Are We All Stakeholder Managers Now?

Rhion Jones wrote this note to set up the first session of The Stakeholder Engagement Room: Live, held on Monday 5 October 2026. Below it are the main points from the session, and the recording is free to watch, with no registration needed.

We are being provocative, but stakeholder theory is still evolving, and the way we interface with our ‘stakeholders’, as individuals and as organisations, is changing rapidly.

A career in its own right

Tens of thousands of people have the word ‘stakeholder’ in their job titles. They are found in the private, public and voluntary sectors. There are several thousand vacancies for such roles in the UK at any one time. It’s a career choice with definite prospects!

Stakeholder work without the job title

It does not stop there. There are hundreds of thousands of other management jobs which do not mention ‘stakeholder’ in the job title, but which are intensely involved with contacting and interfacing with stakeholders on a regular basis.

Indeed, many top-level director roles are predominantly focused on managing stakeholder relationships.

Specialist discipline or core management skill

So, is this now a specialist job, requiring particular skills and training? Or has it become a more generic skill which most responsible managers need to possess?

Why engagement and management are not the same thing

At The Stakeholder Engagement Day 2026 in Manchester, I explored some of the trends, and the distinction between stakeholder engagement and stakeholder management.

It’s not a theoretical nicety. It matters because it affects the training, processes and systems that are needed.

What came out of the session

Rhion opened by putting the question another way: is stakeholder management a specialist function, or a general management capability? He compared it with total quality management, which began as a specialism until managers started telling everyone they were all quality managers. Which way it goes for stakeholder management, he said, depends on who your stakeholders are, your organisation’s mission and objectives, the relationships you’ve inherited, and your history and culture.

He also pointed to how much of the work sits with senior people. One local authority chief executive told him she’d expected most of her time to go on running an organisation of 12,000 staff. In practice, about 80% of it went on external stakeholders.

A working definition

Rhion admitted there’s no really satisfactory definition of stakeholder management, so he offered his own, as a starting point for debate rather than the final word:

‘Securing and deploying the resources to devise and implement a strategy for stakeholder relationships that aligns with an organisation’s mission and objectives.’

Different stakeholders, different relationships

Organisations need a different relationship with each group of stakeholders. Some only need to hear your messages. Some you need to hear. Some need a two-way dialogue, some you consult before changing a policy or programme, and some you collaborate with. If engagement is spreading across a whole organisation, Rhion argued, it needs an overall approach, so one department isn’t in continuous dialogue with a stakeholder that another only sends updates to.

Mapping is a management decision

Asked how stakeholder management differs from stakeholder engagement, Rhion said the early academic work was all about engagement and dialogue. Management came later, once there were activities to manage. Stakeholder mapping sits on the management side, because deciding where a stakeholder goes on the map is a value judgement about how they fit your aims. Our guide to stakeholder mapping covers the main methods.

Strategies that gather dust

A participant from the project management community said the most common problem he sees is a stakeholder strategy written at the start of a project, then left on the shelf while the project runs. It has to be a living document. He’d once asked a programme manager on a major infrastructure project who his stakeholders were, and been told: ‘That’s the project manager’s job.’

AI and the volume of communication

On AI, Rhion’s concern is that consultation papers, the responses to them and the analysis of those responses are all increasingly AI-assisted, which makes it harder to know what people really think. Counterintuitively, that may lead to more face-to-face contact, not less. He also warned that more communication often means communicating less well. Participants added that AI is a useful tool, but its answers need checking, and you need to know where its information comes from.

Two rules to finish

Looking ahead to the next session, Rhion offered two rules for anyone handling stakeholders: ‘Don’t do anything unless you mean it. Don’t say anything unless it’s true.’ They aren’t only rules of stakeholder management, he said. They’re rules of good management.

Watch the session from 5 October

The recording covers all of this in Rhion’s own words, plus the role of project managers on long infrastructure programmes and the recent changes to planning consultation.

Stakeholder management is everyone’s job
Recorded on Monday 5 October 2026, 41 minutes
Free to watch, with Rhion Jones, the Consultation Guru, chaired by Vicky Adamson

Watch the recording, or see all six sessions in the series. The next session, Managing difficult stakeholder relationships, is on Monday 2 November 2026 at 1pm, and you can save your seat here.

If you’d like more from Rhion, his Ask the Guru films and articles are free to watch and read.