Managing disappointment – a challenge for stakeholder teams.
No one wants disappointed stakeholders.
People or organisations who may have had high hopes of us, but who feel let down. Maybe, they keep a brave face in public, but, privately, we and they know that the mood music has changed, and that where once there was hope, there is now scepticism.
Ask politicians! Sir Keir Starmer is not the first Prime Minister to find that there was little by way of a ‘honeymoon period’, and all too soon, he faces lots of sullen backbenchers deeply unhappy that their plans may not be fully achieved. There’s a line from a Robert Browning poem in 1845 that has often been used to describe this change. “Never glad confident morning again” It sums up the disillusion nicely.
There are as many reasons for disappointment as there are stakeholders, but foremost is a mismatch between expectation and delivery, and that is why, in creating and sustaining relationships with stakeholders, the prime task is often to set realistic expectations.
Why perception beats performance
Thirty-five years ago, I was given a riddle to solve. I was working for a world-class IT supplier in those bygone days when computers needed occasional visits by engineers to deal with failures or performance issues.
A critical element of customer satisfaction was how quickly they could get onto the customer site and resolve the issue. We measured it as the “Average Response Time”. We had enough data to know that our engineers arrived a lot quicker than our key competitor. Yet, on this specific measure, customers were much, much more satisfied with the slower service that the competitor offered. Why?
It then emerged that whereas we promised a four-hour response and arrived in about three and a half hours, the competitor arrived within four and a half hours, but had only promised an eight-hour response. In other words, the competitor set expectations much lower but consistently exceeded them. We aspired to higher standards, achieved them, but got less credit because we had set the bar very high. Our customers, in short, expected more!
To this day, that experience taught me how critical it is to set expectations that we can meet with flying colours, and to stop trying to persuade people that we could deliver that which we sometimes could not. Hence the slogan "under-promise; over-deliver".
Politicians are in a dilemma. They fear that unless they promise the earth, they won’t get elected. Yet if they do, they set themselves up to disappoint everyone, but especially their supporters. Indeed, at the last election, Labour was criticised for not being ambitious enough. It has not saved them from disillusionment and mistrust.
For most of us, the issues are not of high-level national politics but of more day-to-day matters. Yet the principles of how to deal with disappointment are similar, and here are some of the strategies worth considering:
How to respond when disappointment sets in
Understand root-causes
Decide what has gone wrong. Be honest. Did we genuinely believe that something could be done only to find out that, in practice, it could not?
The military have a saying that no plan survives contact with the enemy, but many of us routinely fail to have a contingency if PLAN A does not work out. Did we exhibit optimism bias and fail to explain caveats and dependencies to critical stakeholders who might have been counting on our success?
Alternatively, have our plans been – to use a hackneyed old nautical phrase – ‘blown off course’ by external events? If so, it then becomes a matter of gauging the extent to which these were foreseeable. Did we make the right assumptions, or did we discount something we should have anticipated? Stakeholders may be more sympathetic to changes that come ‘out of the blue’ but less so if we were negligent in the expectations we set.
Focus on the positive by ring-fencing the disappointment
Hopefully, not every aspect of a stakeholder’s interest in us disappoints.
Even if, in aggregate, the sum total of issues has been problematic, there might be some matters with which we can empathise. It might mean sitting down and consciously setting aside important topics where we ‘agree to differ’ and exploring those matters where we still see ‘eye to eye’.
Suddenly, those matters where there is consensus assume a significance beyond their true importance. They act as a ‘bridge’, making difficult conversations just a little bit easier.
The more positive we can be about the areas of agreement, the less likely it is for areas of disagreement to threaten the relationship itself. Experts in conflict resolution have long since learnt that every tiny element of agreement helps as confidence-building measures to create the conditions to tackle the more fundamental disagreement.
Distinguish between the issues and the relationship
Diplomats are trained to walk the tightrope between establishing and maintaining cordial relations on the one hand and accurately representing Government policies on the other.
Stakeholder managers have an equivalent challenge to preserve the dignity of the relationship even in the face of serious disagreement. This clearly goes beyond friendly personal relations and extends to more formal disclosure or exchanges of information or co-operation on issues of less controversy.
De-personalising the situation can be difficult, especially if the disappointment stems from the values, attitudes or style of a new individual in a key position.
Imagine we are an infrastructure developer who maintains a reasonable interface with long-standing campaigners who object to our schemes. Then one day, they make a new appointment, and we need to deal with a less accommodating, more abrasive individual who adopts a more hostile approach to the relationship.
The answer is probably to invest more in winning the substantive argument and to let the personal relationship evolve and morph into a more formal, if less intimate dialogue. Is this what has happened for many countries with the current US President?
Our stakeholder landscape is seldom static. People and organisations are continuously assessing and re-evaluating their relations with us. They can veer from delighted to distressed alarmingly quickly, and maybe for reasons we scarcely understand. Those who are disappointed today may not stay that way, though you cannot rely upon it. It all adds up to the need for vigilance and an investment in business intelligence.
We should probably call it stakeholder intelligence, and it means research into what motivates and drives the stakeholders’ views and opinions. It also means understanding the fundamental connection that links them to us. If we are tethered together in some way, what exactly is it? Are we both part of a chain, steps on the side of a pyramid, cogs around the same wheel, the spokes of a single hub, or whatever … ? And have we understood what weakens or what strengthens those links?
Disappointment is a symptom of much that can go wrong in stakeholder relations. Ignoring it may be full of risk. But good management offers us many ways to address the problem, and stakeholder relations teams should look carefully at what’s now possible.
Written by Rhion Jones
Rhion Jones was the Founder Director of the Consultation Institute and is an acknowledged authority on all aspects of public and stakeholder engagement and consultation. He advises Tractivity and contributes expert analysis and commentaries on current issues.
Rhion now publishes thought leadership articles regularly as the Consultation Guru.