Stakeholder map

How the stakeholder map works

Before a change programme starts, work out who it depends on. Add each stakeholder, place them by how much influence they hold and how they feel about the programme, and mark how strong your relationship with them is today.

The grid uses two axes, and a third dimension you can record alongside them.

Influence

Influence comes in two forms, and the strongest stakeholders have both:

• Organisational influence: power from formal authority, such as someone's position or budget
• Social influence: power from informal authority, usually a combination of reputation and the reach of someone's network

A well-regarded expert with no authority, or someone with a wide circle but little standing, has one without the other. Those people matter, but they are not the ones who will carry a programme.

Attitude

Place each person as a supporter, neutral, or opponent. Judge their attitude towards the programme, not towards you. Conflating the two is the most common mistake people make with this exercise, and it produces a map that flatters your relationships and misreads the politics.

Relationship

Record your own relationship with each stakeholder as strong, neutral or unknown, or weak. This is what turns the map from a diagram into a plan, because it tells you not just who to influence but who is realistically able to do it.

Where to spend your effort

The map answers three questions: who you need to influence, in what way, and in what order.

• High influence and supportive: your platform. Build around them, and keep nurturing them, because enthusiasm wanes when it is taken for granted
• High influence and opposed: do not ignore them. High-profile opponents derail programmes precisely because they are uncomfortable to approach
• High influence and neutral: usually the best return on your time, and the group most often overlooked
• Low influence: monitor, and remember that influence changes as a programme progresses

Match the intervention to the attitude. Asking an opponent to become a champion tends to fail; asking their opinion tends not to.

Using the stakeholder map in a session

Build the map as a group rather than alone. Where two people place the same stakeholder differently, that disagreement is usually the most valuable output of the session, because it means the programme is working from two incompatible pictures of the organisation.

Revisit it. A stakeholder map built at kick-off and never opened again is a document; one revised at each checkpoint is a tool.

Nothing is sent anywhere and nothing is stored on our side, which matters when the map names real colleagues and records what you think of their attitude.

For the background to the technique, read our guide to stakeholder analysis for change management projects. The map is also used inside our Influence change management simulation and our Cohesion high-performing teams simulation.