Your stakeholders define your team’s purpose. Yet, how deeply do you truly understand their underlying motivations? Project success hinges on grasping their history, perspective, and more importantly, their core drivers: values, loyalties, and potential losses. This isn’t just good practice; it’s essential.
Now, knowing these drivers doesn’t magically make your team’s work easier or faster. But you know the old African saying, “If you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go together.” And that’s true for navigating your team’s complex challenges. While understanding these drivers won’t magically simplify tasks, it will allow your team to truly ‘go far’ together, navigating complex challenges with lasting impact.
The Trifecta of Key Drivers: Values, Loyalties, and Potential Losses
Let’s break down these three key drivers that frame a stakeholder’s perspective:
Values: Like your team’s values, these are the principles that guide a stakeholder’s decisions. Think of it as their internal compass. Are they driven by innovation, stability, efficiency, or perhaps social impact? Understanding these values helps your team frame its work in a way that resonates with the stakeholders it serves.
Loyalties: This is where things get interesting. Who or what is each stakeholder loyal to? Is it their department, their team, the company’s long-term vision, profitability, tradition, or even their reputation? Identifying each stakeholder’s loyalties helps your team anticipate potential sticking points and build a stronger alliance with them.
Losses: This is perhaps the most critical and often overlooked aspect to improve stakeholder engagement. What does each stakeholder stand to lose if your team’s project succeeds? It might be power, resources, a sense of identity, or even their sense of security. Recognizing these potential losses allows your team to address stakeholder concerns proactively while building trust.
The Strategic Advantage: Why Decoding Drivers Matters
Engaging team stakeholders to understand what drives them is important, so you team can align team and stakeholder goals to meet their needs. Research shows that projects with strong stakeholder engagement have significantly higher success rates. For example, one study found that firms that failed to align stakeholders on the issues of risk mitigation saw a 20% drop in project success rates (Accenture, 2025).
By understanding these drivers your team will build stronger relationships, gain critical buy-in, mitigate conflict, and achieve superior project outcomes.
Actionable Insights: How to Uncover Stakeholder Drivers
You can gather information about stakeholder values, loyalties, and potential losses in a number of ways.
- Active Listening: Conduct one-on-one meetings, focusing on verbal and non-verbal cues.
- Observation: Analyze stakeholder interactions, noting priorities and communication styles.
- Network Analysis: Map stakeholder relationships, identifying key influencers and decision-makers.
- Surveys and Feedback: Utilize surveys for broader insights, especially with larger stakeholder groups.
Caution: Be mindful of time constraints and biases. Build trust for open communication, respect confidentiality, and use information responsibly. This isn’t manipulation; it’s empathetic partnership.
Your Leadership Challenge: Convert Insights into Impact
Here’s my challenge to you: Work with your team to reflect on each of its key stakeholders. What do you think their core values are? Who or what are they loyal to? And what do they stand to lose if your team reaches it goals successfully? Write your answers down then start building a plan to validate and address these drivers for each stakeholder.
What can your team do more of to understand what drives each of your stakeholders? When you understand the key drivers for those you serve, you serve them better, reach your team goals successfully, and honor your team’s purpose.
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Here’s another blog post on engaging stakeholders: Master Stakeholder Engagement: 4 Roles to Drive Team Success.
🚀Want your team to improve its ability to engage stakeholders effectively to understand better what drives them? Or maybe you want to explore team coaching for another aspect of how your team works together. Let’s discuss how I can help you.💡 Book a free strategy session.
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