Stakeholders play a crucial role in public relations and the success of your organisation.
And developing and maintaining relationships with them can be challenging, particularly when time is short, budgets are tight, and resources are stretched.
So, how can you better manage those stakeholder relationships?
This was a question we explored in our latest masterclass for members of The Media Team Academy, where we were joined by Guy Esnouf, communications and stakeholder engagement director at Radioactive Waste Management.
And we began by exploring the difference between media relations and stakeholder management.
“I find it interesting we talk about media relations and stakeholder management,” Guy said.
“Why relations and why management? Why do we think of two groups of stakeholders differently? What does that imply about the way we deal with them?
“If you talk about the media, it tends to be someone you don’t know. It tends to be a quick response to a specific activity.
“But with stakeholders, many have known and followed your organisation for longer than you’ve been there. They know it better than you – warts and all.
“You need to engage them properly in an adult, one-to-one, level playing field way.”
Guy’s organisation manages Britain’s radioactive waste and aims to deliver a geological disposal facility that will see radioactive waste buried deep underground (between 200m and 1 km down) in solid rock.
The project will cost around £50 billion and requires digging as much length of tunnel as the London Underground.
And it needs local support in a vote. So, who are the main stakeholders?
“Firstly, it is our employees,” Guy said.
“We are doing a vital job that has to be done safely. Then it is the local communities – these people will need to vote. So, this might be the parish, district or county council, and local business groups.
“Then there are national interest groups – many people have not focused on what needs to happen with this waste, and we must start talking about it.
“There are lots of academics, unions, pressure groups, MPs, government departments and international bodies.”
So, how does the way Guy manages these stakeholders differ from how organisations interact with the media?
“These are long-term relations,” he said.
“If all goes well, we will start putting the waste underground in the late 2050s – that’s 35 years away.
“We need to work with that community over that whole time. That’s more than many people’s careers.
“So, we need to get to know people and understand them. For the community, we are working to create a vision for them. Do you want this? Does it fit part of your future?”
Isn’t this the same as building long-term relationships with journalists?
“You have to think about the frequency of turnover with journalists. If I need to manage relations with a particular council, the journalist involved on their local newspaper will turnover every 18 months.
“And that gets in the way of that long-term management. There’s a lot of turnover in national media.
“I know a lot of journalists and it is ‘what newspaper are you on this month?’.
“The journalists often know little of what you are saying. And the stakeholders know a lot.
“Journalists look at a story, and five minutes later they don’t know who you are. But stakeholders remember what you said five years ago.
“So, it is different worlds. Yes, they relate, and journalists are a subset of stakeholders overall. But it drives different behaviours from our teams.”
Does this mean the era of the communications generalist is over, as Simon Baugh, the chief executive of the Government Communication Service, has suggested?
Guy said: “What we do in our roles is essential for the success of our organisation. We need experts managing it.
“I think of it as a decathlete versus an Olympic specialist. The decathlete does the same sports as the 1,500m runner and the shot putter. But they require different training and body shapes, and the decathlete can’t do them as well as the individual specialists.
“So, what Simon is getting at is that we cannot accept mediocrity. We have to accept, pay for and support perfection or excellence.
“The key management challenge in smaller teams is whether you do five things ok or choose the two or three you do excellently.”
Stakeholder models and mapping can make management easier and create an understanding of the groups that can influence your project and how they are connected.
They can give the process structure and help identify priorities.
The salience model categorises and prioritises stakeholders and identifies their needs.
Dominant stakeholders:
“These are the people who have a lot of power and legitimacy,” Guy said.
“A regulator is an example of this. We’ve all seen energy companies being allowed to fit pre-payment metres for some customers. Who said that? Ofgem, the regulator.
“They have been shaping the energy retail business more and more actively over time.
“Another important one is your board – they can shape what you do.”
Dangerous stakeholders:
Guy said: “These are outside the process and can stop what you do.
“Think about a protest or lobby group.”
Dependent stakeholders:
“These are interesting because they don’t have any power,” Guy said.
“It could be residents. If you are a utility company and need to dig up roads, damaging local businesses. The dependent stakeholder will try to do something about that, such as complaining to the press. And that press coverage is then seen by the board and the regulator.
“So, they are shaming you into something.”
Definitive:
This is where power, urgency and legitimacy converge.
He said: “These have it all.
“The most fundamental one is your boss. They have the right to sack you.”
Non-stakeholders:
These are people who could be a stakeholder in the future.
“If you are in business A and are thinking of going into A1 or A2, understand them,” Guy said.
“You may have annoyed or ignored them in the past, but now you need to understand them.
“This is a bit of lateral, horizon scanning – who might be coming down the road?”
These different stakeholder groups then need to be put together on a map, looking at their influence, interest and impact.
Influence:
“These are the ones that can shape what you do and your market,” Guy said.
“For example, what degree of influence does a local authority have over your business?
“Planning, roads and perhaps not much else unless you provide services to them.”
Interest:
Guy said: “Do these people really care about what you do? Or do they care that you don’t give them a problem?
Impact:
Guy said: “If you please them, how does that help you? If you annoy them, how does that impact you?”
This framework helps identify those you need to keep satisfied, closely manage, keep informed and monitor.
“If they are low interest and low influence, then you just need to monitor what they say,” Guy said.
“Those you need to keep satisfied need regular updates so they know what you are doing, and you are doing it in a way they would want.
“The key ones are those you need to manage closely. And the difficulty here is whether your boss agrees they are the ones you need to manage closely.”
Guy also maps his stakeholders under these three categories.
“We manage power differently to urgency,” he said.
“Urgency is probably where you would put the journalists. Your regulator would go under legitimacy and power.
“Thinking about where these different stakeholders sit changes how you work with them.”
