A four-step framework for moving stakeholders from their current state to a desired outcome: identify key influencers and blockers, assess where they stand on a support scale, define an ambitious but realistic vision with a specific ask, and plan concrete actions to influence them. Real examples include a CFO who can block HR operations and the challenge of creating a compelling HR vision.
Chapters
So I'm going to walk through, uh, what is considered in the business when we talk about decision makers. We're going to talk about stakeholder management. Really? Stakeholder management. All 3 of you know how to do this. And guess what? All 4 of us don't do that when we need to do that, right? So I'm going to just walk through the process of that. And there's just, there's, uh, 4 steps of this, and I'm gonna walk through the steps. We can walk through any pieces of this. So we've already done the first one is identify key influencers. And, and I've made a list here of who those look like. They could be decision makers, the actual decision makers. They could be leader advisors. And the reason why I added that to the list, leader advisors, is because I've been playing the role of chief of staff to the dean of the business school. And all of a sudden, I became a power broker. And so many people go like, I need to talk to the dean. It's like, and the dean says, you need to talk to him first because I, you know, I can't get inundated with 115 things every day. So, who are the leader advisors? Um, who are the coaches, you know, for those decision makers? And then key influencers are raving fans, ambassadors. Um, uh, but also what I put on the list of key influencers are the blockers. Who can block your thing from happening? And I love Paul, yours with the CFO. If you got everybody all lathered up about doing this HR operations thing, guess who can like kill it in a millisecond? It's the CFO. So, you know, knowing that that's like one of your key people to start with. Awesome. So who are the blockers? And then, and I wrote down here under blockers, the active resistors, which I love the active resistors. They're the ones that go like, well, that's not going to work. You're like, great, let's— like, why don't you think that's going to work? The more difficult one are the passive resistors. Oh, okay, that's interesting. That wasn't like, I agree, let's do that. That's like, that's interesting. Oh my gosh, when I hear that, I'm like, oh, that's like That's like, I went on a date. How did you like her? Well, she was interesting, right? Oh, oh, you mean it was horrible, right? It's like, I didn't say that. It's just interesting, you know? So, you know, interesting, fine, you know. Oh, how, how did that go? Oh, it was fine. Oh, oh, oh, oh, you know, hated it. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So the pass— that— those are the words of passive resistance, Right? And you guys, you guys are good at that. You're professionals. But passive resistors are the tougher influencers to identify in your stakeholder management. Cool. So that's step 1, identify the key stakeholders, or the, yeah, key stakeholders. And then the classic stuff, um, assess point A. Where are they at? What are their beliefs? And, and there, and there's a sense of moving from, and Amber, I'm gonna go to the first piece that you said is like people, yeah, they have to be CEOs of their own wellness. Okay. Where are they moving from? They're stuck. They're, they, they victimy. Yeah. They're frustrated. They're fatigued. They're, you know, that's those kind of words of where are they now? What are they moving from? And we just had a, on another call this morning, we talked about that, defining the word miserable. And I have above my desk a definition of misery is wanting to be anywhere else than where I am. When I look at that, I go like, oh, I'm miserable. And I look up there and I was like, but I'm sitting in my house. My wife is downstairs. Okay. I am not. There are other places that are worse that I could be right now. So let's not be dramatic. I'm not miserable. I'm just fatigued. I'm upset or whatever, but I'm not miserable. But moving from— so where are people moving from? And this is really key for us with this too, you know, Nate, with yours too. It's like the frustration of where do men feel like They're playing second. Oh, what an unpopular, politically incorrect, you know, movement that you have. Nobody wants to hear that except the men who are frustrated that there are no rites of passage for, you know, boys to move through. There are no recognitions for what men are feeling right now. And so, so that's there. So where are they moving from? There's this. And Nate, your potential coiled, your coiled spring is there. It's so coiled. Yeah. You just have to like touch it and it's gonna go, you know, and you just have to figure out what those words are. Um, so, so point A, and then when I used to do change work, um, I'd ask what change stage are they in? Are we in a readiness stage? We're getting ready for something to change. Are we in an adoption stage? We're in the midst of the thing being implemented. And I love this definition of adoption for all 3 of you. Adoption is assuming ownership for something that's not naturally yours. Amber, I think it was on our project where I first said that, I think way back. But, and, and, and then I followed that up when I talked to people and there's a lot of ugly babies out there. That no one wants to adopt. So are they in the adoption phase, or are they in the business that's new usual? They're getting new rhythms up and running, or are they in a value realization stage? So I, I literally say, where are they at with this? And then what's their degree of support, -3 to +3? And it's important, you know, it's important to identify the influencers that are -3, -2. There's other people that are like, they're plus 3. Sometimes the plus 3s are as dangerous as the minus 3s. Let's go, let's do this. It's like, I hear the enthusiasm, but you gotta slow down some. Okay, so that's point A. And then of course, assess the point B. We talked about what's ambitiously possible. And, and when you think about this, if you put it too far out there, people give up. If you put it too close, it's too simple. You're there to stretch people just far enough. They're going, I'm in. So, Paul, talking about yours with HR operations, if you do a vision of HR that's like palm trees and sitting on a beach, people go like, whatever, I've heard people say that before. The promises made, right? But if you go like, you know, I really want to tweak this part of the recruiting process, they're going to be like, that's it? That's all we got? It's too close. You got to put something just out there. They go like, I really want that, but it's a stretch. How are we going to make that work? So when I think about point B, this is about articulating exactly the decision you need people, your decision makers to make. It's about their point B. Nate, how we were talking about, like, if you're asking me to do this, What's my point? What's my immediate— what's my first step? Basically, I want you to reach out to people. I want you to launch something in March. I want 15 people in a circle around a campfire. Can you make that work for me? It's like, oh, that's a big ask. Um, do you care about, you know, the men in your community? Are they talking like this? Do they have frustration? Say, yeah. How much do you care about them? A lot. Then let's go do this, right? You know, it's like, so, so Where do you want that stretch to be? And then the fourth one is what actions to fill the gap? What are the tactics? Implement and influence, right? I wrote down here, implement and influence. So identify stakeholders. Where's your point A? Where's your point B? And what actions you want people to take? I should have drafted a really cute diagram for this because I, and, and if you, if I had my whiteboard behind me, point A. Point B, line in between. And what I used to do with this, with when I went point A to point B, above the straight line, I do a little squiggly line, a little tilde above the line, because we all know on this call that the path between point A and point B is never a straight line. It always takes a circuitous path, but people hire us, people engage us because we're better at creating the straight lines than anybody else in terms of the things we're talking about. Right? Yeah. Good, good. Because you guys got to believe in yourselves in this. So this is good. So that's what I got. So I want you to take 30 seconds. What's the first step you're going to take from this call regarding your decision maker? 30 seconds.
