the right people, info, and time for the conversation in every meeting. (We will dig into that more in a later tidbit) For the Stakeholder meeting, PIT is a crucial tool that allows you to redirect those well-meaning stakeholders that ask, “When will we have wireless mics for all the singers?” “When will we be able to get in-ear monitors?” “I found $5 headsets on Amazon. Can we order those?” Now, you can simply say, “Let’s chat about that in Monday’s Stakeholder meeting.”
Back to School and Trust Building
Being able to consolidate all those conversations is, on its own, worth the price of the meeting time, but there is a second byproduct of the Stakeholder meeting: Trust. That’s right, you will build the trust of your stakeholders, because in this meeting you will present what I like to call your Homework. I have discussed this in the decomp Tidbit, but Homework is essentially the work you put in to verify that an idea, project, or whatever task your team is doing is the right thing.
Stakeholders love ensuring that the team they have employed are using critical thought when deciding how to solve problems. After all, most of your Stakeholder group is made up of people that may have solved these same problems before or, at a minimum, have some opinion about how you should solve it. One great way to show a team of leaders that you have what it takes to come up with a great solution is to routinely show them your thought process. I will lean on the great quote from my good friend and fellow coach Jon Beebe:
I trust my team to the extent that they can explain their thinking.
As the room of leaders and stakeholders probe your solution, you also start to learn what is important to them by listening to the questions they ask. All of this leads to a situation where you have routinely explained your thinking, and stakeholders are less inclined to worry - which is the number one reason they continue to ask, “Where is that project I requested?”
Agreement or (dun dun DUN) Approval?
I am a huge fan of seeking agreement and alignment over approvals. Approvals are slow proxies for trust, but you can read that in my earlier Tidbits. What I will say for the Stakeholder meeting is that you are leaning toward alignment and not approvals. When I met with the stakeholders for the sound team, the idea was to let them know what I was planning to do with their investment based on the Homework I had done. I absolutely wanted them to probe my thinking, but my attitude in the room was one of, “You entrusted me to lead this team, and I will continuously earn that trust, but I won’t ask for permission.”
That may sound caustic, but it’s necessary. If you are going to earn trust, you have to be willing to hold the tension of being bold enough to not ask for permission while at the same time holding your work in “open hands.” The last thing a stakeholder that is looking for a self directed leader wants to hear is, “But what do you think we should be doing,” or “Is it okay if we...” Both of those questions are a sign of either low trust or lack of confidence in the leader facilitating the meeting.
Which brings me to the final point: You, as a leader or representative of the team, should be facilitating this meeting. That means you should be bringing these stakeholders to the table and not the other way around. If you are the one out there actively thinking of the right next steps or leading the project, you need to be actively seeking the input of your stakeholders. If you wait for them to come to you, I can almost guarantee that it will be on their own schedule, and they will be less inclined to treat you as the leader you are.
Recap
Let’s round out the basics of a Stakeholder meeting.
Use the PIT Maneuver and get the right People, Information, and Time for a regularly cadenced chat about the work.
Focus on inviting people that request work of your team or have veto power for your projects
Do your Homework.
Understand the “Why” and Value behind your next set of work
Hold it with open hands as you seek alignment and not approval
Share your Plan and Prioritization.
At Ramsey Solutions, we use a Now/Next/Later tool in our Stakeholder conversations to visualize our work and get prioritization feedback from stakeholders.
If you can succeed in creating a regular cadence and push conversations to that meeting, you will be a lot farther than most companies - even if all your doing is ordering in-ear-monitors for the praise team or a jazz cover band.
Until next week,
Keep on learning. Keep on growing.