Presentation making the business case for stakeholder engagement, internally and externally

1. Lecture Five: Stakeholder
Engagement: Theory, Mapping, &
Managers
February 11th 2015
Lecturer: Tobias Webb
Tobiaswebb.blogspot.com

2. Stakeholder Engagement
Other lectures covered employees, investors and
NGOs. This lecture looks at other key stakeholders:
• Ed Freeman on Stakeholder Theory (video)
• Mapping Stakeholders
• Engaging Middle Managers (Stakeholders?)
• How to get the CEO / Board on board

3. A good example of a company getting
stakeholder engagement wrong: Tesco
• Suppliers
• Communities
• Financial stakeholders

4. Stakeholder Mapping
How to make it work for your
business

5. Who are your stakeholders? It's not so simple..
A stakeholder in an organisation is...
“any group or individual who can
affect or is affected by the
achievement of the organisation’s
objectives”.
(European Business Ethics Network)
"A stakeholder is any person or
organization affected by or with the
power to influence a company's
decisions and actions"
(Blowfield and Murray, “Corporate
Responsibility”)
Stakeholders are evolving…

7. From a business perspective, we've gone from:
"A stakeholder is anyone that can screw up my business" (2002)
to:
"Stakeholders are source of innovation and risk management for
my company" (2013)
But most companies still live within the first paradigm of risk
management...

9. Stakeholders, the “obvious” ones
Primary:
• Employees
• Business partners & suppliers
• Investors
• The government
• Consumers
• Communities
Secondary:
• NGOs (but very important)
• Institutions
• Lobby groups
• Academics and business schools
• The media
• Non-human stakeholders: Natural
environment/climate change

10. So where to start? The most significant groups..
• Suppliers (child labour)
• Communities (pollution)
• NGOs (Greenpeace etc)
• Governments (Compliance)
• Employees (Innovation)

11. Stakeholder Mapping: A simple four step plan
Step one: Develop a categorised list
of the members of the stakeholder
community
Step two: When a list is relatively
complete (not perfect: it's a moving
target) assign priorities based on:

12. Stakeholder Mapping - Priorities
Power (high, medium, low)
Support (positive, neutral, negative)
Legitimacy/Influence (high or low)
Urgency (strong, medium, weak)

13. Stakeholder Mapping: A simple four step plan
Step three: Focus on the ‘right
stakeholders’ who are currently
important
Create a tool to visualise this critical
sub-set of the total community

14. Stakeholder Mapping: A simple four step plan
Step four: Benchmark this against
Freeman's model of primary and
secondary stakeholder to check
relevance
Primary stakeholders: Those without
whose participation a company
cannot survive
Secondary stakeholders: Those that
influence the company or are
affected by it but who are not
essential to survival

15. How do you justify this kind of work to your board?
Stakeholder analysis helps identification of the following:
• Stakeholders' interests
• Their mechanisms to influence other stakeholders
• Potential risks: Which groups may be affected by our work?
• Potential opportunities: Who can help us solve problems?
• Key people to be informed about the project during execution phase
• Negative stakeholders as well as their adverse effects on the project

16. Embedding CR
Lessons from management

17. When embedding, things to think about (1)
• Objectives, goals, targets,
milestones: What is the
difference for you and your
company?
• How could you ensure your
lower-level targets service your
higher level objectives?
• Build your own: Would you prefer
to use external tools or frameworks
to define goals and targets, or
create your own?
• The long-and short-term: What
would help you in matching targets
and timelines appropriately?

18. When embedding, things to think about (2)
• Benchmarking: Are you aware of
what others do, and how can you
know what makes a good target
in your case?
• What role is there for ongoing
performance comparisons?
• Going off-piste: How can you
prepare for when results are not
as planned?
• What about when the targets (or
even the objectives) seem
mistaken?

19. Embedding CR: Six Phases
Phase 1: INSIGHT - stakeholder
views, science based understanding
of issues, benchmark of competitors
and peers
Phase 2: Public commitment of the
“headline goal” – reducing carbon by
30%, reducing injuries

21. Embedding CSR: Six Phases
Phase 3: Establish a baseline
Phase 4: Allocating responsibility for
action, the business must own the
baseline, own the target and own
the achievement

22. Embedding CSR: Six Phases
Phase 5: Public reporting of progress.
Revisit what you said you’d do,
create the sense of continuity and
recommitment
Phase 6: Transparently revisit and
challenge the original goal

23. Key lessons for senior managers
• Clarify CR roles and
responsibilities at board level, CR
champion on the board, board-
level committee
• Articulate CR strategy clearly,
reflecting board responsibilities
and accountabilities. Put it in the
mission!

