Stakeholder Engagement: We Need More in 2024

An illustration of connected people communicating

Stakeholder Engagement: We Need More in 2024

In 2024, the need for engaged supporters is real. As business leaders, we must work harder than ever for a healthy, engaged stakeholder community. In particular, this rings true when it comes to the design and development of new products and services. For example, the massive investment in high speed rail in the UK (HS2) was recently shelved citing economic woes. It also suffered from a critical lack of public support for the high speed rail solution. Even in less spectacular cases, many businesses face stakeholders who have more reach through social media today than ever before. It is scary to think that one angry customer could sink a new product launch before it even reaches the market. 

 

However, this is not a tale of powerlessness. Rather, it is the opposite. It is a quest for new and better tools to help us manage and engage our customers, consumers, users, partners, and internal teams. As you know, we live in a networked world of partnerships, data sharing, integrated technologies, and shared innovation. Great stakeholder management is not a destination, but a journey that simply continues. And, there are no single answers that help us solve for unhappy or for happy stakeholders. We must seek to balance priorities and communicate our rationale clearly.  

 

The purpose of healthy stakeholder engagement in an innovation program is to build mutually beneficial, long-term relationships with those who are affected by, or who can affect, the big ideas. And, the more effectively our stakeholders engage, the more able and likely they are to address issues important to customers. Ultimately, this leads us to realizing higher levels of trust and acceptance.

Leadership Competencies for Healthy Stakeholder Engagement

There are three key competencies that we look for in leaders engaging stakeholders:

First, we look for a discovery mindset. This involves the ability for our leaders to create, recognize, elaborate, and articulate the problems that need to be solved and the opportunities that can be explored.

Second, we must have an incubation capability. This is also known as the ability for our business leaders to evolve the opportunity into hypotheses and experiments that can be reliably tested for desirability, feasibility, and viability. 

And lastly, we look for an acceleration orientation, or the ability to scale. Here, we look to leaders who will seek to ramp up the new solution to stand on its own, so it can successfully compete and deliver on its promises.

Consider the graphic below, which demonstrates which leadership focus will be required in order for you to effectively communicate with and encourage your stakeholders.

Five Tenets of Healthy Stakeholder Engagements

So, now that you know what leaders need when engaging stakeholders, how do you empower stakeholders to take action? All stakeholders, regardless of their power and influence over the initiative, should be encouraged to act in their appropriate role. Furthermore, good stakeholder-ship takes practice, and a seasoned innovation leader must help to foster the right level of engagement. We call this activating.

Activating will be successful, meaningful, and impactful only when it comes as a result of healthy stakeholder engagement. And how do you do that? I’m glad you asked! Here are five key tenets of healthy stakeholder engagement you can keep at the forefront:

  • It is strategic. We keep our engagement outcomes-based, answering the “why?.”  Questions of impact, risk, and long-term objectives should inform engagement priorities and be informed by stakeholder perspectives.


  • It is dialogue-based. Additionally, stakeholder engagement should create opportunities for a two-way discussion and for stakeholders to input into decisions that affect their lives.


  • It is proactive. We maintain the key tenet that anticipatory and regular communication is critical, allowing space for stakeholders to express any concerns and for the team to pivot accordingly.


  • It is clear and direct. In addition, we ensure that engagement is underpinned by openness and honesty about any potential adverse impacts and include explanations of who may be affected, when, and how.


  • And, it is inclusive. Lastly, we engage with all affected stakeholders, including vulnerable groups, by using tailored engagement approaches.

 

Conclusion

In conclusion, a new year brings a new chance to reset and regroup. As you seek to push forward on new resolutions and new products, ensure you closely examine the general health and wellbeing of your business’ internal and external stakeholders. They are arguably your most critical corporate assets. By fostering transparent communication and active involvement in decision-making, addressing stakeholder needs and concerns, and adopting a long-term perspective, you can build and maintain robust relationships with stakeholders that are healthy and thriving. And that will help keep your business healthy and thriving too. 

A Call to Action

Want to learn more about healthy stakeholder engagement and how Teaming Worldwide can help your company take the guesswork out of innovation? Visit teamingworldwide.com/innovation to schedule a discovery call or email hello@teamingworldwide.com for more info.

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Intentional Innovation® is a commercially-proven innovation operating system designed to simplify and implement higher-performing, longer-lasting solutions that drive market disruption, new revenue, and deeper customer engagement.

Ready to learn more about Intentional Innovation® and how Teaming Worldwide can help you solve your business’s most pressing innovation pain points? Let’s connect. Visit www.teamingworldwide.com/innovation to schedule a discovery call or email hello@teamingworldwide.com.

An Innovation Leader’s Quest for Credibility

An Innovation Leader's Quest for Credibility

Notes from the Field

In a recent one-day workshop with a group of healthcare executives, the frustration arose that innovation leaders (i.e., those whose portfolio covers innovative investments) must fight for the credibility of the innovation program in ways that their counterparts do not need to. These innovation leaders felt their existence was constantly being called into question, even today, when innovation leadership is needed more than ever in healthcare.  

This exchange got me thinking about how important credibility is to a leader whose charge is to innovate. The act of creating the next generation of products and services involves making promises that are inherently risky. So when we are making a series of risky bets in new technologies and solutions, our stakeholders sometimes conflate these individual risks with the overall innovation program. 

Moreover, an organizational leader must possess a high degree of credibility already in order to operate effectively. Yet, the leader’s individual credibility is not always extended to the innovation function. So there is a disparity – a tremor in the force that must be continuously addressed for innovation to excel. We must evolve our stakeholders capacity for taking risks and making big bets.

An innovation leader would do well to have methods and tools for reinforcing the essential promise of innovation. 

Innovation comes in many different forms, however the leadership function at the heart tends to have golden threads across all innovation programs. As we go about innovating new and inventive ways to grow the business, four particular leadership practices may be useful: 

 

  • Set the Vision. In the messy work of a typical innovation program, we see pivots and fast failures, and early partnerships come and go, and strange new business models. We need a compelling, articulate vision of the future that overrides the individual portfolios. 
  • Engage Others. The leader should be meeting with teams, learning and hearing many perspectives. Engagement is a multi-sided game, so the leader needs great EQ to do this effectively.  Leadership begins and ends with people – and therefore engagement is the first task. 
  • Be A Sense Maker. Innovation leaders are storytellers and sense makers. How does AI fit into the future of our organization? How will we work with robots in the future? These questions should be storylines that evolve over time in order to form innovation narratives to help other leaders and teams make sense of the wide open future.   
  • Manage Creativity. We need deeply creative teams that can blow up the assumptions of today’s business and reformulate new models for tomorrow. But how do we do this without causing panic? Begin by building firewalls around the creative process – make it safe for stakeholders to engage in a full throated creative agenda. But also ensure that that process has a conclusion and the results are filtered through analytical tools like risk management.
A leader’s stock-in-trade is credibility.

Without it, she has no ability to build trust, influence others, or create momentum.  Leading an innovation program is a potential cred-killer, so the leader must take care to position herself accordingly.  

Want to talk more about leadership and innovation?

Join us over in our LinkedIn Community: Intentional Innovation where we explore a wide range of topics around modern innovation practices and work together to define The Future of New.

You may also enjoy this related article: A Quick Reflection on Grit.