How do you align internal Stakeholders?

Aligning internal stakeholders can be challenging, but also rewarding and necessary. When you think about career growth, this is one skill that will level you up. Why? It’s human nature to have opinions and perspectives that we hold strongly. Sometimes these opinions may not be the project driver or the subject matter expert. To meet business objectives, you’ll need to gain buy-in, alignment and ultimately respect from your stakeholders.

How do you start building this alignment? It all starts with communication, transparency and micro-moments of trust. You need to build relationships to help align stakeholders. You need to strike a balance between collaboration and teamwork while having clear ownership and accountability.

Oftentimes you’ll also find alignment comes from an ongoing cadence of performance readouts. You’ll meet less friction when you can get ahead of questions. For example, can you automate a report sent on X sequence to keep stakeholders informed? It’s important to maintain a healthy ongoing dialog to keep alignment as this is not a static exercise; it will have to be adaptable.

As a marketer, knowing your audience is critical. Internal stakeholders are no different. I view them as your internal audience. Generally, I will schedule an initial kick off call to learn their priorities, areas of concern/learnings if it is a run rate program, and their communication preferences. Getting specificity and clarity on the role they'd like to play the expectations they have on how they'll stay up to date on the project are critical to your and the project's success.

I tend to over communicate initially and will double check with statements like: "since we're new working together, are these updates at the altitude you'd like? Anything else top of mind?"

I always do the following in every project:

• Meet with internal stakeholders individually to build relationships (if you don't have one) and provide context on your role, your role in the project, and what success looks like to you

  • Also ask them the same questions to get the same answers for context

• Turn the problem/project/business opportunity into a project brief and share that in advance of an internal kickoff meeting for people to review on their own time

  • This should include a RASCI and acknowledge who will be giving feedback, when, why, and how

• Hold/host a kickoff meeting to walk everyone through the project goals, deliverables, and timelines

• Create a project chat to keep everyone aligned with updates, roadblocks, etc.

• Hold/host regular project standups/meetings for everyone to stay aligned (depending on the size of the project these might need to be frequent or might not be needed)

• Stick to your planned feedback loops and stakeholders to avoid feedback ballooning and increasing project scope and timelines

• Leverage tools like Asana, Notion, Monday.com, etc. to organize the project, setup workback schedules, and automate processes

• Understand your stakeholders.

• Understand their goals, needs and priorities.

• Understand their expectations from you/your team/function.

• Figure out how the above aligns with your goals, needs and priorities.

• Communicate very clearly and consistently on how you can help them meet their goals or overcome their challenges.

• Start small and build from there.