The power interest grid in practice: a worked example and three common mistakes

What is the power interest grid?

The power interest grid, also known as Mendelow's matrix, is a strategic management tool widely used to assess the stakeholders in a change management project. A stakeholder is anyone affected by the change or able to affect it: team members, senior leaders, other departments, and sometimes customers, suppliers, or regulators.

The grid asks two questions about each stakeholder. (1) How much power do they have over the outcome, whether through formal authority, control of budgets or resources, expertise, or their network? (2) How much interest do they have in it, based on how far the change touches their work, their team, or their targets?

The answers place each stakeholder in one of four quadrants: (1) manage closely, (2) keep satisfied, (3) keep informed, or (4) monitor. Our free power interest grid tool explains each quadrant in detail and lets you map your own stakeholders.

The value of the grid is its simplicity. Categorising stakeholders by power and interest gives you an at-a-glance view of who needs your attention, so you can focus your time where it counts. Revisited as the project moves on, it also shows you when someone's position is shifting, before it becomes a problem.

Why the power interest grid is harder than it looks

Knowing the four quadrants is the easy part. Placing real people in them is harder. Job titles mislead, interest shifts as a project moves on, and the people who matter most at the start are not always the ones who matter most at go-live.

This article works through a stakeholder map for a typical change project, then sets out three mistakes we see often, with practical takeaways you can use on your own work. To follow along, open the tool in another tab and map your own stakeholders as you read.

A worked example: rolling out a new CRM system

Imagine you are leading the move from spreadsheets and an ageing database to a new customer relationship management (CRM) system across a 200-person sales and service organisation. Here is how a first pass at the grid might look, as a worked Mendelow matrix example you can adapt to your own project.

Manage closely (high power, high interest)

• Head of sales: owns the targets the system is meant to improve, and her team will use it every day
• Project sponsor: holds the budget and has staked their credibility on a successful launch

Keep satisfied (high power, low interest)

• Finance director: signs off the licence costs, but has little interest in how the system works
• IT director: controls integration resources, though the CRM is one of many projects on his list

Keep informed (low power, high interest)

• Sales and service teams: their daily work changes most, but they did not choose the system
• Sales administrators: they know where the existing data is messy, which makes them invaluable during migration

Monitor (low power, low interest)

• Facilities team: involved only if training rooms need booking
• Marketing team: a future user of the data, but not part of the first phase

Read off the strategies and a plan starts to form. The head of sales and the sponsor are consulted before decisions are made. The finance director gets a short monthly summary on cost and timing, not the project log. The sales teams get regular updates and a genuine channel for concerns. Facilities and marketing hear about it in general updates.

That is a reasonable first map. The trouble is that it was built from an organisation chart, and the next three sections show where it is most likely to go wrong.

Mistake one: mapping job titles, not people

Formal authority is easy to see. Informal power is not, and it often decides whether change sticks. In our example, the sales administrators sit in 'keep informed'. But if one of them is a long-serving colleague the whole sales floor turns to for help, her view of the new system will spread faster than any announcement. Her real power is far higher than her grade suggests.

The reverse also happens. A senior title can carry less weight on a particular project than it appears, for example when a director is new in post or about to move on.

Practical takeaway:

• Place people based on what they have actually done, not where they sit on the chart
• Ask who people go to when they are unsure, and look for names that do not appear on the chart at all
• Sense-check your map with someone who has worked in the team longer than you

Mistake two: treating the map as finished

Interest is the least stable part of the grid. It tends to rise sharply when a change reaches someone's desk. In the CRM example, the finance director has little interest at the planning stage. Three months in, an overrun on integration costs or a complaint from the payroll team about commission data could move her into 'manage closely' almost overnight. If she is still receiving only the monthly summary when that happens, she is likely to feel blindsided.

The same is true further down the grid. The marketing team, parked in 'monitor', becomes very interested the moment it learns the customer data it relies on is being restructured.

Practical takeaway:

• Revisit the grid at each project milestone, not just at kick-off
• Note what could raise each stakeholder's interest, such as costs, deadlines, or data they rely on, and watch for it
• Pay particular attention to anyone heading towards 'manage closely'

Mistake three: under-investing in 'keep informed'

Under time pressure, it is tempting to give the 'keep informed' group a regular update and move on. Yet these are usually the people most affected by the change, and they know how the work really gets done.

Individually they may have little power. Together, they can gain it quickly. If the sales teams decide the new CRM slows them down, their complaints will reach the head of sales, who was a supporter but may start to have doubts. Equally, if they feel listened to, they become your best early warning system and your most credible advocates.

Practical takeaway:

• Give this group a way to raise concerns, not just a channel to receive updates
• Use their knowledge early, for example by involving sales administrators in planning the data migration
• Treat a cluster of similar complaints as a sign that the group's power is rising

Pair it with attitude

The grid tells you how much attention each stakeholder needs. It does not tell you whether they support the change. In the CRM example, the IT director and the finance director sit in the same quadrant, but one may be quietly enthusiastic and the other sceptical about the cost. They need very different conversations.

For that second dimension, use our stakeholder map, which plots influence against attitude. Used together, the two tools give you a fuller picture of who to engage, how, and how often. For a broader look at engaging stakeholders through change, read our change leadership and stakeholder management playbook.

Practising it before it counts

Much of what makes stakeholder mapping hard only shows up once a project is under way, when real people respond in ways the map did not predict. That is difficult to learn from a slide.

In Influence, our change management simulation, teams lead a nine-week change project and have to win support from stakeholders who hold both formal authority and social influence. They decide who to engage, when, and how, and then see the consequences play out. Because it happens in a simulation, a misjudged stakeholder is a lesson rather than a lost project, which is why psychological safety matters so much in this kind of learning.

Wrapping up

The power interest grid is quick to draw and easy to get slightly wrong. To recap the three ideas we have explored:

• Map people, not job titles; informal power is often what decides whether change sticks
• Treat the map as a living document; interest can rise overnight when a change reaches someone's desk
• Invest in the 'keep informed' group; they are most affected by the change and can gain power quickly

To map your own stakeholders, try our free power interest grid tool, with no registration. And if you want your managers to practise winning support for change under realistic pressure, take a look at Influence.

Further reading

Our free learning tools include the power interest grid and stakeholder map alongside other browser-based apps for leaders and teams, and our micro simulations let you practise in just two to five minutes.