To explore this further, Guy guided members of The Media Team Academy through some recent high-profile stories.
“One of my worries about stakeholder management and planning is that we spend all the time with the plan, present it to the board and then it goes into a huge file and is forgotten about,” he said.
“So, planning is one thing, and implementation is another. And it doesn’t always go well.”
One of the world’s biggest beer brands found itself in crisis media management mode after working with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney – and then appearing to back down following a huge backlash.
“I lived in the US for 14 years, and Bud Light is part of the culture, particularly in right-wing media,” Guy said.
“If you’ve been following the culture wars that have been going on, this was stepping on a cultural landmine.
“It either did it deliberately or accidentally, and I’m not sure which is worse.
“Let’s say they did it deliberately because they want to change how people see them. That’s laudable. But I think they went from A to Z too fast.
“They didn’t bring their customers and stakeholders with them. There was no engagement or indication Bud Light wanted to change who it was and how it was seen.
“If it was deliberate, it is a change that needed to be made over time, not overnight.
“If it was accidental, was an internal department so blind to the outside world that it saw an influencer with 10m followers and thought that was good? I don’t think 10m is an impressive number for a business that size.”
The ferry company made headlines around the world after sacking 800 employees through a video message.
It resulted in the company facing large protests and being accused of “gangster practice”.
“This is an organisation abusing its employees,” Guy said.
“And I feel for the comms teams who probably had little choice but to do this.
“But it is a sign of bad management. When a company has to make a shock announcement like this, it shows it wasn’t watching its finances. It wasn’t giving its employees and customers the respect they need.
“And that’s why it was criticised for how it did it.
“I was with npower, which doesn’t exist anymore. It had a lot of customer and financial problems and lost senior leaders.
“The new chief executive worked with us in the comms team to say, ‘how do we manage this?’.
“And we said we’ve got to be transparent with our people, let them know where we are, what the main trends and problems are and what we are doing about it.
“And we created a dashboard we put out every month for 42 successive months.
“We couldn’t turn the company around. And thousands of people lost their jobs. But we monitored employee satisfaction with the company, and it went up.
“Why? Because everyone knew we were being transparent.”
Are there any good examples of stakeholder management to explore alongside those of how not to do it?
“It is hard to come up with good examples because ‘good’ doesn’t get reported.
“Good stakeholder management means you get to do what you wanted to do.
“Maybe a controversial ‘good’ example – but one we are all aware of - is covid lockdowns.
“We all know how we were managed during covid. We remember those daily updates.
“That was stakeholder management to get us to agree to stay at home. That was difficult, and if you had suggested five years ago a government might be able to do that, I think we would have said no.
“But it did.
“And it worked until it stopped working.”
There is increasing pressure for organisations to get involved in political and social issues.
How does that sit with stakeholder management?
“We talked earlier about the geographical disposal project,” Guy said.
“We describe it as the biggest environmental protection project in Europe.
“But we don’t paint ourselves green because we are working with nuclear waste.
“So, this is where the communications team needs to be able to see across and have a good enough relationship with the people who make the decisions to say, ‘do we stack up there?’.
“If you are talking about lockdowns, are you having private parties?
“If it follows through, you can take that high ground. But it needs to be a serious conversation.”
Guy said: “You don’t want to alienate stakeholders. Businesses want to make money, and organisations want to serve their communities.
“So, you don’t want to do anything that gets in the way of that aim.
“But sometimes you need to pick the right enemies because it gets you noticed by powerful and influential friends.
“Do it deliberately, and don’t expect the sales and marketing team to think the same way.”
Can you get everyone together to ensure the message is aligned?
“My style is not to get everyone together,” he added. “I prefer to do it in small groups and explain what we want to do.
“Once that work has been completed, you can present it as ‘this is what we have agreed’.”
Comms teams are all different.
Some will have limited resources. How can they manage stakeholder communication?
“I’ve been there,” Guy said.
“When I worked for Microsoft, I was managing its legal issues worldwide, and I had a team of three.
“We needed to say what mattered most to the company. It might not have been what was most interesting to me.
“We managed the issues in a top down priority order. And the ones that were at the bottom, I was aware of and monitored, but couldn’t do much else.
“You need the boss of your organisation to be confident in you and what you do.
“Pick the issues that matter and focus on them. There’s no point focusing on the issue affecting your foot if another one is threatening your head.”
Have shared lists/SRMS (stakeholder relationship management system)
Guy said: “We talked about the need to be across what is happening.
“I have a relationship management system that is part of my customer management system. I live and breathe it.
“I have it as a shortcut on my screen so I can click on it and access it straight away.
“Without a good system, it is hard to do the job.”
Once you have this in place, collect the right data and keep it clean.
Form alliances with groups that can help you disseminate and share your messages
Guy said: “I think this is not explored enough.
“I once went to my boss and said, ‘I cannot manage this key issue – I need twice the team and budget’.
“When he said no, I asked if I could form an alliance with another company and do it together.
“He agreed. So, we worked with another powerful company on a topic and divided the workforce and budget. And it meant I could do much more.”
Salience models
“Know who matters and why they matter. So, if they ring at 11.30, I know if I need to reply by 11.40 or can wait until Tuesday week.
“If you don’t have this understanding, you end up doing everything for everybody and burning out.
“All stakeholders are equal, but some are more equal than others.”
Well-practised and documented grievance management policy
“Employees can create so many problems,” Guy said.
“So, we must be linked in with how we treat our people.
“You can’t take a societal issue if you don’t respect your people.”
Other departments
Guy said: “Work with marketing, HR, and finance. Alliances and working across the organisation should be in our job description.
“We need to build internal and external alliances. Those are the way to get around limited budgets.”
Don’t forget you can catch up with this masterclass, and all the previous ones, in the video library section of The Media Team Academy hub.
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