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The best strategies benefit all your stakeholders—including customers, workers, suppliers, communities, and investors. As a senior leader, how can you design a strategy that balances these competing priorities? It starts with using data to your advantage. First, consider external perspectives of your company. How are you rated across various criteria like social justice, management effectiveness, or brand value? While these assessments may not always be 100% accurate, exploring third-party perspectives on your company will help you overcome confirmation bias and perhaps uncover useful data about the value you’re delivering to various stakeholders. Then bolster that data with internal insights (from employee surveys, for example) to determine how your stakeholders relate to one another. Once you’ve done that, you can begin crafting your strategy, which should provide a clear description of your company’s purpose, establish criteria for evaluating progress toward it, determine priorities among stakeholders, and measure value creation for each stakeholder group. Finally, create systems that uphold your new direction: Build a culture that embraces your stakeholder strategy, design organizational structures that increase cross-stakeholder collaboration, and establish new processes that help grow stakeholder value. |
| This tip is adapted from “How to Create a Stakeholder Strategy,” by Darrell Rigby et al. (From HBR) |
