Stakeholders! Amiright?
Your end users, sponsors, advocates, detractors, managers, leaders, peers, shareholders, and community members. They hold the keys to your project’s success quite literally in their hands. Your technically excellent solution means nothing if it can’t be implemented, adopted, or used effectively.
This is where effective stakeholder engagement becomes your superpower. When you develop a systematic way to understand stakeholder psychology, you’re better equipped to navigate scepticism, pushback, and general disinterest in your ideas, initiatives, or projects.
Engagement as investment, not cost
Mindset is everything here. Effective stakeholder engagement isn’t an overhead; it’s a strategic investment in your project’s success.
Your engagement goals should be crystal clear. You need to know exactly what you want your stakeholders to DO, THINK, and FEEL differently as a result of your engagement. And our engagement activities must match these goals.
Perhaps you want stakeholders to adopt new software, provide funding, endorse your solution, or change behaviours to establish a new culture. In each scenario, stakeholders are critical to your success, and each requires a tailored approach.
Stakeholders are human beings with whom you have unique relationships. They’re not all equal in influence or impact, so you need a framework for understanding them as individuals while engaging efficiently at scale.
What “effective” engagement actually means
“If we just consult with stakeholders enough, they’ll eventually come around, won’t they?”
Consultation without genuine engagement is like running on a treadmill, a lot of effort, but you’re not actually getting anywhere.
The key lies in combining your knowledge of stakeholders with understanding what they value and how involved they need or want to be in your project. It’s a delicate balance requiring continuous check-ins. And you can’t achieve this without first understanding your stakeholders deeply.
The goal is engaged stakeholders, not overwhelmed ones.
Empathy is strategic
What currency do your stakeholders trade in?
If your stakeholders trade in Euros, they’re more likely to invest in your project if you convert your Australian dollars before attempting to trade. This is especially critical for stakeholders with high influence over your success or those significantly impacted by your changes.
You must understand what they truly value. Stakeholders struggle to engage when you don’t connect your problem to something they care about. This is fundamentally your challenge to solve.
Consider this example: If a plant operator sees their job purpose as keeping operations running to meet customer demand, they’ll struggle to engage with anything that doesn’t align with this goal. If they believe you’re distracting them from serving customers, they may become difficult to reach, unresponsive to emails, absent from meetings, or even deny site access for your project.
Walking in someone else’s shoes isn’t just kind—it’s strategically essential.
Understanding this plant operator’s perspective reveals that to capture their attention, you need to frame your project through customer impact stories. You must also accommodate their operational realities: shutdown planning, shift management, and production factors. Once you grasp what truly matters to them, numerous empathy-based engagement strategies emerge.
This understanding leads us to the powerful strategy of co-design.
The art of co-design
When you invite the right stakeholders to help shape your solution rather than simply respond to it, you tap into something far more powerful than traditional consultation or “opinion gathering.”
Co-design isn’t only about creating better approaches (though you will)—it’s about leveraging a fundamental psychological principle: when people help create something, they develop ownership. They become champions and advocates for the solution.
The art of co-design lies in facilitating messy conversations, coordinating differing perspectives, and keeping conflict healthy and productive. Co-design opportunities must be both strategic and authentic.
You can’t invite everyone to co-design everything, and you absolutely cannot offer pseudo-participation where people think they’re designing but you’ve already made the decisions. You are only fast-tracking cynicism and increasing stakeholder discomfort with whatever comes next.
Who should you co-design with?
- Highly impacted stakeholders who will live with the consequences of your decisions daily
- Subject matter experts who understand nuances you might miss
- Influential champions who can help socialize shared ideas within their networks
- Constructive sceptics who will stress-test your assumptions in ways supporters won’t
Why co-design works (when done well)
- Shifts attitudes: Transforms reticence to interest to ownership
- Surfaces insights: Uncovers practical knowledge you’d never discover alone or as a project team
- Builds advocates: Creates champions who can explain the “why” to others
- Reduces dismissal: Minimises the “above my pay grade” syndrome that kills many good initiatives
The foundation is clarity and authenticity
Genuine co-design opportunities require clarity about what’s open for co-design and what isn’t. People are remarkably reasonable when faced with legitimate constraints, but they cannot tolerate feeling manipulated.
Be upfront about boundaries, and within those boundaries, give stakeholders real influence over outcomes.
This is strategic empathy in action.
Want to explore how to engage your stakeholders with empathy? We have strategies and techniques that can transform your stakeholder relationships. Get in touch to learn more.