The question from one of our participants was very straightforward and something I thought would be easy to answer.
Yesterday while conducting a Business Leadership workshop for a global audience we had a module
on “Stakeholder Mapping.” This is a core module in our content library and it is used to build skills and capabilities in a digital simulation workshop and then of course back on the job.
We were discussing one of the most basic tools of Stakeholder Mapping tools where you identify and segment key stakeholders by how important they are to the project, process, or change, and what is their level of support. This graphic provides the four quadrants of stakeholder mapping as each quadrant will inform you of what to do and how to do it.
The discussion was fantastic and participants were using their business simulation workshop as a laboratory for exploring interpersonal skills like building stakeholder strategies to accomplish their goals.
And then the question came, “As we move forward, do you have any benchmark data that shares what is the common distribution of stakeholders?” I thought that was going to be an easy answer, but I searched every place and found nothing.
So, we did the next best thing and created our own data through a survey. We have been so fortunate to keep in touch with many of our past participants via LinkedIn so I simply asked our network of more than 10,000 subscribers to participate in a very simple, less than one-minute survey to help us explore and get the data.
And the network didn’t let us down!
Here are the results and the data is fascinating:
High Importance to Success – Low Support Quadrant (20%)
This is surprising. This data tells us that the most vulnerable, highest-risk stakeholder archetype is actually the smallest one. That means:
- It should be more manageable
- There is less to worry about
- There are ways of minimizing a significantly negative impact.
High Importance to Success – High Support Quadrant (33%)
This was the most pleasant surprise of the data. The implication is that most people doing stakeholder management can feel comfortable that the most important segment will support them if they engage in the proper stakeholder management principles including:
- Communicating Clearly
- Managing Expectations
- Cooperative, Action-Oriented Engagement
These three best practices mean you need to be proactive and go out of your way to overcommunicate and make sure you are driving communications and keeping your most important stakeholders engaged and focused on the results you are trying to achieve.
Low Importance to Success – Low Support Quadrant (24%)
The good news here is the people in this quadrant are not important to your stakeholder mission and you don’t need to have an elaborate strategy here as it’s a smaller segment with less impact.
Low Importance to Success – High Support Quadrant (24%)
These are your change supporters, and it is interesting to note that there are probably fewer of them than you thought. This means you need to put them on your radar and be extra diligent to maintain their support and leverage them to help you influence others.
In summary, Stakeholder Mapping gets a little easier and you have a benchmark of the distribution of different archetypes. The surprise is that you need to spend more time with the smaller represented segments such as the High Importance to Success – Low Support Quadrant.
