Stakeholder Engagement and Roles in Strategic Planning:
Organizations seek to develop collaborative support for new strategies and roadmap to exploit new trends to identify and establish, new opportunities through the use of meaningful stakeholder engagement. Though it is not linear rather iterative process in which an organization learns and improves its ability to perform meaningful stakeholder engagement, developing relationships is a mutual respect in place of one-off consultations. The early engagement is beneficial to outline the likely opportunities, risks, conflicts and constrains within the organization, and reinforce partnership.
As the organizational leader, the following aspects might be considered in terms of stakeholder management to establish an engagement process which will promote cross-cultural relationship and fostering widespread habit of tolerance and compromise within the organization built on common values and vision.
Internal alignment of the concerns in expectations, roles and outcomes: This stream of action will help to appreciate a multitude of viewpoints, pressures and business objectives the organization has.
Building trust with stakeholders: Building the level of trust in relationship aided by understanding their viewpoints or motivations through avoiding not be too quick to judge.
Building transparent environment: recognizing and articulating the tone of participation will play a pivotal path to encourage viewpoints from across the population spectrum
Allow representatives from all your stakeholders: This includes gender, race, age, class, education or religion attributable to diversified opinions flow.
Organization's culture: This will have an impact on how stakeholder engagement occurs (i.e. autonomy for local adaption and local relevance).Therefore assessing its culture is important for identifying enablers and barriers to your stakeholder engagement activities.
Assessing past non-productive engagement behavior will help the organization to learn from past experiences. It is important to collate this information from both the organization and stakeholder viewpoints.
Recognize the interplay the influences between leadership, and capabilities in creating strategies, processes and procedures.
Perform effective communication.
References:
1. Bryson, J. M. (2011). Strategic planning for public and nonprofit organizations: A guide to strengthening and sustaining organizational achievement (4th ed.). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
2. Raj Sharma. (n.d). The six principles of stakeholder engagement. Retrieved from http://www.censeoconsulting.com/media/pnc/2/media.12.pdf