8 Powerful Questions You Need to Ask Before Stakeholder Engagement

Stakeholder engagement is one of the more critical aspects of leadership. Stakeholders can be anyone from your front line employees to suppliers to business partners, and your organization’s relationship with them is dynamic and can change over time.

There are many advantages to identifying and getting to know your stakeholders, and even more disadvantages to not engaging with them. A failure to understand their needs can lead to blind spots for managers and executives, which can have disastrous effects, such as low employee morale or a dismal bottom line.

On the other hand, effective engagement can result in increased productivity and stronger financials. We can also use research-based strategies to notice such blind spots so we can overcome them.

Identifying Your Key Influencers

While you might be inclined to start engaging with all the stakeholders in your organization immediately, it would be more practical to focus on the relationships that matter the most. This means sitting down with your team, coming up with a list of all stakeholders, and then whittling down this list to the people who have the most impact on your organization — these are your key influencers. Even though it might be tempting to address the concerns of all…