Difficult Stakeholder Engagement Protocol
How to give sensitive feedback to power
Have you ever been in a situation where you wanted to give someone critical feedback but were concerned that he or she would not take it well and it would negatively affect how you work together? Some people shy away from giving direct feedback in general, which can be counterproductive and I will cover it in a future post. I mean here a situation, where it might be inappropriate or just unhelpful to criticise someone, for example your own boss.
Personally, I have done this poorly a few times, both with peers on the executive team and the CEOs I reported to (I was too eager to share my suggestions and didn’t articulate them in a diplomatic way). As I wished I had known the approach outlined below much earlier, I am making this my first framework on the Start-Up Leadership Toolkit Substack. With my coaching clients, who as founders, who have the privilege of not having bosses, I have seen this applied in difficult co-founder conversations and also external stakeholders.
When and how to use this framework
A critical stakeholder is behaving in way that is causing problems for you and/or the business
You can’t (or don’t want to) directly confront the issue or direct/demand a change of the behaviour.
This could be due to a balance of power, dependence or other factors
Originally this framework was developed for upward feedback to one’s direct manager
I have seen it successfully applied to board members, investors, clients, co-founders and indispensable employees (for coworkers there is a more direct ‘Accountability Protocol’ that I will share in the future)
Use this protocol to prepare for a conversation to influence the stakeholder into changing behaviour or finding a solution to the underlying problem.
Principles
Always treat the stakeholder in question as your #1 client
Ensure you don’t create extra work for the stakeholder (ok for coworkers)
Reframe from criticising the person or her behaviour to having a learning conversation (for yourself)
Shift from teacher to learner.
Protocol: Learning Conversation
Goal: learning, not teaching or fixing
1. Identify the ‘what’
Prepare for yourself:
Identify a business problem, that is connected to the stakeholder’s behaviour
Articulate the problem independently from the stakeholder
What do you want to learn?
Reach out to the stakeholder:
What is the conversation about? (topic)
Describe the business problem
(again: do not directly address the stakeholder’s behaviour)
2. Take responsibility
In the conversation, take ownership for the issue:
What can you do about the problem?
Contribute a solution
How would you like to help?
3. Ask a learning question
This needs to be a question that you genuinely don’t know the answer to
Do not try to win the argument or make a point, but actual seek to gain a new insight
You need to be genuinely interested in the topic
In most cases, following this approach, the stakeholder feels invited to doing his part in solving the issue and might either get himself to realise that he might need to change his behaviour, or together you find a way that it doesn’t matter.
Source (and recommended further reading/listening): https://essentialcomm.com/podcast/giving-upward-feedback/