24. Key lessons for senior managers
• Encourage frank exchange and
engagement at senior levels
• Avoid delegation of critical
decision-making that senior
leaders need to make

25. Key lessons for senior managers
• Join-up high-level
communications, linking to the
company’s CR goals, objectives
and strategy
• Champions and cheerleaders are
critical: Don’t “outsource”
responsibility for CR issues:
Manage internally

26. Key lessons for senior managers
The key lesson is:
Don’t try to eat the elephant all at
once: A bite at a time. Your road map
is an invaluable tool

27. Ten fundamental
things to remember in
stakeholder engagement in
emerging markets
Tobias Webb, Founder, Innovation Forum
www.innovation-forum.co.uk
Tobiaswebb.blogspot.com

28. There are no secrets.
Resist the urge to compartmentalize information.
Treat all communications as if they were going
to be posted on the internet for all to see
(because, that may just happen). Act authentically but re
member everything can and often will, end
up on the record.

29. Interest alignment.
Constantly search for alignment between
company/project interests and stakeholder
interests. Be creative – sometimes real
opportunities lie outside the box. Interest
intersections, where your interests and
stakeholder interests align are valuable gems.
Think inside and outside the box to find them.

30. Realistic timeframes and budgets for
stakeholder engagement are vital.
Make sure your CFO understands and approves a
realistic budget. Help them to understand the cost
of your failure.

31. Share credit – it will multiply
Credit shared is goodwill created. Acknowledge,
recognize, praise and promote partners and
collaborators (government, NGOs, communities,
organizations, etc). Do it every chance you can.
You gain much and lose nothing.

32. Smile. Let your humility
and humanity show.
Credit shared is goodwill created. Acknowledge,
recognize, praise and promote partners and
collaborators (government, NGOs, communities,
organizations, etc). Do it every chance you can.
You gain much and lose nothing.

33. Understand before understood.
Communication is critical. Listening is key. Seek to
understand before you try to be understood. Think
about how you say things: Use soft language, not hard,
emotion generating terms.

34. Everyone is the face of the company.
They should be trained in stakeholder engagement.
Right person to right position: If you delegate, train and
build capacity. Make sure your people know how do it
right, never assume. This means your bosses, your
reports and others across the company.

35. Simplicity is good.
Complexity will cost you.
Simple guidelines beat complex prescriptive
procedures every day of the week. Be realistic. If your
stakeholder engagement plan, process, procedure
is too complex who is going to follow it. Don't turn
stakeholder engagement into box ticking! Train and
trust your people. Give them room to be creative and
responsive but let them now where the boundaries are.

36. All is not the same.
The importance of taking note of culture cannot
be underestimated. Things change from country
to country and project to project. Rigidity will often
crack and break. Allow room for adaptation to culture
and use it when necessary.

37. Stay in touch.
Ongoing communications even when there is no
obvious demand – Be open and transparent, it builds
trust. Think about being counter intuitive with regular
communications about the good and bad. Get the
balance right. Communicate frequently enough that
you are not forgotten but not so frequently that you
are ignored. Don’t always wait for a big win, or failure.

38. 17 further lessons from a recent executive workshop
can be found at:
http://tobiaswebb.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/
27-expert-tips-on-engaging-stakeholders.html

39. A few examples:
SAB Miller in Ghana (more here)
• Developed new beer brand brewed using cassava roots
sourced from small holder farmers in S Ghana
• Considerable engagement with farmers, farming communities,
agricultural organisations & regional Ministry of Agriculture
personnel to understand the cassava industry and develop a
local supply chain
• Addressed supply security concerns and built trust
• Beer brand then sold back into these rural communities

40. A few examples:
Anglo American nickel mine in Venezuela
• Created significant community housing programme
• Provided healthcare, medical supplies for local hospitals,
which lacked capacity and supply
• Matched and exceeded local expectations
• Flood and practical disaster assistance for communities
• Resulted in ‘Chavistas’ protesting FOR the company

41. A few examples:
Nestle and Golden Agri Resources (GAR)
• 2010 Greenpeace campaign shocked Nestle to action
• GAR, leading palm oil suppliers, pushed to work with
Greenpeace and TFT (The Forest Trust)
• Created market leading partnership to prevent deforestation.
Set the scene for huge changes in the sector and in forestry
(APP, Wilmar, many others)
• Win-win outcomes created for all involved, including investors