Engagement as Part of Buy-in

Introduction

"...engagement is needed to build meaningful, trusting relationships with your stakeholders..."
Sandra Jerkovic, 2022

Stakeholders can include staff, communities that you operate within, customers, potential business partners, shareholders, etc.
"...building those meaningful, trusted relationships has many positive outcomes, whether that is building your reputation for giving insight into how people are feeling or reacting to your service, products or actions. Its move beyond 'tick the box' to being a foundation of good business..."
Sandra Jerkovic, 2022

Getting engagement early in any project will increase the chances of success. Yet many organisations avoid it, ie
"...They fear alerting......their stakeholders to what's happening in their business because they are fearful of a negative response, or interference to their timelines for their process..."
Sandra Jerkovic, 2022

However, if organisations are not honest, open and transparent and limit access to information to stakeholders, it can have disastrous results, ie
"...with authorities losing confidence in organisations, business leaders hitting the headlines and shareholders threatening revolt..."
Sandra Jerkovic, 2022

NB Need to be careful with buy-in that people don't become over-possessive, ie it is their project and they will defend it against all 'comers', even if the 'comers' are right!!!!

Four steps to successfully build stakeholder engagement

1. Build credibility (engage early and on things that matter; provide stakeholders with the information they need; be proactive and follow-up)

2. Be transparent (be open and honest with your intent; be clear about what stakeholders can be informed of; be willing to listen and adapt, ie be flexible; report publicly on outcomes)

3. Be inclusive (use a range of engagement techniques to ensure engagement is accessible and inclusive; ask stakeholders how they want to be engaged; develop constructive stakeholder relationships by understanding them and their needs, this provides a much better basis to build on when you need to have difficult conversations)

NB Excluding some stakeholders, who think they should be involved, can create significant problems, which you want to avoid)

4. Build trust (meet stakeholders on their terms; create opportunities to collaborate and build relationships; be available and responsive)

NB
"...People can still get upset. The difference between outrage when you haven't had a good process, and outrage where you have, is that people can at least understand the background and how you got to that point..."
Amy Hubbard as quoted by Sandra Jerkovic, 2022

Need to develop engagement with stakeholders so that you are ready to have dialogue with them when they want it.