Picture this, a project team spends 18 months developing a proposal, they commission studies, gather evidence, build business cases, review options, challenge assumptions and refine plans and by the time the proposal reaches stakeholders, the team knows it intimately.
They have lived, debated and accepted it, then they walk into a meeting and share the proposal with stakeholders for the very first time and something unexpected happens, stakeholders don’t react with the same enthusiasm.
Questions emerge, concerns surface and objections appear and the project team leaves frustrated.
“We explained it clearly”
“We shared the evidence”
“We answered the questions”
Yet despite all of this, support remains elusive, and the problem isn’t usually the quality of the proposal, the problem is that the project team and the stakeholders are standing in different places on the same journey.
The team has had 18 months to process the change yet stakeholders have had 20 minutes and therein lies one of the most important lessons in stakeholder engagement:
- Change doesn’t happen when we announce it
- Change happens when people emotionally accept it
We experience change emotionally before we process it rationally
Most organisations approach change as a logical exercise, they provide information, share the evidence, explain the benefits and answer the questions but the assumption is simple, if people understand the facts, they will support the change but human beings don’t work that way:
- Before we analyse information, we react to it
- Before we evaluate risk, we feel it
- Before we embrace change, we assess what it might mean for us
This isn’t resistance, it’s human nature and when stakeholders hear about a proposed change, their first thoughts are rarely technical, they’re personal and they have an array of questions that they ask themselves:
- What does this mean for me?
- What does this mean for my team?
- What am I gaining?
- What am I losing?
- What don’t I know yet?
These questions form the foundation of every stakeholder response and unless we understand them, we risk engaging with people’s words while missing the emotions driving them.
The emotional stages of stakeholder engagement
Whether we’re engaging communities, partners, customers, elected officials or colleagues, there are often recognisable emotional stages that emerge, not because people follow a formula, but because people are people.
The first stage is often surprise, even when change has been anticipated, confirmation creates disruption. Something familiar may be about to become unfamiliar, something predictable may become uncertain and uncertainty has a powerful effect on human behaviour.
The brain immediately starts searching for information that helps restore a sense of control and that’s why stakeholders often ask questions quickly, not because they are challenging the proposal but because they are trying to orient themselves.
Then comes assessment where people begin interpreting the change through the lens of their own experiences and every stakeholder asks a slightly different question:
- An operations manager sees operational risk
- A community representative sees local impact
- A senior leader sees organisational implications
- A partner organisation sees strategic consequences
The same proposal, different perspectives, concerns, and realities and this is why effective engagement is never about delivering a single message. It is about understanding the perspective through which that message will be received.
Resistance is often a signal, not a barrier
One of the most misunderstood moments in stakeholder engagement is resistance and many organisations treat resistance as something to overcome, manage and minimise but what if resistance is actually useful? Information that can be used as an advantage? When stakeholders push back, they are often revealing something important:
- A risk they can see
- A consequence they fear
- A value they want to protect
- A concern they believe has not yet been considered
Resistance is often evidence that people care, after all, indifference rarely creates objections because engaged people object, invested people challenge and people who care about an outcome want to influence it. The role of stakeholder engagement is not to eliminate resistance, the role is to understand what is creating it because when we understand the concern, we can engage with the concern but when we only engage with the objection, we stay at the surface.
The transition few people notice
There is a subtle moment that occurs during successful engagement. A stakeholder stops asking: “Why is this happening?” and starts asking: “How would this work?” It’s easy to miss but it matters, because it signals a psychological shift. The stakeholder is no longer focused exclusively on the existence of the change.
They are beginning to explore the future, they’re imagining possibilities, testing assumptions, considering options and thinking about solutions because this is where collaboration becomes possible, not because the stakeholder has been persuaded but because they have moved from reaction to exploration and people rarely make that transition because they received another presentation, they make that transition because they felt heard.
The most valuable skill is often the quietest
When people think about stakeholder engagement, they often think about communication as presenting, facilitating, influencing or explaining yet some of the most effective engagement professionals spend a surprising amount of time doing something else, and that’s observing:
- They notice who speaks first in a meeting
- They notice who people look towards before sharing an opinion
- They notice which questions generate energy and which create silence
- They notice what stakeholders talk about before the meeting starts and after it ends
- They pay attention to what is not being said
Because human behaviour leaves clues, and those clues help us understand where people are emotionally. The stakeholder who needs reassurance requires a different conversation from the stakeholder who wants involvement and the stakeholder who feels uncertain requires a different approach from the stakeholder who feels excluded and observation helps us recognise the difference.
Stakeholder engagement is the business of human behaviour
At its heart, stakeholder engagement isn’t really about communications which is simply one of the tools in the comms toolkit but what stakeholder engagement really is, is the study of real people:
- How they interpret change
- How they perceive risk
- How they build trust
- How they make decisions
- How they respond when certainty disappears
The most successful engagement professionals understand that every project has two journeys, the one of a technical journey including the programme, milestones, deliverables and the outputs and then there is the human journey, the emotions, perceptions, concerns, relationships and trust.
Projects are delivered through the first journey but they are accepted through the second and when we recognise the emotional stages stakeholders move through when facing change, something important happens.
We stop trying to move people through a process and instead, we start helping people navigate a transition because change isn’t ultimately about plans, projects or programmes, it’s all about people and people don’t need to be managed through change, they need to be understood.
Rapport North 