The six sessions
Each session stands on its own, so there is no catching up to do if you join partway through. Every session runs for 50 minutes.
Specialist teams have led stakeholder management for years. But in most organisations, the number of people whose work depends on key relationships now stretches well beyond them. Is that a question of internal education and minimum standards, or can good stakeholder management become a genuine corporate capability? Rhion opens the series with the argument, and guest practitioners push back.
You will leave with: a clearer view of which roles in your organisation are already doing engagement work without calling it that.
Conflicting interests, competing obligations, relationships under real pressure. Every practitioner has them. This session looks at genuinely difficult situations, the communication and crisis techniques that help, and gives you space to swap experience with peers who have had the same conversations.
You will leave with: techniques you can use in the next difficult conversation, and the reassurance that yours are not unusual.
If you have ever tired of explaining your job to sceptical colleagues, this one is for you. Even people familiar with the term struggle to pin down what ‘stakeholder’ really means. We take apart the myths around the language, and you tell us how you describe the role, and defend its value, inside your own organisation.
You will leave with: a sharper way of describing what you do to the people who fund it.
Most teams map stakeholders once, file the matrix and move on. This session looks at how different forms of mapping, from interest and influence grids to relationship and network views, can shape how you plan, deliver and evidence engagement. Bring an example if you have one.
You will leave with: two or three mapping approaches beyond the standard grid, and a sense of when each earns its keep.
Long-term relationships are the goal. Short-term pressures intrude anyway, and most of them arrive unannounced. This session explores the working practices, and the systems, that stop short-term thinking undoing years of relationship building.
You will leave with: practical ways to protect the relationship record when a programme suddenly changes shape.
Plenty of organisations aspire to be seen as stakeholder-conscious. Few manage it. We close the series on the values and behaviours that separate the organisations that succeed from the ones that just say it, and what leaders can do to close the gap.
You will leave with: the questions to ask inside your own organisation to tell a culture from a claim.
Your hosts
