Stakeholder management is essentially the process of maintaining good and healthy relationships with the people that impact your work. Effective stakeholder management allows leaders to successfully communicate with all their stakeholders, and ensure that everyone is on board for every managerial activity and decision.
A business is all about relationships, and running a successful business calls for keeping all your stakeholders i.e. all individuals who have an impact on your business and are impacted by it, happy. To understand what is stakeholder management, one needs to understand the key characteristics that go into it and their respective benefits which go as follows:
Key Characteristics Of Stakeholder Management
Stakeholder management has certain key characteristics associated with it that ensure its effectiveness and success which include the following:
Inclusivity
Since teams are becoming more diverse and increasingly remote, stakeholder management is based on the principle of inclusivity in terms of making all stakeholders feel included irrespective of their designation, role, or importance within the company. It also means that all differing opinions in terms of company decisions are to be entertained.
Transparency
Transparency and honesty are integral components of stakeholder management as they help establish trust between two parties. Ensuring transparency of all company processes between stakeholders is important for cooperation and mutual decision-making.
Coherence
Coherence and clarity are important aspects of stakeholder management as they make complex tasks simple. To have everyone on the same page, all processes and information must be crystal clear for the stakeholders to view and understand. Hence, stakeholder management calls for coherence and clarity as key components.
Benefits Of Stakeholder Management
Given below are five benefits of an effective and comprehensive stakeholder management strategy:
It helps you build better relationships
Engagement with your stakeholders regularly allows you to build genuine relationships based on trust and cooperation. To run successful businesses, there must be a mutual understanding between leaders and stakeholders rather than merely business cordial relationships, and stakeholder management allows you to build genuine relationships that enhance the credibility of your organization in the eyes of stakeholders.
It helps you categorize your stakeholders
Your stakeholders include a vast number of individuals, and a good stakeholder management system like Borealis allows you to categorize your stakeholders multidimensionally and allows you to link them to certain events, projects, designations, locations, and departments. It allows you to keep notes about which stakeholders pertain to which department or event, which facilitates communication and information dissemination.
It helps you detect opportunities and threats
A stakeholder management system allows you to effectively identify opportunities and threats before they are even made public. For instance, if your marketing department puts out a social media post that unknowingly is offensive to a certain social group, you are likely to discover the fault from your stakeholder management system through their input in real-time and cater to the issue at hand as soon as possible before it comes to widespread public attention.
It helps you prioritize stakeholders
Your stakeholders may vary in terms of the importance and influence that they hold over your organization, and hence need to be managed accordingly. Stakeholder management allows you to prioritize stakeholders based on their importance. As a leader, you can hence categorize the depth and frequency of communication for each category of stakeholder.
It helps you in decision making
Your stakeholders provide indispensable intelligence when it comes to effective decision-making, and stakeholder management would allow you to make use of corporate intelligence. If you use an effective stakeholder management system, it would allow your stakeholders to put in their responses that can be viewed by leaders and incorporated in decision-making in real-time.
