For many, the daily grind of work can get us stuck on a treadmill of dealing with the next, and the next, and the next. Enter the world of community and stakeholder engagement and this can be even more so.
At times, internal and external needs can appear to be at cross purposes, and it feels like a Groundhog Day of circular conversations.
Jim Collins, author of “Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap and Others Don’t”, offers an interesting analogy in his research into super successful companies that could easily be applied to community and stakeholder engagement.
His analogy is that, regardless of how cunning the fox is, the hedgehog has one simple but effective form of defence against him: it curls into a ball and fans its spikes. No matter how many times the fox might try to penetrate this defence, he is unsuccessful every time.
Collins suggests that this is the same for successful organisations, in which those who are good at one or two core things hold steady, regardless of what the world throws at them. Notably, this was not just about knowing what keeps an organisation financially steady, but also about knowing what people in the organisation love doing.
So, what might the community and stakeholder engagement hedgehog be? What are the one or two core principles, that regardless of what gets thrown at us, will hold things steady?
It’s about relationships, not transactions
Yes, there are things to talk about, plans to be developed, and options to be refined, but unless there is a positive relationship, those conversations will be more tense than they need to be.
We are all far more flexible and even willing to allow others to make decisions on our behalf, when there is a relationship to back that up. Likewise, we are more critical, and can be harder to satisfy, if that foundation is not there.
Some people grumble about the way other people react, but the mature question to ask is: “What kind of relationship have I built?”
Context is everything
Organisations love nice, neat, lineal and repeatable processes, but the reality is that people are very rarely neat or lineal in their behaviour or thinking. Likewise, the needs of one stakeholder or group is not the same as another’s.
With literally hundreds of methods to engage, there is no “one size fits all” and there is a real risk that organisations become fixated on a narrow band of engagement options, usually because these are the methods that suit them.
Without knowing the context of those you are trying to engage (their vision, values and constraints) organisations run the risk of being seen as tone deaf to those they are wanting to engage with.
Sometimes stakeholders can be very foxy in how they manoeuvre, but trying to outsmart them can tie us up in knots.
Know your context (vision, values and constraints), know their context and if you are willing to explore the alignment of these, then you will be able to navigate 80% of the engagement challenges you will face.
The rest comes down to how well you manage the remaining 20% of engagement challenges that usually involve foxy stakeholders who were never seeking alignment anyway.
"To avoid Groundhog Days, you need to build relationships and understand the context."
The Engagement Hedgehog
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