The Truth About Stakeholder Management

Stakeholder management is the process of managing stakeholders, primarily by taking into account the interests of stakeholders and determining either how best to align those stakeholders' interests with the interests of the company or determining how to change the company's actions and interests to match the stakeholders' interests. Stakeholder management is, in general, centered around trying to get stakeholders to provide assistance for achieving the goals of the company from the perspective that stakeholders wield influence over the actions of the company.

Stakeholder management is usually conducted via an overall strategy which has particular goals as its endpoint and numerous techniques in order to best achieve those goals with regard to the stakeholders.

Some of the techniques that might be involved in stakeholder management include stakeholder identification or analysis, stakeholder matrix, and stakeholder engagement. Stakeholder identification and analysis serve stakeholder management as these are the processes by which the stakeholders are determined. Stakeholder matrix involves determining positions of stakeholders based on exactly how much influence they might wield over the particular project involved in the stakeholder management.

Stakeholder engagement is the process by which leaders within the company might come to understand and learn more about the stakeholders through personal interaction. Stakeholder engagement is, to a certain extent, a technique separate from stakeholder management in that stakeholder engagement allows executives to come to understand the stakeholders and determine how to shape the company so that both the company and the stakeholders are served.

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