When organisations talk about stakeholder engagement, the conversation almost always turns outward: customers, communities, partners, regulators, political leaders and the public.
A significant amout of time and energy is invested in understanding their needs, building relationships and creating trust and rightly so, these stakeholders really matter but there is one stakeholder group that is often overlooked – our own people.
It’s an interesting paradox, organisations spend vast amounts of money trying to improve external reputation, customer satisfaction and stakeholder sentiment, yet sometimes neglect the very people responsible for delivering those outcomes in the first place.
The truth is simple: if we want to get it right externally, we must get it right internally first.
Bob Chapman, CEO of Barry-Wehmiller, spent years championing a remarkably different view of leadership. When he spoke, he rarely talked about products, services, market share or profitability. Instead, he spoke about people, care and responsibility and the profound privilege of leading human beings whose lives extend far beyond the workplace.
His message was both simple and challenging: the way we lead matters because the way people feel when they leave work each day follows them home. It affects families, relationships, confidence, wellbeing and communities and that perspective changes everything. It moves people from being resources to being human beings. It transforms engagement from a communication activity into a responsibility and perhaps most importantly, it forces us to ask different questions.
Not, “how do we get more from our people?” but “how do we create an environment where people can give their best?”
Too often, organisations become consumed by the metrics they can easily count:
- Quarterly targets
- Annual objectives
- Performance indicators
- Delivery milestones
These measures have much value, they help us understand progress and provide focus and accountability, but they are temporary. Every target eventually expires, every reporting period closes and every performance dashboard is replaced by another.
The numbers that dominate most projects will, in time, be forgotten but the impact we have on people will not. Long after a business case has been archived or a programme has been delivered, people remember how they were treated, they remember whether they felt valued and after the targets have been met, missed or exceeded, people remember whether their organisation genuinely cared and that is the legacy of meaningful internal engagement. Not the metrics displayed on a screen, but the experience left in the hearts and minds of people and this matters enormously.
Lets take the infrastructure industry where you’ll often hear stories about rail, roads, bridges, tunnels, assets and programmes. We celebrate engineering excellence, innovation and delivery and quite rightly, these achievements deserve recognition, but infrastructure is not the sole story, at the very heart of it all, are people.
- The rail and roads we build matter because of the lives they connect
- The projects we deliver matter because of the communities they serve
- The investment we make matters because of the opportunities it creates for others
None of it happens without the people who dedicate their time, expertise and energy to making it possible so perhaps we could spend a little less time talking about concrete and more time talking about the people who pour it. Reframe the message from celebrating an asset and more time celebrating those who deliver it, recognising those who build it and who ultimately benefits from it because people connect with people, they always have and always will.
This is where internal stakeholder engagement becomes more than an organisational activity; it becomes a strategic advantage. When people feel informed, valued, trusted and connected to something larger than themselves, they engage, collaborate and solve problems differently. They speak differently about their organisation, both inside and outside of work.
External reputation is often a reflection of internal experience and because of this, an organisations culture travels, people carry it into meetings, conversations, decisions and relationships. No communications campaign can sustainably compensate for a culture that people do not believe in yet a culture built on genuine care creates ambassadors that no marketing budget can buy.
Perhaps the challenge for organisations is not whether they measure engagement, but how they measure it which begs the question: “are we measuring the right things or simply the easiest things? Some of the most important outcomes of engagement are difficult to capture on a dashboard:
- Trust
- Belonging
- Psychological safety
- Pride
- Purpose
- Human connection
These are not soft measures; they are the conditions that make high performance possible. The organisations that thrive in the future may not be those with the most sophisticated strategies or the most impressive assets, they may be the organisations that understand a timeless truth: people create results, not the other way around.
When we genuinely care for our people, we create the conditions for extraordinary things to happen, not because people are told to perform but because they choose to and when that happens, stakeholder engagement stops being something we do, it becomes part of who we are because in the end, the stakeholder we often forget may be the one that matters most, the very people sitting beside us, those behind us, the people who will carry our culture forward long after the quarterly targets have disappeared and the people whose lives we touch every single day.
Rapport North 